Webinar Details
Many nonprofit organizations are rethinking their technology stacks for fundraising and development. If you are a nonprofit executive or development director considering moving from Raiser’s Edge to a more flexible, scalable, and secure solution such as the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), this half-hour session is for you.
In this webinar, we discussed the opportunities that Salesforce NPSP presents for organizations currently on Raiser’s Edge, provided a high-level overview of the phases of work required to implement Salesforce successfully, and gave attendees some next steps to help their organization analyze options and plan for the change.
Key Learning Objectives
- Learn about what Salesforce NPSP can offer your organization when it comes to fundraising, development, and donor management.
- Gain insight into what a qualified implementation partner should provide throughout the key phases of implementing a new system, including discovery, implementation, data migration, and post-launch support.
- Develop action items for your team to start defining priorities, evaluating options, and preparing for a major system migration.
Speaker
Mary Dare Brown
Senior Account Executive, Fíonta
Mary Dare joined the Fíonta team with a commitment to helping nonprofits accomplish their goals through strategic technology solutions. Prior to Fíonta, Mary Dare worked with a variety of nonprofits as a solutions specialist at Blackbaud. She brings a passion for many organizations, but especially those in animal welfare and cancer research.
She is a graduate of Clemson University (Go Tigers!) and currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Outside of work, Mary Dare loves watching college football and listening to true crime stories.
Transcript
Lexi Milani:
I want to welcome you to Fíonta’s webinar today, Saying Goodbye to Raiser’s Edge. We’re so glad that you’re here. For anyone who’s not familiar with Fíonta, we were founded in 2001, specifically to assist nonprofits and associations with their technology needs, and that remains our mission today. We’re headquartered in Washington, DC, but we are a remote-first company now officially, and we have a 60 staff and growing across the United States. In the 20 years, we’ve been in business, we’ve served over a thousand nonprofit association and foundation clients, and we are women-owned and majority women, which is still rare enough in our industry that we like to call it out. We’re very proud to be a Salesforce.org Premium Partner, as well as a Fonteva Certified Implementation partner. And we also offer a full in-house user experience, design, and web development practice.
Lexi Milani:
I usually try to fit all 1,000 clients on this slide, but that never quite works, so this is just some representative clients that we’ve worked with over the past few years, and we consider ourselves very lucky to have supported their missions. You may recognize some of these organizations from being in your own mission areas or perhaps even being your own organization. And finally, I get the pleasure of introducing our presenter, Mary Dare Evans (now Brown). Mary Dare is a senior account executive here at Fíonta, so I get to work with her every day. And not to… Just to lead with this, she is also a former Blackbaud account executive. She really knows what she’s talking about when she’s talking about Raiser’s Edge here. She’s also a true crime fan, an indoor cyclist, and a college football enthusiast, which actually means Clemson. Without further ado, Mary Dare, I’ll turn it over to you.
Mary Dare Brown:
Thank you so much, Lexi. Appreciate that. And thank you to everybody for joining today. As Lexi mentioned, and as you can see here, I spent some time previous to Fíonta at Blackbaud, so I have a lens from that from the account executive role there, as well as my time on the business development team here at Fíonta working with Salesforce. A lot of my perspective in these coming slides, and we’re going to talk about today, is from that. I’ll go ahead and get it started.
Mary Dare Brown:
And let’s talk about the agenda. Here are the high-level points that we’re going to talk about today. I wanted to talk first about what are some key themes that we’ve seen about folks outgrowing Raiser’s Edge. Let’s give it an overview of Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack or NPSP. We’ll talk about things that you can prepare for your migration and get into those details, as well as the process overview from Fíonta’s perspective. And then we’ll talk about… Well, we have a resource in here towards the end about a previous webinar from one of our tech gurus, Jennifer, about moving your data and then we’ll wrap it up with Q and A.
Mary Dare Brown:
I wanted to start with the outgoing of Raiser’s Edge, because that’s obviously our common theme for today, and talk about some of these key points. The common themes the Fíonta team has really run across and organizations evaluating change from Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce Success Pack, or Nonprofit Success Pack. You’ll see that these are not a specific type or single type of organization. It really stems from the goals and challenges. As you know, stakeholders are not just donors. These can be volunteers, members, or board members. You know how this goes, right? And building engagement amongst these stakeholders comes from both development and marketing.
