From Pipeline to Platform: Revolutionizing Church Engagement with Community Cloud

By: Joe Luedtke, President, Liturgical Publications

Nonprofits recognize the brilliance of Salesforce in managing the opportunity pipeline, from identifying donors to tracking interactions and executing email drip campaigns. Salesforce’s platform-based solutions are disrupting every sector of the market. Why should nonprofits be any different?

Consider the rise of Apple and Google’s Smartphone, the ubiquitous use of Amazon.com for purchases, and most recently the disruption of Uber and Lyft. Apple and Google both have great technology features on their phones, but it’s their App ecosystem that extends the phone’s value. Sure Amazon’s site is easy to order on, but it’s their plethora of suppliers (who all started out as buyers!) and the wealth of product reviews that drives their success. Ride sharing services work because their network is resilient and diverse. Not their computing infrastructure network, but their human network. A rider today can be a driver tomorrow. It’s the creation of a platform for engaging the consumer that’s propelling these platforms to success.

As a nonprofit, imagine if you had the capabilities to amplify your human network, on demand, when you need it. The question isn’t how to get more donors. It’s how to engage more members, how to foster more volunteers, how to create super fans, and how to extend those fans to create a highly amplified network effect. The companies listed above have been successful because they’ve done just that.

As the original social network, religion should have this down pat, but too often churches resign themselves to outdated tools or incompatible, piecemeal solutions. Faith communities need to engage their members where they’re increasingly spending more and more of their time: online. Many of our nonprofit customers, individual Catholic churches, are often preoccupied with data management and building maintenance as they try to keep the lights on. To truly revolutionize their community, churches need to foster interactions and develop ways to convert the passive member to a dynamic, engaged partner in their mission. If they can accomplish that, donations will follow.

The average donor pipeline tries to manage members’ data and control internal resources. An engagement platform exposes that data and let the member self-manage it, augment it, and share it as appropriate. With Community Cloud, a platform is created to engage members online, encourage interaction within the organization and with the public, promote events, solicit volunteers, and spread the news. Combine this with the Salesforce CRM and involvement is suddenly quantifiable, helping the nonprofit leverage that data to drive engagement across the board.

In his book The Four Signs of a Dynamic Catholic, Matthew Kelly presented research finding that 7% of Catholics were doing 80% of the work in their churches. Increasing engagement by 1% would lead to an overall increase of 15%. What nonprofit wouldn’t want their membership, donations, activities, and volunteer hours to rise by 15%?

LPi is determined to revolutionize the process, empowering churches to engage more intentionally, 1% at a time.

We’ve combined the powerful Salesforce CRM with Community Cloud and App Cloud, revolutionizing the engagement possibilities for one of the largest nonprofit markets in the United States: churches. We’re making it happen with our new Salesfore app: Mosaic. Learn more by visiting us at the Salesfore.org Lodge at Dreamforce this November.