Recently, Cloud for Good hosted an in-person event at the New York Salesforce Tower. We were joined by customers at all stages of their respective technology transformation – those looking to convince their teams to make the switch, those who just started a Blackbaud migration, and those on phases two and three of their Salesforce journey.
A New World for Nonprofits
No matter the size, or how far along the nonprofits in the audience were, they all came together to share experiences and learn from our incredible panel of speakers, including members of Cloud for Good, Salesforce, American Kennel Club, Harold Grinspoon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Museum, about how Salesforce has been impacting the user experience of their constituents, staff, and donors.
The post-pandemic world is seeing many changes to the ways we previously have engaged with one another. We see news headlines blanketed with back-to-office mandates and a highly uncertain economic and political climate. Employers are focused on doing more with less, and that mantra can often translate to your internal staff wearing multiple hats during the workday, and impersonalized donor and constituent experiences.
Many nonprofits, just like traditional businesses, are struggling in these areas too. But nonprofit organizations are rising to the occasion and identifying the solutions necessary to continue serving their constituents, making a difference, and impacting their communities.
In the current landscape, nonprofits focus on employee retention, fundraising, and maximizing the increased need for services and programs. While some organizations are driving impact in these areas, the ones that are thriving have invested in technology to increase efficiency, maximize personalization, and drive results.
Focus on User Experiences
Today, when things like inflation and labor shortages threaten the sector, technology that focuses on user experience is a way of creating efficiency, productivity, and cost savings through automation. These nonprofits create space for nurturing their most valuable relationships, starting with their employees, donors, and other constituents.
Efficient and productive nonprofits are more effective at delivering impact. They engage and retain their employees. They fundraise together. They focus on people instead of tasks. They can do more with less and reap the benefits of cost savings to drive their missions forward. At our New York event, Cloud for Good was joined by experts from Smile Train, American Kennel Club, Harold Grinspoon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Museum to dive into how organizations were rising to meet today’s challenges by creating exceptional user experiences for constituents, donors, and staff.
Smile Train
Smile Train empowers local medical professionals with training, funding, and resources to provide free cleft surgery and comprehensive cleft care to children globally. Across 75+ countries and 1.1K partner hospitals empowering 2.1K medical professionals, this vital organization advances a sustainable solution and scalable global health model for cleft treatment, drastically improving children’s lives, including their ability to eat, breathe, speak, and ultimately thrive.
In order to build a more reliable source of truth and create greater user adoption, Smile Train has implemented Salesforce for Nonprofits as its central platform for fundraising and constituent data. Supplementing this foundation is DonorDrive for peer-to-peer fundraising, and Active Campaign for more effective marketing and engagement efforts. This suite of solutions has resulted in streamlined business processes, enhanced data security and visibility that protects donor information, and a highly scalable environment enabling future growth on the Salesforce platform.
American Kennel Club
American Kennel Club (AKC) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to upholding the integrity of its Registry, promoting the sport of purebred dogs, and breeding for type and function. Founded in 1884, the AKC and its affiliated organizations advocate for the purebred dog as a family companion, advance canine health and well-being, work to protect the rights of all dog owners, and promote responsible dog ownership. With a mission so expansive and multi-faceted, it should come as no surprise that over 55K phone calls, emails, and live chats are received by the organization every single month.
AKC utilizes a suite of Salesforce for Nonprofits, inContact, and Experience Cloud solutions to centralize these communications and provide constituents with a self-service platform focused on an intuitive user experience. Through these tools, constituents are catered to as individuals, allowing them to seamlessly access information such as dog DNA test kit information. All the while, internal staff access all incoming and outgoing user data with ease and efficiency.
Harold Grinspoon Foundation
Inspired by the deep meaning and joy offered by Jewish living, the Harold Grinspoon Foundation (HGF) helps people connect to Jewish values, faith, traditions, and culture, and build vibrant Jewish communities. Through a partnership with Cloud for Good, and the utilization of Salesforce technology, HGF has empowered its central mission and supported a robust litany of programs, events, and initiatives.
Through a combination of Nonprofit Cloud, Service Cloud, Tableau, and Slack, HGF has created a single source of truth for all data within the organization and has eliminated both data insecurity and integrity risks across the organization. Newly achieved visibility into data is on-demand, allowing staff to make data-driven decisions, unify program management strategies, and lay a strong foundation of technology for rapid growth and innovation.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Committed to innovation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation collects, preserves, and interprets modern and contemporary art, and explores ideas across cultures through dynamic curatorial and educational initiatives and collaborations. With its constellation of architecturally and culturally distinct museums, exhibitions, publications, and digital platforms, the foundation engages both local and global audiences.
An assertive investment in technology became a necessity for the foundation as a result of the pandemic. Salesforce became the clear solution for the foundation, specifically a combination of Salesforce for Nonprofits as a platform for fundraising and constituent data, Ticketure for ticketing and membership management, and Marketing Cloud for increased engagement. Development, marketing, and membership teams are now united in efforts to increase visitation and revenue. The teams now utilize better KPIs to drive data-backed decisions, share dynamic and flexible reports to all staff, and deepen audience engagement across the 300K NYC constituents tracked in its CRM.
Creating Impact at Scale
While the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in many nonprofit organizations, those that continue the investment and create scale outside of work are opening their organizations up for greater impact.
We’d love to talk more about how technology can help your organization scale, grow, and impact your user experiences – reach out to us at [email protected] to learn more.
