As part of our ongoing capacity building program, Fionta is pleased to present The Fionta Minute, a series of short Salesforce-focused videos. In this episode, we cover two exciting features from the Nonprofit Success Pack, Engagement Plans and Levels.
Fionta Minute: Engagement Plans & Levels from Fionta on Vimeo.
Video Transcript
Salesforce is a phenomenal platform for nonprofits, because it allows nonprofits to centralize data about their supporters and their operations in order to achieve their mission with greater efficiency.
It’s that centralization that helps nonprofits to coordinate their efforts and better serve their supporters by tracking a 360 degree view of the individual. Better yet, the system is constantly improving thanks to the tireless efforts of Salesforce.org and the nonprofit community that created and expands the Nonprofit Success Pack – a set of free customizations for Salesforce.
As we work with our nonprofit clients, we’ve often heard them talk about the challenges of managing too many tasks, not having all data they need to do their jobs in one place, inefficient business processes, and budget constraints.
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Out of the box, Salesforce allows the assignment and tracking of tasks, as well the ability to associate these tasks with supporters, donations, or anything else that’s being tracked inside a Salesforce record.
These can be fundraising tasks like sending a thank you email or letter, scheduling a meeting or lunch, or program-specific tasks like sending a brochure or orientation packet to a volunteer.
By using engagement plans, you can create a sequence of common, related tasks based on a process and instantly associate them with a donor, volunteer or any other object in Salesforce. In this example, we’re sending a thank you email, following up a few days later with a thank you note, sending a teddy bear a few weeks later and then sending an outcomes report 60 days after that.
This standardized process can be added to a record with just a few clicks…
This automatically creates the tasks, sets the deadlines and assigns them to a Salesforce user based on rules that you specify in the engagement plan. For example, the thank you tasks are assigned to the record owner (the relationship manager), but merchandise fulfillment is being handled by our volunteer John here.
Of course you can manually assign these, but… automation is a central feature of Salesforce so here’s where it gets really exciting… Levels allow you to automatically assign Engagement Plans based on meeting criteria that you set. These can be dollars amounts like donation totals or they can be engagement metrics such as volunteer hours.
That means that when a donor reaches a threshold that you determine, the tasks from the engagement plan are automatically created and assigned.
For volunteers, the process is the same, but the Engagement Plan is activated based on the metrics that you determine and the tasks can be customized to your nonprofit’s unique needs and workflow.
The amazing part about Salesforce is that, while most of these tasks could have been accomplished before using a combination of the existing tools, the Salesforce nonprofit community recognized a shared need. The Nonprofit Success Pack puts all of these tools in one place, in one system, offers it to nonprofits for free.
As always, we hope this Fionta Minute has been helpful.
Learn more about our Salesforce practice or contact us to get started optimizing engagement plans and/or levels.