Mary Dare Brown:
As you all know, there’s a substantial overlap between the two organizations within a nonprofit and for many organizations, digital transformation is a key initiative, and it’s crucial to growing impact. We all know this. Simply put, organizations need flexibility in their technology solutions to achieve not only financial goals but also mission during outcomes. And so, this leads me to my next point, that nonprofits value cloud-based technology. And the reason why is, once again, you’re looking for flexibility and we realize that, and now more than ever, we have realized that the need for remote accessibility and user-friendly technology is of utmost importance.
Mary Dare Brown:
Having a native cloud-based solution, like Salesforce NPSP, as opposed to a hosted solution with clunky connectors. Think about Raiser’s Edge, the Salesforce, or excuse me, the database view Raiser’s Edge 7, versus the NXT web view. Kind of clunky, right? And so, thinking of a hosted solution versus a cloud solution, a cloud solution allows for quicker software updates, better security, and work flexibility.
Mary Dare Brown:
As you’ll sit here today, you’ll look amongst maybe some of the folks in this group and you’ll notice that you work for different nonprofits. You work for different missions, you have different technology needs. And so, many options for third-party applications, for event registration, peer-to-peer fundraising, marketing automation, and even your financial reporting needs, are able to be integrated with Salesforce NPSP. And so, clients realize that options can be very limited with Raiser’s Edge, and if you’re not willing to use a Blackbaud API tool, you’re going to need most likely a middleware, like Omatic, which some of you may be familiar with, to integrate. Having the flexibility to choose the application that best suits your organization’s needs today and in the future, we think about the future state here too, is another reason why organizations have chosen to migrate and leave Raiser’s Edge for Salesforce NPSP.
Mary Dare Brown:
Although this isn’t a comprehensive list, as you can imagine, I’ve just got four bullet points here, this last point I think is a critical piece to the puzzle, and it’s really about lowering your technology debt. It’s a desire for many organizations. And a lot of people aren’t sure how to approach this, but today, as you can see, we’ve been focusing on fundraising and development because it closely relays to Raiser’s Edge and what you’re doing at Raiser’s Edge. But Fíonta works with a lot of organizations in a phased approach where we address your needs today for Raiser’s Edge, data to move to Salesforce NPSP, but in future phases, you may want to include program management or membership management.
Mary Dare Brown:
And I bring this up because it’s a substantial way for an organization to lower its technical debt. And so, today your volunteer manager may be tracking information in a third-party application. Your program manager may be tracking vital information, very important to your operations, in Excel spreadsheets. These are key components that a lot of organizations think about that can actually be done natively in Salesforce NPSP without the need for third-party integration.
Mary Dare Brown:
Let’s go on to our next and talk about what is Salesforce NPSP. This might be an overview for some of you guys that are on here that have done some of your research already, but I want to get an overview for the folks of you who haven’t. Salesforce NPSP, or Nonprofit Success Pack, it’s used interchangeably as you can see, is a cloud-based stakeholder relationship management solution and it’s built out of the box for nonprofits. NPSP is a series of managed packages. And what that means is it’s installed on top of Salesforce Enterprise Edition that you may be familiar with that for-profit businesses use. These packages of NPSP make it easier for Salesforce to manage core relationships between individual donors, households, and the companies that they work for.
Mary Dare Brown:
NPSP is built with the power of Salesforce, of course, but in nonprofits, where you’re needing to track gifts, pledges, membership, volunteers, grants, and it’s very different from how a for-profit business works. And so, Salesforce NPSP can operate as your single source of truth, stretching across multiple offices within your organization. Keep in mind, as I’m mentioning, once again, that it’s not just attracting donations. It handles many things like managing volunteers, and membership grants, and it can be configured by an implementation partner, like Fíonta, based on the organization’s specific needs.
Mary Dare Brown:
I want to show you a few slides here that give you a snapshot of what Salesforce NPSP would look like as an internal user. This first one is a contact record. Salesforce NPSP uses contacts or individuals and accounts or organizations to organize data. You’ll see on this slide, that this is just the contact-related information. When we go to the next one, we’re going to see a gift record. And this is information, obviously, that’s direct within NPSP for a major gift. There are many different types of gifts. And you’ll see here, the different milestones that can be associated with a donation life cycle. These steps are right here, and the required fields can be different for your organization and they can vary as you need them.
