Fundraising is the lifeblood of most nonprofits, but the process can feel cumbersome, repetitive, and siloed. By optimizing the process of entering, acknowledging, and tracking gifts, and by integrating development efforts with finance and data strategy, you can reduce friction and support growth.
Rethink Gift Entry as a User Experience Challenge
Gift entry doesn’t have to be tedious. When approached as a user experience (UX) challenge, it becomes an opportunity to streamline operations, improve accuracy, and make the process more intuitive for staff.
Custom Screen Flows in Salesforce, for instance, can be designed to reflect real-life workflows, dynamically adapting to the type of gift being entered. Matching gifts, recurring donations, grants, and in-kind contributions all require different details. A tailored gift entry screen can display or hide fields based on gift type, ensuring staff only interact with the necessary information. Tribute and soft credit information can also be captured in-line, eliminating extra steps and improving data quality.
For events like galas or end-of-year appeals, where many gifts share common fields like campaign, designation, or date, default values can be pre-filled. Staff only need to update what’s unique to each gift, like the amount or payment method, reducing redundancy and saving time.
Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) both offer flexible gift entry interfaces, but custom Screen Flows provide added control. Screen Actions, for example, allow users to search for donors using multiple criteria such as name, address, unique ID, or email, and detect duplicates before records are created. These actions enhance search accuracy and maintain data integrity.
Salesforce’s evolving Screen Flow features now enable the design of a single-screen entry and review interface. Reactive formulas, dynamic sections, and inline calculations reduce clicks and cognitive load. With built-in field validation and real-time feedback, staff are guided to complete every required field without needing to navigate away.
Automate the Right Kind of Stewardship
Acknowledging a gift is more than a courtesy. It’s a core part of effective donor stewardship. Automating this process ensures that every donor receives timely and consistent recognition, which frees up staff time.
Salesforce provides tools to send personalized tribute letters and email acknowledgments using styled templates. NPC includes a built-in document merge solution. For more complex workflows, third-party tools such as Conga, Apsona, or PDFButler enable batch processing and automated status updates.
Batch acknowledgment from list views further streamlines follow-up, particularly for organizations that process high volumes of gifts. Alerts and status fields help staff monitor outstanding acknowledgments. Simple dashboards can flag gifts that still need attention, making follow-up easy to manage.
But stewardship doesn’t stop at acknowledgments. Tools such as engagement plans, actionable lists, donor tags, and RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) scoring enable fundraisers to tailor their outreach effectively. Quarterly or biannual donor summaries, segmented by giving behavior, reinforce donor impact and build lasting relationships.
Connect Fundraising to Finance
One of the most persistent challenges in nonprofit operations is the disconnect between the fundraising and finance teams, which can lead to discrepancies, delays, and increased workload. One key way to close the gap is by embedding accounting fields directly into the gift entry process. These fields ensure that relevant financial data is captured at the point of entry. Defaults and conditional logic can make these inputs faster and more accurate, while still allowing for necessary adjustments.
At Fíonta, we’ve helped clients, including Venice Family Clinic and Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF), incorporate these practices into their systems. Development and finance teams stay aligned without relying on manual handoffs or rekeying data.
Salesforce’s Accounting Subledger goes a step further. It enables real-time synchronization of financial data, automatically generating debit and credit entries whenever a gift is added or updated. This ensures that changes, like a designation update, are reflected across both development and finance records without requiring additional steps. In NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud, this functionality transforms Salesforce into a reliable source of financial truth.
When paired with approval checkpoints and reconciliation-ready dashboards, these tools promote transparency and accuracy across teams. The result is a fundraising and finance operation that works in sync, reducing errors and enabling better reporting.
Let Data Drive, Not Drag, Your Strategy
Clean, reliable data isn’t just for reporting. It should actively guide your fundraising strategy. The foundation is clean, with Household and Person/Contact records enhanced by address validation and enrichment to ensure quality targeting.
Once data hygiene is established, segmentation unlocks powerful insights. With Salesforce, you can segment donors based on their giving frequency, history, and engagement, including volunteer participation, event attendance, or email activity. This enables personalized outreach and helps identify lapsed donors more efficiently.
Campaign influence tracking in NPC, powered by Outreach Source Codes, enables fundraisers to attribute gifts not only to a campaign but also to the specific message, channel, or content that inspired the action. This provides deep cross-campaign insights, enabling more accurate measurement of ROI.
To further guide strategy, Salesforce supports LYBUNT reporting and RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) scoring. These tools enable the creation of actionable lists and donor portfolios, allowing fundraisers to prioritize the right prospects at the right time.
Engagement scoring can go beyond monetary activity. Incorporating volunteerism, digital engagement, and event attendance into a custom score provides a more comprehensive view of donor connection, enabling more effective tailoring of stewardship.
Know When It’s Time to Upgrade Your Tools
Even the most optimized processes can fall short if your systems can’t scale with your organization. Many nonprofits find themselves outgrowing their CRM tools as their fundraising operations become more sophisticated.
Some of the most telling signs include reliance on workarounds for managing tributes or soft credits, frequent data cleanup before campaigns, and manual gift coding that complicates reconciliation with the finance department. In NPSP, for example, soft credits are managed across multiple objects. Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) simplifies this by introducing a unified data model that tracks soft credits and tributes directly on the gift, making it easier for teams to manage complex giving relationships.
NPC also separates donor-facing and internal designations, helping to reduce confusion across teams and maintain clean records. These structural improvements streamline workflows, improve accuracy, and enhance cross-team coordination.
While upgrading your systems might feel daunting, it can significantly increase efficiency, improve data quality, and better support multichannel strategies. If your current tools are holding you back, it may be time to explore new options.