As a continuation of our Gift Processing with Cloud for Good’s Advancement Accelerator blog published last month, I wanted to dive deeper into the connection between the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and the Education Data Architecture (EDA). More specifically, how this connection enables your Advancement team to identify areas of interest, giving capacity, and the next best action to help you make more informed asks from your constituents.
Connecting NPSP and EDA or your SIS
When it comes to fundraising, there is no better foundation than Salesforce’s NPSP. Salesforce has poured investment back into the product, spending over a decade developing solutions to help organizations create a complete picture of their development. My colleagues Tal Frankfurt and Kestryl Lowrey speak more about these benefits in this blog. From new feature releases, product enhancements, and architecture designed for fundraisers, it’s no surprise that many organizations both in the nonprofit and education sectors are turning to this solution.
For education institutions, however, you may already have an instance of Salesforce on EDA or other Student Information Systems (SIS) in place that help you identify important details about your alumni, such as previous coursework, participation in athletics or other extracurricular activities, and areas of interest.
That is one of the benefits of our Higher Education Advancement Accelerator. We’ve designed a native Salesforce solution that utilizes Salesforce Connect and External Objects to help bring valuable alumni information into your fundraising instance of Salesforce. Pertinent information about your alumni and donor interactions with your institution is captured directly on the Contact’s Record and updated as the information changes in your system of record. The best part? You get to customize what data flows in and out of the system and there is no need for custom integration.
In combining these two solutions, you are getting the most complete picture of your alumni and donors, without having to go through multiple systems. It becomes your one-stop-shop as you begin prospecting, cultivating, and nurturing these relationships.
The 360-Degree View of Your Alumni & Development
In addition to the connection with your alumni information, our Advancement Accelerator includes several tools, features, and functionality to help you get a 360-degree view.
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Identifying Areas of Interest
Cloud for Good has developed our proprietary Badges and Interests applications. These solutions give your Advancement team a customizable visual representation of your alumni and donor’s interests and important donor information. You’ll be able to see if your alumni and donors are interested in the arts or athletics, if they’re a reoccurring donor or one-time giver, or any other piece of information that you deem important as your team accesses a Contact’s Record. Represented with icons, these badges and interests help you quickly identify what is important to your alumni and donors at a glance.
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See History of Giving
In addition to seeing interest, you will be able to view all previous giving information in one location, including both hard and soft credits. Visualized as separate payments or represented as a chart, this complete picture of donation history can help you identify inclination to give (and when they are more likely to give – perhaps they always give larger gifts right before school is back in session), and if your outreach is impacting your alumni and donors giving history.
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Assess Giving Capacity
The more information you have on your alumni and donors, the more targeted and impactful your request for donations becomes. As part of the Advancement Accelerator, we recommend wealth screening. Wealth screening solutions create a profile of your contact and look for wealth information, such as stock ownership, political giving, real estate ownership, and even gifts to other organizations and institutions to help you identify a donor’s capacity and willingness to give. This can help you understand the right amount to ask for and, when used in conjunction with the other attributes we previously discussed, can be incredibly useful as you continue prospecting within your database.
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Take the Next Best Action
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly popular in today’s world and can be a powerful tool as you are looking for the next best action to take with your alumni and development. Einstein Next Best Action uses recommendations, business intelligence, and AI to synthesize tactics, strategies, and business insights in real-time. It uses workflows and recommendations for various stages of the donor lifecycle to predict which action (or set of actions) will have the greatest impact on your prospecting on a Contact-by-Contact basis. Once selected, Next Best Actions provides you with a list of tasks to complete, to help you reach your intended goal – in this case, raising more funds.
With Cloud for Good’s Advancement Accelerator, it becomes easy to see the information that you need to make clear, informed asks while continuing to build relationships with your alumni and donors. In our next article, we will speak to how you can better understand the data within Salesforce with tools like Tableau, and how that can help you identify trends, benchmark success, and power-up your advancement programs. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments section below.
You may also be interested in:
- Blog: Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for Higher Education Advancement
- Success Story: Gordon College
- Success Story: Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary
