Move Donors from Cultivation to Solicitation
Learning Objectives:
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify the benefits and use cases for Path in advancement.
- Navigate potential gift opportunities with Kanban.
- Simplify the donation process with Giving Pages.
This module provides information about the managed package version of Education Cloud. As of March 2023, new or migrated customers use Education Cloud integrated platform solutions instead of managed packages. For information about the integrated platform solution, go to our Education Cloud Documentation.
In earlier modules we explored how Salesforce for Education supports your team as you build and manage alumni relationships and report against advancement goals. In this module we take a closer look at Path, Kanban and Giving Pages, tools you can use to further cultivate those constituent relationships and motivate alumni to become donors.
Track Donor Movement with Path
With Path, you can create a moves management plan to turn prospects into donors. It’s designed to take the stress and confusion out of tracking where each of your donors is in the gift opportunity process at any given time, and what steps to take next. On supported objects, your Salesforce admin can create a different path for each record type. Think of all the different and unique paths you can create to guide your team as they work!
Key Fields & Guidance are available at each step of a prospective gift’s path to ensure data entry is consistent and actions taken are properly aligned.
- Key Fields helps your team identify what key information they need to gather at any given step in the process.
- Guidance then supports your team members by suggesting the questions and strategies that are most likely to lead to success and movement to the next stage.
And perhaps the most fun detail of all—there’s confetti! Motivate, celebrate, and enjoy a mindful moment of fun for you and your team members with on-screen confetti when a path is successfully completed with a win.
Keep Tabs on the Big Picture with Kanban View
While Path helps you hone in on one particular donor’s gift and understand their journey from a single donor perspective, Kanban zooms out and provides you with a bird’s eye view of your overall donor opportunities by stage. Kanban is like a digital version of a bulletin board with all of your opportunities displayed on their own notecards. With Kanban view in Salesforce, there’s no need for thumbtacks, no lost index cards or illegible handwriting, and moving an opportunity from one stage to the next is as easy as a drag and drop.
In addition to saving you a trip to the office supply store, Kanban also gives you the power to filter and view your gift opportunities with a click of a button. Try that with your bulletin board and things are bound to get messy. Want to only view donors assigned to you? Done. Are you a manager and need to see how a specific team member’s donors are progressing? You got it. Presenting to the team and interested in focusing on just the opportunities in a particular stage? Kanban makes searching and filtering your data easy to do, see, and share. Take a look at Rachel Noble’s Kanban below as she filters it to focus on her assigned donors.
As a major gift officer at Cloudy College, Rachel may need to view her team’s donor data in different ways to meet her current goal. Today, she wants to view the donors specifically assigned to her so she can strategize her efforts. Having the visual of exactly how many donors are in each stage helps her decide what her most critical outreach is right now, and what actions she might start queuing up for the near future. At the same time Rachel is drilling down to her individual donor list, Virginia Cook, the VP of Advancement, is using Kanban to see the progress of Cloudy’s entire team of major gift officers. And while both Rachel and Virginia can simultaneously use Kanban to suit their own needs without impacting each other, when Rachel moves a gift to the next stage, her progress is reflected on Virginia’s Kanban view right away.
Follow these steps if you'd like to switch up your Kanban view.
- In Kanban, click the Settings icon and select Kanban Settings.
- Select a numeric or currency field to summarize, or select None to remove the summary from the Kanban view.
- To determine how your records are organized into columns, select a picklist like Stage, or group records by owner.
- Click Save.
The visualization of data and progress is what makes Kanban such a game-changer. Extra credit: To see a visual summary of your donor opportunities in Salesforce, check out the chart feature in Kanban.
Make it Easy to Donate with Giving Pages
You’ve cultivated your prospective donor leads and tracked progress with Path and Kanban. Now, your hard work has paid off and a prospect is ready to donate! They just need to know how to give. Giving Pages provides an easy way for donors to give to your institution.
Giving Pages, part of a suite of donor management tools called Salesforce Elevate, is a one-time or recurring donation solution that simplifies the creation of donation forms for your online presence while conforming to your branding and configuration requirements. Giving Pages automatically enter donation data into Salesforce and will eventually integrate with Google Analytics for powerful reporting.
With Giving Pages you can:
- Launch advancement campaigns in just a few clicks, with branded pages and out-of-the-box forms.
- Create beautiful, mobile giving experiences for alumni and constituents in no time.
- Give your constituents the ability to give, anywhere, anytime, with built-in protection.
Cloudy College saw great success when they set up a Giving Page for their annual day of giving campaign.
You’ve established your strategic initiatives and put some great processes in place. Way to go! In the next unit we’ll dive into managing your donor portfolio.
