Meet Philanthropy and Partnerships
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the key features of the Philanthropy and Partnership app.
- Describe the important objects for high-touch fundraising.
This module discusses features available in Fundraising, an integrated platform solution included in Nonprofit Cloud and Education Cloud.
This module doesn’t cover fundraising solutions available in managed packages. For information on managed package products for fundraising, visit the Fundraise with Nonprofit Success Pack trail.
If you’re unsure which solution your organization uses, check with your Salesforce admin.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, consider completing the following recommended content.
Nurture Complex Relationships
High-value gifts can be transformative for a nonprofit, but they usually don’t come easily. Large gifts and grants are the product of building complex relationships over time.
If you’re a major gift fundraiser or you work with grantmakers, you know the challenges of this type of fundraising. It can be difficult to get a real-time and unified view of your portfolio of prospects and opportunities. You sometimes must work around complex processes and slog through difficult systems to enter notes.
For fundraising managers, it can be difficult to forecast donations through the long process of cultivating transformative gifts. You need a reliable system to store data about each relationship as you deal with fundraiser turnover.
Fundraising is here to help. The Philanthropy and Partnerships app in Fundraising gives fundraisers the tools to nurture and track complex relationships. It includes unified donor profiles, actionable portfolios, intuitive note-taking flows, and a single system to store data and limit the effects of fundraiser turnover.
How does this work in practice? Consider Hunger No More International (HNMI), a nonprofit dedicated to ending hunger and providing access to nutritious food and resources to communities in need. HNMI adopted Fundraising, and it’s given a significant boost to its major gifts and grants staff.
For example, HNMI Major Gift Officer Sujan Singh has a clear portfolio view that links him to donor profiles where he can track donor’s life events, their interests, and his notes about meetings. Sujan’s manager has the tools to collaborate with her team and track progress, too.
In this module, you learn the basics of the Philanthropy and Partnerships app. Along the way, you follow Sujan as he works with a prospective donor.
Manage the Donor Lifecycle with Philanthropy and Partnerships Features
Major gift officers like Sujan follow a standard process in the donor lifecycle. That process includes five basic steps.
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Identification: Find prospective donors
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Qualification: Assess prospective donors’ capacity, affinity, and propensity to give
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Cultivation: Build a relationship with a prospective donor
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Solicitation: Ask for a donation
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Stewardship: Show your appreciation to the donor and build the relationship for future solicitations
Because Salesforce is a customer relationship management system—or CRM—many of the features you need to manage the donor lifecycle are standard. Salesforce Sales Cloud provides a suite of tools for managing relationships and deals of all types and sizes.
The Philanthropy and Partnerships app adds purpose-built tools for managing the donor lifecycle and fundraising-specific relationships. Use the app to raise more money, retain donors, and lower your fundraising costs.
Those benefits start with the donor portfolio, where you manage all of your assigned prospects throughout the donor lifecycle.
Using Actionable Lists, you can automatically assign prospective donors to fundraisers and manage relationships. Plus, donors can be automatically added to lists based on the rules you and your Salesforce admin set in a tool called Data Processing Engine, which provides your actionable list with a dataset.
Each donor in a portfolio has a donor profile.
The donor profile is a person account page layout used in the Philanthropy and Partnerships app to make information accessible and easy to act on. For example, you can view a timeline of your organization’s relationship with a donor, track wealth and giving history, and add customized alerts so you know which donors to prioritize.
Understand Key Objects for Philanthropy and Partnerships
Learn about the key objects and records.
Person Accounts, Households, and Relationship Objects
Individuals are tracked in Fundraising using the Person Account object, which combines elements of the Account and Contact objects. Learn how to track information about individuals, households, and their relationships in the Stakeholder Management in Nonprofit Cloud module.
Contact Profile
Use the Contact Profile object to track details about a prospective donor, such as their income, assets, and gifts to other nonprofits. A contact profile is related to a person account, which uses the Related Record Detail Display component to display details from contact profiles on donor profiles.
Donor Gift Summary
The Donor Gift Summary object stores rollup fields about a donor’s giving. Your admin can use the template provided to automatically calculate fields for a donor’s total gift amount, highest gift amount, and more. A donor gift summary is related to a person account, which—like contact profiles—uses the Related Record Detail Display component to show details on donor profiles.
Interaction Summary
Use the Interaction Summary object to keep detailed notes of donor meetings and discussions. Each interaction summary stores and relates notes to a prospective donor’s person account to get a complete view of your work using secure, permanent records.
Action Plan and Action Plan Template
Use the Action Plan object to manage tasks for each step of your relationship with a donor. Use the Action Plan Template to standardize action plans and start from a common set of tasks and document checklist items. Create action plan templates for different needs, such as assessing a donor’s ability to give during the qualification stage.
Opportunity
Use the Opportunity object to track a potential major gift or grant. As you prepare for a solicitation, track your work in an opportunity record, and then close it as won or lost after you ask the donor for a gift.
At HNMI, Sujan isn’t ready to create an opportunity yet, though. In the next unit, you follow Sujan as he starts at the beginning of the donor lifecycle to identify and qualify a prospective donor.