Salesforce Pardot: Marketing Automation as Thoughtful as You Are

Using Marketing Automation to Recruit Volunteers

By: Chris Robinson Account Director at Bubblebox

With a quick introduction to Marketing Automation done and dusted, lets dive deeper into how a Pardot campaign might look like for a nonprofit organization.

We’ll be referring to “prospects” a lot in this blog, so let’s first explain what a prospect is. Typically, a prospect is a website visitor who has engaged with your content and has provided personal details through a form. This information will include (but is not necessarily limited to) an email address and often times a first name, last name, company, or geographic location. Pardot helps you collect this information by making it easy to create and host forms on your website or landing page. Because Pardot seamlessly integrates with Salesforce, all this information is readily available both for your employees who work out of Pardot, and also those who solely work out of Salesforce.

So who might a prospect be for a nonprofit organization? In short, a prospect is anyone who you believe will add value to, or is deserving of an ongoing digital relationship with your organization.

Here are some examples of potential nonprofit prospects

● Prospective individual donors
● Prospective corporate donors
● Prospective partners
● Prospective volunteers
● Prospective ‘franchisees’ or chapters
● Prospective sponsors

Each of these types of prospects expect targeted communications relevant to them. Being able to segment based on their needs means that communications can be crafted specifically for them. In Pardot, these communications can be automated, which means you can take a prospect on a journey over a given period of time, designed to keep them engaged in whatever campaign you’re running.

Volunteer Recruitment Campaign Example

In the following example, we will be looking at a nonprofit that is currently seeking volunteers to support an upcoming event. Before looking at the journey mapping which we’ll build with Pardot’s Engagement Studio, it’s important to plan what information we need to a) collect from a prospect and b) use within the journey. For this campaign, we are assuming that the nonprofit already has the prospect’s email address, first name and last name, from a newsletter they signed up to on the website, and that this prospect has opted in to email communications.

Information to collect on form

● City, Postcode, Country (Do they live/reside in the city where the event is taking place?)
● Age (Are they old enough to volunteer at this event?)
● Availability (are they free at the time of the event?)
● Skills (Do their skills match the requirements of the position?)

Information used to communicate

● Purpose of organization (mission and values)
● Event details (purpose, date, time)
● What volunteering for the event entails
● Looking for both skilled and unskilled volunteers at least 21 years of age
● Explain the benefits of being an event volunteer
● Provide alternative ways to support (financially, individual or corporate donors)

We now know what the goals are. Let’s make it happen.

The below email journey was created using Pardot’s Engagement Studio based on the goals outlined above. Engagement Studio lets you build, test and report on marketing automation programs, with easy drag and drop elements. Using logic, you can decide who gets communicated what, depending on their actions during the course of the engagement plan.

What’s the best part about this email campaign? It’s automated, and you’re collecting additional information using a Pardot form that can be invaluable to your organization.

So there you have it, a simple volunteer recruitment campaign executed through Pardot. But there’s so much more you can do with Marketing Automation. Think of all the manual campaigns you run – and how much easier and more efficient they could be if using some simple automations. Pardot truly does make a small marketing team an army – because it lets you decide on the best engagement, while it picks up the heavy lifting, and reports back to help you tweak and update campaigns to best meet your objectives.

As a Salesforce.org international Impact Partner, we have a vested interest in the success of the organizations we work with. We understand that technology, data, and automation should augment your relationships and operations – not hinder them. Organizations can maximize value gained from Pardot and the Salesforce suite by investing not only in the technology, but in their team. Bubblebox makes this possible by providing training and consultancy services in addition to implementations. Together, Bubblebox and Salesforce.org make it easy for nonprofit organizations and higher education institutes to do what they do best: better the world in which we live and the communities to which we are connected.

Download Pardot for Nonprofits E-Book