How Salesforce Improves Fundraising for Public Broadcasters

At a time when government funding seems to continually rest on a knife’s edge, public media stations need to raise money effectively to continue their mission. But social media and modern mobile lifestyles mean today’s broadcasters need a 360-degree view of constituents to be successful in their fundraising efforts. Thankfully, a solution like Salesforce has the tools you need to develop successful fundraising strategies. From tracking donor activities to optimizing communications channels, here’s how Salesforce can improve development efforts for public media stations.

Donor management

To effectively manage your donor database, you need robust segmentation capabilities and comprehensive visibility into constituent activity. Salesforce allows your team to track and analyze key information about a donor’s giving history and develop donor profiles to guide your communication strategies.

With reports from Salesforce, fundraisers can analyze data based on donation type, donation frequency, reporting requirements (governance, audit and oversight) and events attended. You can also track the kinds of outreach efforts that donors responded to positively. This can help you optimize your channel strategy so you reach constituents in the most effective manner possible. Overall, increased visibility into donor activity allows you to personalize outbound communications and ultimately develop more successful fundraising strategies.

Staying connected

Fundraising results are contingent upon the ability to manage relationships with donors and deploy a sound communications strategy. In today’s world, people expect personalized messages, and the right solution can help make personalization easy and efficient. With Pardot, Salesforce’s marketing automation system, you can streamline your outbound communications and automate messaging personalized for your audience segments. You can also schedule individual, personalized outreach efforts to encourage donations and remind people about the impact of their gifts. This not only helps strengthen your donor relationships, but automation improves efficiency for your team and allows you to expand your reach.

Scores and grades

To be successful in fundraising, you can’t waste time and resources on donors who are unlikely to give again. Focus your efforts on your best targets and make the most of engagement opportunities. An easy way to separate top prospects from less likely donors is to use automated scoring and grading models built into Salesforce and Pardot. These tools help you qualify every donor or prospect in your database in terms of how interested they are in your organization. You can assign numeric scores based on whether an individual reads your content, opens your emails, completes a form and more. You can then target those more highly engaged individuals and increase your chances of fundraising success.

While successful fundraising is often a direct reflection of the time and effort put into it, the right tools can make things a lot easier. By using Salesforce to optimize your data analysis and develop strategies that connect with donors on a personal level, public broadcasters can build relationships and secure the funding they need to pursue strategic goals.

To learn more about how Salesforce can boost fundraising efforts for your public media station, download our e-book: Transforming Audience Engagement in Public Media.