Nonprofit Direct Mail on Salesforce, Part 12: Reporting

Hello and welcome back to my blog series about direct mail! My name is Dustin. I’m a Solution Engineer for Salesforce.org based in Charleston, SC. I can’t believe that this is the last post of my direct mail blog series. I figured I would end the series bringing all of the posts together in Reports and Dashboards. Let’s dive in!

Nonprofit Reporting with Salesforce

Good news: you can do robust reporting with the Nonprofit Success Pack. Not only can you take advantage of all of the robust reports and Dashboards capabilities of the Salesforce platform, but NPSP also adds nonprofit-specific reporting functionality For example, you could run a report to show you all the donors who gave in a marketing campaign. If you are not familiar with Reports and Dashboards on the platform, start with the Reports and Dashboard Trailhead Module.

When you’re doing reporting in Salesforce for direct mail, the primary objects will be looking at in Salesforce are Opportunity (Donation) and Campaign. If you chose to build out separate objects for packages then you may want to consider that as well. Since direct marketing in NPSP uses standard objects, you will benefit from the standard fields on that object, such as Date, Category, and things like the Campaign Hierarchy. You will also have all of your custom fields that were added to track things like source codes.

The most important thing to remember in this case is that every donation (Opportunity) will have a campaign associated with it. That campaign will represent the direct mail segment. In order to analyze the performance of your marketing, you can report on donations and breaking those donations down by campaign and parent campaign.

Keep reading to learn how to go through the process of setting up your nonprofit reporting with Salesforce for direct mail.

Report Configuration

Report View

Dashboards

Use dashboards to get a glance at how your fundraising is doing at a high level. Along with reports, you can also create dashboards focusing on your direct mail efforts. As a best practice, I suggest keeping these a bit more generic than your reports. I say that because dashboards are really designed to be a snapshot of the state of your business. I recommend focusing on overall channel performance, direct mail categories (e.g. acquisition vs renewals), and year-over-year growth. This will give you and your leadership the quick snapshot needed to analyze your current business trends. If you wanted to then drill down deeper, you can click any dashboard component to see the full report.

The screenshots below give you an example of how some organizations design their Dashboards.

Sample Dashboard

Einstein Analytics

Einstein Analytics in an advanced business intelligence tool you can use in Salesforce. This allows you to have an interactive reporting experience with their Salesforce data and other data sources. This tool is very useful for larger nonprofits that have complex direct marketing reporting requirements. Unlike native Reports and Dashboards above, Einstein Analytics can analyze data from any source; not just data stored in Salesforce.

To learn more about Einstein Analytics, do the Explore with Analytics Trailhead Trail. You can also watch this quick preview below that shows how this could be configured to review direct mail data.

Top Tips for Nonprofit Using Reports and Dashboards

1. Focus your reports on the campaign and opportunity/donation objects.
2. Keep dashboards high level for executive and overview reporting.
3. Einstein Analytics is a great option for very complex nonprofit direct mail analysis.

Did you enjoy this blog series? Want to pass it along to your peers? You are in luck – I am very excited that Salesforce.org is turning this entire series into an e-book. Be sure to contact us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for updates on when this will be published.

As always, please reach out with any questions that you may have! For more on nonprofit fundraising, read this e-book.

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