Marketing Cloud for nonprofits: What it can do for you

With thousands of email addresses and a variety of donor segments in your database, manually creating, personalizing, and sending communications for your nonprofit just isn’t feasible. Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a solution for nonprofits that integrates into your Salesforce instance and comes with other exciting features you can leverage to streamline virtual donor communications.

To give you an overview of how Marketing Cloud can improve your nonprofit organization’s donor engagement capabilities, we’ll cover these basics:

• What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
• Key features: What Marketing Cloud can do for nonprofits
• How to make the most of Salesforce Marketing Cloud for nonprofits
• Wrapping up: Getting started with Marketing Cloud for nonprofits

If you’re looking for ways to streamline internal processes and improve your nonprofit’s outreach with data, Marketing Cloud could be just what you need. Let’s jump into this exciting marketing solution by starting with the basics.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud Engagement, commonly known as Marketing Cloud, is a marketing automation tool that integrates with other Salesforce clouds to streamline outreach. For nonprofits, Marketing Cloud integrates with both Nonprofit Cloud and the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP).

The cloud’s features help nonprofits simplify donor outreach by automatically pulling donor data from their databases into their communications, reducing the need for manual list creation and email personalization. By using Marketing Cloud for nonprofits, you’ll gain access to these basic features:

• Email templates customized with your logo and brand colors.
• Access to first-in-class marketing tools within your Salesforce instance.
• Fully-integrated marketing platform that allows you to build and segment lists based on your Salesforce data.
• Ability to grow and add more Marketing Cloud features when your nonprofit is ready.

With these features, Marketing Cloud allows nonprofits to produce tailored messages without sacrificing valuable staff time. If your nonprofit is already using Nonprofit Cloud or NPSP and has at least 10,000 emails in your database, Marketing Cloud can be an impactful addition to your toolkit.

Key features: What Marketing Cloud can do for nonprofits

The main benefit of Marketing Cloud for nonprofits is automation. By integrating with your existing Salesforce instance and automating entire email campaigns for select donor segments, Marketing Cloud covers your nonprofit’s baseline stewardship needs for you. That way, your staff can focus on the more hands-on aspects of building relationships with donors.

Exactly how does it automate marketing processes? We’ll get into more detail about each of the key features below.

Simple setup process

Right from the setup screen, Marketing Cloud begins simplifying work for your nonprofit’s staff. Not only does Marketing Cloud’s Setup Assistant walk you through the high-level setup steps, but it includes plenty of additional training resources, such as:

• Links to Help articles.
• Access to Salesforce’s training hub, Trailhead.
• Trailhead skill-building course recommendations.
• Videos to help staff unfamiliar with Marketing Cloud.
• Search bar to quickly find helpful Trailblazer Community resources.

This feature allows you to spend less time on setup and more on transformational areas like data extension and list configuration. Nonprofits with tech-savvy administrators and marketers may be able to quickly set up Marketing Cloud themselves. Don’t have a tech-savvy staff? Our team at Redpath Consulting Group is always here to help!

Journey Builder

Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder tool allows you to go beyond simple automations like sending donor acknowledgments after a donation is entered in Salesforce. With Journey Builder, you can automatically send a series of emails to guide your contacts toward a specific goal, such as contributing to a year-end campaign.

With branching logic, communications are automatically tailored to your audience’s behavior. For instance, Marketing Cloud for nonprofits will guide donors down different pathways depending on whether or not they clicked on the last email they received. Trailhead provides an example of what this branching logic looks like for a new donor welcome journey:

While Journey Builder’s drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to use, planning out a thoughtful and impactful journey can be a roadblock for nonprofits of all sizes. In case you need help tailoring your journeys for donor stewardship, Marketing Cloud includes these pre-made journey templates to get you started:

• Welcome Series
• Anniversary and Birthday Sends
• Event Follow-Up
• Re-Engagement

These templates can help you establish some baseline journeys and spark ideas for creating your own journeys to meet your nonprofit’s specific needs.

Salesforce email templates

Along with giving you the ability to design your own email journeys, Marketing Cloud lets you create your own email templates that can be used for stand-alone sends or incorporated into your journeys. To use Marketing Cloud effectively for nonprofits, you might create templates for:

• Thank-you emails with different calls to action, such as subscribing to your newsletter or asking for another donation.
• Reminder emails for making a donation or completing another call to action.
• Welcome emails for first-time donors, new recurring donors, and newsletter subscribers.

By creating a collection of basic templates that meet your nonprofit’s communication needs, you’ll set yourself up for quick and easy email personalization for different donor segments and individual supporters.

Assistance with first data extensions

The data extensions feature is essentially a relational database in Marketing Cloud that constantly syncs with your nonprofit’s Salesforce data to ensure constituents are getting the right messages. With data extensions, list segmentation can be taken to a new level of personalization.

Many marketers are used to thinking of simple lists as the way to group their constituents for communication, so it can be challenging to get used to the idea of Marketing Cloud’s data extensions. To help you ease into this new segmentation system, Marketing Cloud includes plenty of helpful guidance for nonprofits on setting up their first data extensions.

How to make the most of Salesforce Marketing Cloud for nonprofits

Your nonprofit’s marketing efforts shouldn’t stop with setting up a few email journeys and data extensions in Marketing Cloud. To see results, you need to develop data-informed, multi-channel strategies that respond to your donors’ changing preferences.

The platform’s templates, features, and training resources can help your team get off the ground, but it takes work to use Marketing Cloud for nonprofits effectively and strategically to reach your goals. That’s why many organizations choose to partner with a Salesforce consultant to ensure they’re making the most of the platform’s capabilities.

Redpath’s team of Salesforce experts can help implement Marketing Cloud for nonprofits, develop or improve your marketing automation strategy, provide training for your team, and support you every step of the way. Salesforce solutions are ever-changing and improving features, and we know how your nonprofit can put them to good use.

Wrapping up: Getting started with Marketing Cloud for nonprofits

The automation tools and ability to create nonprofit-specific templates that Marketing Cloud offers can improve your organization’s outreach while saving your staff time and energy.

If you’re ready to take your Salesforce usage to the next level with marketing automation, consult your budget and team to see if Marketing Cloud is right for your nonprofit. Don’t be afraid to reach out to a Salesforce consultant for more information about how the platform can align with your nonprofit’s needs and goals.

To learn more about using Marketing Cloud for nonprofits and all things Salesforce, check out these additional resources:

• Salesforce is updating its Nonprofit Cloud: What does this mean? Read about the changes Salesforce is making to its nonprofit offerings and what they mean for your nonprofit.
• Your nonprofit needs marketing automation. Here’s why. Learn more about the major ways nonprofits can benefit from marketing automation tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Raiser’s Edge vs Salesforce: 7 Reasons Nonprofits Switch. On the fence about switching to Salesforce? Explore the reasons thousands of nonprofits choose Salesforce over Raiser’s Edge.