10 Ways to Elevate Your Fundraising

Digital fundraising is essential to success. But making it as easy as possible for people to support your organization isn’t necessarily easy—for them or for your staff. Taking donations over the phone, manually entering payments, or processing refunds and recurring donations can all be time-consuming tasks.

Today’s donors have come to expect ease of use when giving online, whether that’s mobile donation forms, refunds or tax receipts on request. They also want to designate their giving to the programs they want to support. Yet many organizations simply lack the technology and staff to accommodate those donor expectations.  

Meet Elevate, an end-to-end, online donation platform from Salesforce.org that’s tailor-made for nonprofits and educational institutions. Elevate’s product suite integrates with Salesforce tools in the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and creates a seamless donor experience while also streamlining admin functions to dramatically improve productivity.

Here are 10 ways Elevate can elevate your fundraising:

#1 — Launch campaigns in as little as 10 minutes.

You can quickly and easily create customizable and mobile-friendly donation pages with Giving Pages—no programming know-how needed. Add photos, logos, and branding effortlessly to create compelling donation pages. And because it’s integrated into Salesforce, you reduce the need for data entry and improve the availability and ease of reporting. 

#2 — Target ask ladders to a donor’s giving history.

Giving Pages supports your fundraising strategy by letting you customize ask amounts and vary ask ladders based on donors’ giving history. It multiplies base amounts by incremental percentages to determine viable ask amounts that make sense across the range of your donors. In doing so, it potentially optimizes giving. As a former fundraiser and Elevate user stated, this feature alone increased their institution’s giving by 15-20%.

#3 — Easily accommodate donors who want to designate their donation.

Elevate lets you add designation options on Giving Pages, or create defaults that are then automatically allocated to General Accounting Units (GAUs) in Salesforce. By giving donors choices and control over their contributions, you optimize their generosity and enhance engagement.

#4 — Start saving transaction fees by asking donors to cover them.

Whether it’s a one-time donation or recurring gifts, you can customize the language and percentage of fees to be covered, letting donors cover those processing fees. It all adds up to significant savings for your organization.

#5 — Take donations efficiently and quickly over the phone.

Elevate lets you ditch the manual, work-around processes. Staff can take any call and every donation by easily and expediently processing credit card and ACH payments through Gift Entry.

#6 — Add custom fields that sync directly to standard and custom objects and fields in Salesforce.

Elevate gives you the ability to easily add and capture information that matters to your campaigns. Think grad year, maiden name, majors for higher-ed campaigns, or programs of interest and reasons for giving for nonprofits. You can add up to 25 custom fields to Giving Pages and map them back to Salesforce.

#7 — Quickly refund donations, resend branded receipts, and alert donors.

You know the calls: “Did my donation go through?” “Help, I accidentally hit the donate button twice.” “I’ve misplaced my receipt; can you send me another?” Elevate lets you retrieve information instantly and respond fast and efficiently. On top of it all, you can set up Donor Alerts to notify a donor of a failed transaction.

#8 — Easily establish monthly giving options.

And also update recurring donation information with NPSP in Salesforce. Your Giving Pages can process a single, one-time gift or provide donors the option to set up monthly sustaining gifts.

#9 — Streamline and customize the donor experience.

You can pre-populate/prefill donor information on Giving Pages to personalize messaging using URL parameters. You can also prefill data from standard or custom fields that are in Salesforce.

#10 — Integrate your online payment gateway with your Salesforce.

Elevate’s Payment Services connects to your gateway, whether it’s Authorize.net, iATS, or Stripe. One-time and ongoing monthly gifts automatically sync between your payment processor and Salesforce. Manage cancellations, refunds, and more without leaving Salesforce.

By making campaign contributions fast and easy, Elevate enhances your donor experience and expands your success potential. At the same time, it makes it easier and faster to create online fundraising campaigns and process donations. With the added productivity and time-savings, you and your staff are then free to grow your fundraising program.

To learn more about Elevate’s suite of products and the many ways they can improve your fundraising success, contact us.