Organization’s Goals
Salesforce is constantly growing and evolving as the needs of organizations change. Over the next twelve months, organizations surveyed in Cloud for Good’s State of Salesforce in the Nonprofit and Education Sectors have some very clear goals they are looking to achieve:
- Increase fundraising: The number one objective for organizations is clear – organizations want to increase their fundraising so they can do more to support their cause and programs. Salesforce.org continues to provide new and innovative ways to help your organization exceed their fundraising objectives, provide grants and donate licenses to give more organization access to the platform.
- Promote data privacy: With strengthened legislation, such as the GDPR in the European Union and CASTL in Canada, organizations are looking for tools to help them stay compliant. Constituent relationship management tools, like Salesforce, need to adapt and grow to help organizations keep up with the stricter data privacy regulations. Use of marketing automation tools such as Pardot and Marketing Cloud, or third-party applications like FormAssembly, can help make these transitions easier. Here are some tips on how you can help promote data privacy:
- Have an active opt-in box on all your forms
- Collect information, such as country, that can help you distinguish if your contacts are subject to stricter data privacy regulation
- Audit your data periodically to make sure you’re compliant
- Better use of analytics and reporting: ‘Big data’ is becoming a term many organizations are familiarizing themselves with. Organizations are looking for ways to take their data, ask questions and turn it into action. Tools like Einstein Analytics can help your organization visualize data stored in disparate systems and to help answer the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. These reports go a step beyond what most organizations can get from the Nonprofit Success Pack, delivering shareable, actionable, and easy-to-understand dashboard.
Continued focus on Marketing Automation
The use of marketing automation tools has been on the rise for the past three years, and another 57% of organizations are saying they plan to invest in marketing automation over the next year. Marketing automation is a great way to help your fundraising efforts, lead to program expansion and help you increase your donor relations. But selecting your tool based on your organization’s marketing goals and plans is crucial in seeing a measurable impact. The platform you choose should enable your organization to automate and personalize your approach based on your constituent’s interests and integrate back into Salesforce. When used in combination with Salesforce, you’ll be able to automate your messages based on specific criteria and segment your audience to deliver the right message, at the right time. If you haven’t already, consider going with a platform like Marketing Cloud or Pardot. These platforms were created to integrate with your Salesforce instance and make communicating and recording your constituent engagement easy.
Take Lightning by storm
Salesforce created the Lightning Experience (LEX) with a sales-and service-centric mindset. Their goal was to create a desktop environment designed to better support your business processes. With a focus on LEX, Salesforce’s annual releases will bring more and more features that will only be available in LEX.
Utilizing of LEX jumped 21% over the last year. Haven’t turned on LEX yet? If you’re not one of the 33% who plan to do so over the next year, here are some reason why you may want to consider the switch:
- More customization available: Whether it’s getting reports on your homepage or using the flexible user interfaces to serve up dynamic, actionable data across all types of pages, the lightning experience is allowing users easier access to the data that matters to them.
- You don’t need to be a to developer customize your pages: Using the Lightning App Builder, you can design custom record layout pages using drag-and-drop components.
- Reporting and Dashboard enhancements: With the focus that organizations want to have on analytics and reporting over the next twelve months, it is no surprise users are turning on the lightning experience. Dashboards are no longer limited to three static column widths and adding filters on the fly have never been easier with the enhanced reports.
To find out more, download the full report!
