The Cloud for Good team joined fellow nonprofit leaders, changemakers, and industry peers on Day 2 of Salesforce’s 2024 Dreamforce conference for its nonprofit keynote. The theme of this keynote discussed the AI and data strategy tools and solutions that can help nonprofit leaders and changemakers amplify their work, mission, and impact today and in the future, and the current and upcoming tools of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. Here were the highlights and top insights from the keynote.
Business as a Platform for Change
Salesforce’s CRO and Global NGO Sales Leader Kim Bradberry kicked off the keynote and posited that business is the greatest platform for change, which is something that Salesforce exemplifies well and is the reason why she chose to work at Salesforce. Bradberry highlighted the significant work and success Salesforce is amplifying for the nonprofit space, with 59K nonprofit and higher education customers, 9.1 million hours in volunteer time, and an all-time giving total of $728 million generated by its nonprofit customers. However, Bradberry noted that these successes are not without challenges, such as time, disparate data systems, and connecting with constituents, but this is where Salesforce and its nonprofit and AI solutions, like Nonprofit Cloud and Einstein, can help.
AI + Nonprofits: Creating New Possibilities and Driving Efficiency and Impact
Salesforce nonprofit executives Lori Freeman and Norah Steven-Kittner joined the keynote next and proposed how valuable and powerful AI is for nonprofits. People and technology are better when they are together, and leveraging AI is like working with another set of hands that can solve many workload challenges. Great AI starts with great data, they explained, which helped segway into the next part of their presentation where they gave an insightful, knowledge-packed lesson about AI lingo such as Large Language Models (LLMs), Language Models (LMs), prompts, predictive AI, generative AI, and Agentforce. Agentforce is poised to be a next-generation AI bot that Freeman and Steven-Kittmer described akin to giving your data agency, and that humans working alongside AI agents will drive nonprofit success better while leveraging the power of predictive AI.
Nonprofit AI Product Innovations and Solutions: Current and Upcoming
The keynote highlighted many current AI product innovations and solutions the nonprofit community can take advantage of to transform their organization and amplify their impact and mission:
In addition to these solutions, Agentforce will help nonprofits augment staff, elevate donor and client experiences, and increase fundraising and client satisfaction with a fleet of donor support, client support, call center support, volunteer support, and grantee support agents powered by AI, while working together with the Salesforce platform, Data Cloud, Stakeholder 360, and Einstein’s Trust layer.
Einstein was another AI tool that the keynote highlighted for nonprofits, and current use cases in the nonprofit space included:
- Nonprofit Cloud Slack + Case Management: Einstein can identify and show users which donors are at risk of lapsing. Consequently, Nonprofit Cloud Slack can be used to reach out to the constituent and surround them with the support team they need to minimize lapsing.
- Program Management: Einstein can summarize important highlights and information in a readable format, which saves time with program management.
- Connecting Structured and Unstructured Data: Einstein can connect structured data like spreadsheets, contact lists, and relational databases with unstructured data like videos, images, and PDFs.
The keynote also shared future product innovations with AI for nonprofits that will be available in Beta mode October 2024:
- Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud: Provides Major Donor Engagement Summaries, Major Gift Proposals, Program and Benefits Summaries, and Notes Summaries.
- Nonprofit Cloud Next Generation Grants and Programs: A purpose-built AI solution for grant makers.
- Tableau Einstein for Fundraising: Actionable insights for fundraisers built into Nonprofit Cloud.
In addition, Salesforce announced their intention to build Volunteer Management for Nonprofits to enhance and innovate nonprofit volunteer management operations and volunteer relationships.
Nonprofit Trailblazer Community: Innovating and Creating a Better World
Salesforce’s Commons Community Director Cori O’Brien drove the keynote home by highlighting how the nonprofit community and changemakers coming together is so important to Salesforce, emphasizing how the involvement and feedback of Salesforce’s Nonprofit Trailblazer Community contributed to the development, building, and design of Salesforce’s first nonprofit solutions. Everyone in the community is so involved and supportive of one another, said O’Brien, and it’s not position titles that matter in this community, but how you show up, and invited the audience to join and attend several opportunities for connecting at Dreamforce.
The nonprofit keynote at Dreamforce demonstrated how powerful it is and can be when people and technology—specifically purpose-built AI—work in tandem to amplify and achieve change, impact, and make a difference. This is something that Cloud for Good has seen firsthand through our many successes in enabling and empowering nonprofits to make an impact through technology, and with the many AI tools for nonprofits available today and in the future like Nonprofit Cloud, Agentforce, and Einstein, we are excited to see what nonprofits can accomplish with them.
Contact Cloud for Good to discuss how Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and Einstein can help you get the most out of your organization’s technology.
