Salesforce Content: Green, clean and mean (tracking that is)

by Alicia Schmidt, Customer Success Evangelist

When I was a nonprofit Development Director, I sent countless numbers of annual reports, news articles and other marketing materials to donors, prospects and funders in my efforts to get them invested in my organization. At the time, I always wished that there was an easier way to track, manage, and deliver those documents.

In Salesforce, there is! Salesforce Content  is a central place where you can store, share and quickly access documents or presentations that you send to constituents on a regular basis like your annual report, your 501c3 letter, articles about your organization, or program guidelines or applications. Content was rolled out to all nonprofit users this past spring. If you are interested in Content, but don’t have it enabled in your org, please email [email protected]

Content can be organized into workspaces like “major gifts” or “program” to help you easily access your documents and encourage staff collaboration. The content library is searchable, includes inline previews, tagging, commenting and rating systems, and download history. You can also subscribe to content to be notified if the content changes.

With content delivery from the content library, there is no need to attach a large file to an email and risk overloading your donor’s email inbox, or worse, risk the email not getting delivered because of anti-attachment spam filters. The content library lets you send your content to donors via a hyperlink in an email. The donor can then see your content in a private web page. You can password protect the site and control whether they can download the content or not. You can also send multiple documents in single package.

The best part is that when you send out content from the content library you can see exactly when your donor or client opened it. And everything sent or downloaded from the content library is trackable using reports and dashboards. Looking to justify the cost of creating an annual report? Run a report on donation opportunities where the donor received the annual report. Or maybe you want to figure out which marketing document closes the most donations? Run a report on closed donation opportunities summarized by content.

Content is included in license donations to nonprofits, but admittedly, storing large amounts of content in the content library can increase your Salesforce storage needs beyond the 1GB limit included in your donation. If the end result is staff time saved and more donations, however, it can be a valuable investment. Additional storage can be purchased at a deep discount from Salesforce.org. For information on storage pricing, please call 1.800.NOSOFTWARE.

For more information about content, download the Salesforce Content Implementation Guide or watch this video (but turn off the sound – kidding, kind of, just remember that “sales” = donations.)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Y31F_tuEM]