Mary Dare Brown:
This slide right here is different types of donations where we’re going to enter a gift. You’ll see that this particular organization has varying income options here. And so, the major gift versus a grant membership all can be entered here. And then finally, one of the best parts of NPSP that I love is reports and dashboards. You’ll see, as you get to learn NPSP and we talk through this, a lot of the reports and dashboards are standard or out of the box, which means NPSP had them created and you’re able to filter based on that. Let’s say you have last year’s fiscal year, but you want to look at the previous year or you want to look at gifts over $200. Very easy to do with the filter capability. And so, for those of you that haven’t had the chance to see NPSP, I want to show you what that looks like.
Mary Dare Brown:
Let’s go to Ava Ortez. This is a contact record. As I mentioned before, Salesforce NPSP is organized between accounts and contacts and the contact here is Ava Ortez. And so, as we scroll down, we’ll see Ava’s contact information, but we’ll also see her donation information. We’ll see her last gift amount, her best year total. We’ll also see right here, the opportunities or her gifts and her interactions with the organization. And we’ll also see any activity internally that is to happen with Ava. If it’s assigned to a particular person, for instance, the contact owner here is Britzel, when Britzel logs in to Salesforce, these would be something that she would see pop up as a reminder, whether it’s overdue or upcoming.
Mary Dare Brown:
And so let’s take a look, as I mentioned, on Ava’s opportunity details, or one of her opportunity details. This one for instance is tied to a primary giving source or campaign source here, the Giving Tuesday campaign. We can see all that information. And I like to highlight this part right here. It looks different for every particular organization, depending on your needs, but these can include different steps, and different milestones, as I mentioned, depending on what your organization needs. Maybe you need certain documentation or want to require certain things to be completed before you can move to the next stage within a donation cycle. This can be the place that you would require that and move it along in the stage as it’s completed.
Mary Dare Brown:
And once again, I love reports and dashboards, so I wanted to show you what this one looks like. Here is Save the Mutts Fundraising, our makeshift organization here in NPSP. And I want to show you the household gifts for this year because this, I think, is a really helpful tool right here. It’s going to pop out these cool bar graphs. And what we can do is, obviously, we can see it in a report format down here at the bottom, but we can also filter, which is the best part. We can go to last year’s fiscal year and apply. Quickly changes everything. You can see it in an easy format, easy to digest, using this as an annual fund manager, trying to get your list together for that end of your campaign or something of that nature.
Mary Dare Brown:
Let’s switch back over and talk about preparing for your migration, and what that looks like. One of the key points that we want to talk about here is your Raiser’s Edge contract. You need to know when that is coming up and work backward from that date. Raiser’s Edge migrations can take several months and you want to be able to have your new NPSP instance up and running. Give consideration for time busy times of the year. Staff availability, big events, that you’re not able to allocate resources around internally. Think about that as you talk about starting a conversation and really evaluating and gathering your requirements.
Mary Dare Brown:
Another key, obviously important point, is understanding what you have in Raiser’s Edge. It’s probably not just your fundraising data. It probably has something to do with membership or volunteers or even your grants. If you evaluate that and let somebody like Fíonta let us know what is in there, that really helps us better scope what you’re going to be looking for in new functionality at NPSP. And then ultimately, as you’re moving along in evaluation, you want to talk about the requirements gathering. That means involving internal stakeholders, and your team, and discussing where your must-haves and your nice-to-haves and a potential technology solution.
Mary Dare Brown:
Think about your current processes today and what do you like about the current technology? What do you like that Raiser’s Edge is able to do? And what is cumbersome to achieve? Is the data difficult to report? Does finance desire better reporting from you and your team? What processes are essential to your operations today? And ultimately, what are your priorities for this technology evaluation?
Mary Dare Brown:
Another key part, and it’s one that I’m sure Jennifer addresses in the webinar I mentioned at the beginning, but something to think about is data cleanup. Everybody’s fun, favorite part. A big piece to consider when you’re migrating data, and we hear this from a lot of organizations, is thinking about your duplicate records. How far do you want to go back for data? Are we talking about the past three years or are we talking about organizations’ total historical data? And then what data do you need for the future? Fíonta can help you in that process. When we get to discovery and we start talking about the priorities and what makes the most sense for your organization, we can always discuss, but understanding your data will better prepare you for migration. It also allows the project team that will be working on your project to be able to best prepare for an implementation plan and then consider working with Blackbaud to contract services for data cleanup. Maybe that’s the NCOA, National Change of Address, or using a deduplication tool and Raiser’s Edge.
