Top 4 Reasons Why Your Nonprofit Needs Marketing Automation
Imagine this: it’s the end of the fiscal year, and your organization has a few unmet fundraising goals. You vowed to take a more strategic approach to this year’s fundraising appeals, but staffing changes and organization-wide shifts disrupted your plans. Now, you are once again sending last-minute email blasts to your entire database on the final day of your fundraising campaign. Sound familiar? Now more than ever, donors expect a seamless, thoughtful experience built on trust and perceived value from the nonprofits they support. This heightened expectation requires a long-term, personalized approach to constituent engagement rather than a short-term, ...
Cloudy Presents: Enhancement Manager for Salesforce
Periodic Salesforce projects and ongoing system upkeep are a necessity for any org. Planning, tracking and communication for these efforts are also necessary, but they aren’t always easy! Spreadsheets, project management tools, emails, meetings and power point presentations line the path to the Salesforce promised land, but a simple and coherent view of that path is not always clear. To help you on your Salesforce journey, Cloudy is excited to offer a new (FREE!) Salesforce App. This simple app consists of a single custom object, a dashboard, and some (optional) automation to make your Salesforce project planning and management simple ...
Data cleanup and maintenance made easy with Salesforce dashboards
Maintaining data quality is a universal chore that is pretty easy for any busy Salesforce administrator to overlook. There are just so many reports to click through. Fortunately, though, by creating a data quality dashboard, you can make the monitoring of your organization’s data quality much easier. When building dashboards in Salesforce, many nonprofits tend to focus on more traditional sets of reports — those that track sales, fundraising and service metrics. However, dashboards are also a great way for admins to effectively stay on top of data quality and quickly see which areas need your attention. Top data quality ...
Three email drip programs your nonprofit should create today
You’ve read about the reasons why your nonprofit needs a marketing automation solution and how to improve donor stewardship with personalization techniques. Now, let's talk about one of the most powerful features of a marketing automation platform: automated drip programs. Drip programs are an automated series of emails sent on a pre-determined schedule and triggered based on constituent criteria or actions. A marketing automation tool like Pardot allows you to go even further by building non-email touchpoints into your drip program. This can include scheduling a follow-up call to a donor after a large donation, assigning a task to send ...
Donor stewardship made easy with marketing automation
"Dear %%firstname%%" In the past, email personalization meant simply inserting a contact's first name with a merge field into your email greeting, and crossing your fingers that your data was accurate. If you’re engaged in fundraising or constituent mobilization of any kind, marketing automation can be a game-changer for your nonprofit. And with marketing automation tools like Pardot, personalization goes much further – allowing you to automate timely, relevant, thoughtful content and touchpoints throughout a donor’s life cycle. Here are just a few of the tools you can use to personalize your constituent communications with Pardot: Automated emails With features ...
Cloudy’s Favorite Apps: SyncApps by Cazoomi – Part 2 “Tips & Tricks”
MailChimp is a popular platform for mass email and marketing automation - with good reason! The interface is friendly, the marketing automation options are robust, the templates are up to date, documentation & support are good, and the price is competitive. Cloudy has previously reviewed a great app for integrating MailChimp with Salesforce - Cazoomi SyncApps: You can read that full review HERE **The bottom line from that review is that Cloudy does not recommend the free/native Salesforce integration offered by MailChimp. For all the good features MailChimp offers - the “free” integration is not one of them.** But Cazoomi SyncApps ...
Cloudy’s Tips & Tricks: Lightning Record Detail Tabs
One great feature of the Salesforce Lightning UI is the “Tabs” page component. Tabs allow admins to reduce scrolling by putting different pieces of a page layout into Tabs - rather than stacked or otherwise spread out. This example shows a common use case: Putting Account Details and Related Lists in tabs makes viewing all facets of the account easier & faster than the scrolling required in Classic: Admins everywhere have lost no time taking advantage of this great design enhancement, but they quickly ran into limitations, and the desire to do more with tabs! One idea for extending the ...
6 Steps to Salesforce Zen
Does your Salesforce give you a sense of Database Zen? Do you revel in the calm assurance that your Salesforce is well-understood, the data is consistent, and your analytics are driving smart, timely business decisions? If your answer is “no”, Cloudy is here to help. Here are six mantras to boost your Salesforce karma: 1) Clean Up Dirty Data. Dirty data (Duplicates, blank fields, and incorrect values) mean your reports are incorrect and unhelpful. 2) Fix Bad Meta-Data. “Meta-Data” is the setup of your unique Salesforce Database; are you using records and fields in a way that is clean, strategic, and aligned with ...
Cloudy’s Top 10: Resources for Nonprofits using Salesforce – Part 2
Last week Cloudy presented 5 Amazing Resources for Nonprofits using Salesforce. Here are five more don't-miss ideas to support you on your Salesforce journey: 6) User Groups: Salesforce sponsors hundreds of volunteer-led User Groups all over the world. This is community at its best, as fellow-users gather to teach each other and solve problems together. You can find a listing of all the regional Nonprofit User Groups here. If there is not a nonprofit-specific User Group in your region, there may be a "general" Salesforce user group, which would still be a great community resource for you! If there is ...
Cloudy’s Top 10: Resources for Nonprofits using Salesforce – Part 1
Your organization may have started using Salesforce because of the 10 free licenses - and you made a great choice! But what makes Salesforce truly stand out is not just the free stuff, but the amazing community and resources available to nonprofits using the platform. Here are some amazing resources you should not miss: 1) NPSP Documentation: Up-to-date documentation for all parts of the Nonprofit Success Pack. The documentation is clear, concise, and very important to understand, so Cloudy strongly recommends a read-through for all nonprofit admins! 2) NPSP Settings: Find them in your org by clicking the “+” in the Tabs bar ...
