As Cloud for Good continues to forge new paths in the higher education and nonprofit spaces in 2023, several trends have begun to catch our eye. This Valentine’s Day, we’re showing our love to the trends most poised to make waves and make hearts flutter across sectors. Our admiration for these trends is no secret. Take note of the seven trends below and your 2023 will be all the sweeter.
Creating eCommerce Experiences that Put Your Constituents First
Customers across industries demand a sophisticated and personalized experience with their technology. In our modern society where everything from streaming services and groceries to car and home purchases are available at the click of a button, it’s critical that those in the nonprofit and higher education space recognize eCommerce’s potential effect on revenue. Programming, life-long learning, certifications, training offerings, event/ticket sales, and gifts and donations are all aspects that stand to benefit from eCommerce solutions. Consider how Salesforce can be leveraged across clouds to create experiences that scale, centralize, and unlock potential at your organization.
Prioritizing Digital Maturity
Digital maturity, as noted in Salesforce’s Fifth Edition of the Nonprofit Trends Report, helps organizations build workplace cultures that prioritize relationships. The concept of digital maturity is built off the evaluation of how advanced an organization is when it comes to using technology and data. Higher levels of digital maturity directly correlate to stronger stakeholder relationships, higher rates of goal achievement, and more motivated staff. Through cross-cloud utilization of Salesforce solutions, organizations can improve their impact and create working harmony between people and technology.
Investment in Automation and Omnichannel Capabilities
Marie Rosecrans, Salesforce CMO of Education and Nonprofit, suggests that an investment in automation will be necessary in an effort to do more with less while optimizing and prioritizing intelligence-based insights. What this means is a greater reliance on automation to increase efficiency and overall return on technology investments by removing the lift from staff and designing scalable services. Establishing omnichannel capabilities (integrating different methods of interaction available to customers) helps greatly in achieving a return on automation investment. This can translate to heightened constituent support through tools like SMS, Chatbots, Live Agent, and Knowledge Bases that connect deeply with students on high-value topics while removing the burden of issues that do not require personal touches from staff.
Strengthening Donor Relationships
According to the aforementioned Trends Report from Salesforce, most nonprofits today say their strongest relationships are with program participants, while the strength of donor relationships is lower. With the lack of budgets and resources cited as the largest cause of this concerning trend, it’s important to remember that donor relationships impact organizational resources and performance. Assess what your organization is doing to maintain and improve donor relationships. How can you make their giving experience easier? How can you make them feel more connected to your organization? Whether through providing a more intuitive giving experience or better highlighting where donations will go to improve the organization, Salesforce offers a suite of solutions capable of bridging the gap and strengthening donor relationships.
Focusing on Faculty + Staff Engagement
A recent Gallup study confirms that when faculty have the materials and equipment they need, feel cared for at work, and feel connected to their leaders and colleagues, student experience and success improve in turn. When it comes to staff engaging your constituents, they stand to benefit from a more informed, engaged approach through simple improvements any organization can make, such as building knowledge bases and conducting surveys. Engaged employees are both emotionally and psychologically more committed to their work and workplace, and a higher employee engagement rate translates to a higher employee retention rate. Faculty engagement is highly predictive of program success, so take the steps to ensure your institution’s staff has exactly what they need to benefit your constituents.
Amplifying Fundraising Strategy with Direct Response Campaigns
Direct Response marketing is a form of targeted marketing designed to communicate relevant information to consumers who have been identified as likely buyers, donors, or sustainers. The two most common forms of direct marketing are direct mail and telemarketing. Many people don’t realize this, but the majority of nonprofit fundraising still comes from direct marketing. Direct Response Services, or Campaign Services, empower these direct marketing campaigns through highly targeted fundraising strategies. As forms of targeted marketing designed to communicate relevant information to consumers who have been identified as likely buyers, donors, or sustainers. By parsing the most effective fundraising segments relative to your organization, Direct Response Services help to produce campaign deliverables, and insights that drive ROI, and enrich data through direct mail campaigns. The result is a 360-degree view of fundraising activities and constituent engagement.
Contract-to-Hire Staffing Solutions
In today’s uncertain economy, finding and hiring tech talent is challenging, especially for those impacted by hiring freezes. Approving budgets, writing/posting job openings, and recruiting talent is a risky and highly time-consuming process. Organizations need long-term staffing solutions to fill their vacant System Admin and Business Analysts roles, and they needed it yesterday. Contract-to-hire staffing solutions, such as Talent for Good, allow organizations to fill open positions immediately while following internal processes to transition resources to a full-time hire.
If you find yourself crushing on any of these trends in particular and want to pursue your options, don’t hesitate to contact Cloud for Good today.