Mary Dare Brown:
And then last, but certainly not least, is change management. A significant component of changing your technology is staff adoption and change management. We would definitely suggest involving your staff at all ages of the process to get buy-in, and service ideas, and discuss those potential changes and improvements to the processes. And you really want to make sure you leverage your staff influencers, those folks that are on board with wanting to make the change. Not just department heads to promote the project and get participation among your colleagues. It’s also important to be realistic. This is a big change and we want folks to understand how the team plans to address differences and difficulties during the implementation process, but ultimately, you’re there to be the internal champion for this process.
Mary Dare Brown:
Let’s talk a little bit about Fíonta’s point of view and how we handle an implementation process and what that looks like. Here’s just a visual example of the data migration and implementation process, and how it works. You’ll see here at the bottom, that project management, technical oversight, and change management are throughout the entirety of your project, and this allows really the project to run as smoothly as possible. Ultimately, to just be the most efficient. Your project manager will be scheduling meetings, ensuring the project is on schedule and budget from what we agreed upon in the scope of work. Also, the technical lead you’ll see is pretty self-explanatory in that way. They oversee the technical work done in the project.
Mary Dare Brown:
This planning design phase, we also call discovery. And that’s the first phase where we meet with internal stakeholders, that’s you guys, whether that is your IT department, development, events manager, those sort of folks that are going to be affected and giving input on how NPSP will look and how it’ll be set up. We also gather artifacts. If there’s data living in external sources, like your email tool and things like that, then we’ll conduct reverse demos. For example, you show us, Raiser’s Edge, your Raiser’s Edge instance, so we can gather how your data lists today and if there are any quirks to how you’re currently handling some of those things. Then we also start high-level data mapping. That means we’re being filled by field from Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce.
Mary Dare Brown:
During the biggest chunk, you see the data iterations project sprints. This is an iterative build process. This is where we begin the data migration. We’ll also be configuring Salesforce NPSP based on requirements gathered during discovery. This means we’ll be setting up NPSP to reflect your organization’s needs as we mentioned. We talked about fundraising and that would include your pledges, your major giving, membership, and grants, both inbound and outbound. And then at this point, we would also be integrating third-party applications that were agreed upon during discovery. Think about your email tool today. Are you using MailChimp or Online Express or Illuminate Online? Think about your giving pages, or those through Raiser’s Edge, and then also your website. If there’s any integration needed there, we’ll talk about it.
Mary Dare Brown:
At this stage, we will conduct a test import of the data from Raiser’s Edge. What that means is we’ll import your Raiser’s Edge data after we’ve mapped and scripted that data. And then before we go live, we do UAT, which is User Acceptance Testing. This is where we ask you to run reports or conduct processes that we have built to ensure that they’re expected and agreed upon. And then we’ll also conduct our final import and go live. We then conduct training for your new system and we will provide post-go-live support where you can ask us for assistance, of course. And then all this process is built though, in a detailed scope of work that was agreed upon before discovery.
Mary Dare Brown:
This is something we wanted to highlight here. This is an on-demand webinar recording from our colleague, Jennifer, who is a data engineer and has a lot of expertise speaking about clients that she’s seen have a successful data migration and those that maybe have struggled through it, and some suggestions on what you can do with your data. I highly suggest after this, this is a super helpful one that takes a deep dive into some of those data points. And I think from here, we might go into Q and A.
Lexi Milani:
Thanks, Mary Dare. It looks like our first question, and again, you can use the chat or the Q and A to submit questions. Can you talk about the main reasons you see nonprofits move from Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce?
Mary Dare Brown:
Yeah. Some of the main reasons, we highlighted those in the beginning, but technology debt. Wanting to lessen maybe third party applications that they’re using today, that they could do natively in Salesforce. Feeling like they’re outgrowing it in the way of needing more robust technology around membership or volunteers. Really wanting a cloud-based technology solution that focuses on security and updates as some of their primary sources. Yeah.
Lexi Milani:
Okay. And can you have programs / services on the same system as fundraising?
Mary Dare Brown:
You can. Yeah. Salesforce NPSP has a program management module and actually lives within the Nonprofit Cloud or Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), so you can build out all your program management there. It can be a separate office utilizing program management from fundraising and still be in the same instance. Seamless data flow.
Lexi Milani:
And that’s one of the things we often talk about with clients is that you can start with the base functionality and expand.
Mary Dare Brown:
Exactly.
Lexi Milani:
Does the Nonprofit Success Pack have a good roadmap? We haven’t seen a lot of new functionality on Raiser’s Edge.
Mary Dare Brown:
Yeah, that’s a great question. It does. Salesforce does quarterly releases. And they have a lot of changes to a lot of the tools that are coming in there. They take feedback from clients, that’s part of it that they built out with the grants management tool, which was something that was a key piece that nonprofits were looking for. So yes, they do have a roadmap that they refer to and take customer feedback, building that out.
Lexi Milani:
Okay. We’ve got a couple more questions. Can you talk a little bit about data security with Salesforce? Terms of their transparency in that area and where interested staff, people could find information on that.
Mary Dare Brown:
Yeah. That’s a good question too. Always a common one, I feel like people are concerned about, especially being cloud-based. As far as we know, to our knowledge, Salesforce has never had a data breach, and everything Salesforce from Salesforce is published on their trustsalesforce.com website, and that talks about their compliance, their security protocols, and then their service availability. So yes, they do have documentation and are very transparent with the community about that.
Lexi Milani:
Yeah, and if I can just add, I mean, I know at Fíonta and at all implementation partners, we are accustomed to using, to managing highly secure data for our clients. Whether it’s HIPAA or FERPA or whatever the specific protocol and requirements might be, Salesforce is compliant with many of those and you can find that on trust.salesforce.com also. Those are… Okay. We’ve got some good questions here. We are interested in doing more online fundraising. Is that functionality also in Salesforce?
Mary Dare Brown:
Yeah. A good question. Yes, Salesforce has a native tool called Elevate which is their online giving platform. They’ve continued to build out functionality on that, adding recurring gifts, and building out the types of payment services or payment portals that they will allow for. And sometime later this year, or something that’s been brought up as a priority for them, is adding this to the Power of Us, which is part of the free licenses that, or granted licenses, that Salesforce allows for, 10 free licenses, and adding in that Elevate access as a piece that for qualified nonprofit. I would say if you have questions about if you qualify for the free Elevate pages or online giving pages, ask Salesforce directly, and they can get you to your assigned account manager to help you with that.
Lexi Milani:
Okay. We have time for maybe two more questions. We run multi-channel campaigns and struggle with emails, and social online, through Raiser’s Edge. Is this something Salesforce can handle?
Mary Dare Brown:
Yeah. Great question. Another native tool. There are a lot of different tools that you can utilize. I guess I can narrow it down to two solutions that are native to Salesforce – Marketing Cloud, and Pardot. And so you can have those engagements built out, whether it’s a welcome series or engagement path specific to where they’ve clicked in certain areas of interest from previous emails. That’s all possible with those solutions, and it just depends on really your needs to narrow down which one would make the most sense, but they’re both natively built to Salesforce, so yes.
Lexi Milani:
Great question.
Mary Dare Brown:
Yeah.
Lexi Milani:
Okay. Here’s another integration functionality question. We have QuickBooks and would like to integrate it with our CRM. Is that possible with Salesforce?
Mary Dare Brown:
Oh, great question. That comes up a lot and it obviously has to do a lot with what your accounting department is requiring and what they’re looking for essentially, but what we would typically recommend with our QuickBooks clients is letting Fíonta create a custom report that you would export to your finance team and they would import it. A lot of times the finance folks like they have that little bit of separation and checks and balances. That’s what we typically recommend for QuickBooks. Now, if you have a more robust accounting solution, maybe Sage or Great Planes, we would look at something to leverage that’s again, a native Salesforce tool that’s called Accounting Subledger, and that allows for more details to export to your finance team, but there range of possibilities.
Lexi Milani:
And it looks like we have answered all the questions for today. I want to thank Mary Dare for her presentation and just remind all of our attendees that we can always be found online at fionta.com or on LinkedIn or Twitter, and we really appreciate your attendance today.
Mary Dare Brown:
Yes. Thank you, everybody.