Work with Prospects and Donors
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Create and use an action plan.
- Use interaction summaries to store notes.
- Create an opportunity for a major gift.
Create an Action Plan
Now that Sujan has an idea of who Candace is and why she’s in his portfolio, it’s time to qualify her as a prospective major donor.
At HNMI, like many organizations, there’s a standard process for qualification and many other fundraising tasks. Action plan templates and action plans help you manage these standard processes in Fundraising.
Action plan templates are standardized, predefined lists of tasks and document checklist items. With action plan templates, you can quickly create action plans for a record.
Several action plan templates are in use across departments at HNMI. Sujan’s most concerned with qualification now, so he creates an action plan focused on those tasks from HNMI’s standard action plan template for donor qualification.
Your trial org doesn’t have the same template configured, so see the following screenshot for Sujan’s action plan.
On Candace’s donor profile, this action plan also appears in the Action Plans related list. The Open Activities component shows the tasks in her action plan.
Using his handy action plan, Sujan can stay on top of things, even when juggling multiple donors and prospects.
Store Notes on Prospect and Donor Meetings
Sujan starts his action plan with his first task: Call Candace. Lucky for Sujan, Candace answers the phone and they have a great conversation about her interests in HNMI and its mission. This information is super helpful for Sujan and other fundraisers as they cultivate a relationship with a donor.
It’s best to store notes from meetings and discussions with donors in the Interaction Summary object. An interaction summary is a permanent Salesforce record that fundraisers and other staff use to capture rich, reportable data and information. The summaries include many helpful fields by default, which you can customize to your needs.
Sujan is diligent about using interaction summaries to track his meeting notes, so he creates one to track his discussion with Candace.
If your organization has enabled the Enhanced Interaction Note Interface—a single guided flow to easily capture meeting notes—your experience may be different from these instructions.
- Click New on the Interaction Summaries related list on Candace’s person account record.
- Specify these details.
- Title:
Introductory call with Candace Evans
- Confidentiality: Public
- Status: Published
- Meeting Notes: Details about the call, for example, notes about the donor’s interests in specific programs and how they want to get more involved
- Next Steps:
Set up site visit to cafe
- Interaction: New Interaction and these details:
- Name:
Candace Evans qualification introductory call.
- Account: Candace Evans.
- Start Time: Select a time today.
- End Time: Select a time today.
- Interaction Type: Phone Call.
- Save your work.
- Name:
- Title:
- Save your work.
The interaction summary record opens.
Sujan set this interaction summary to both public and published. At HNMI, this means the note is final and that anyone with access to Candace’s person account can see it. He could set it to Confidential, which limits sharing to only people he selects—an important consideration for notes about anonymous or high-profile donors. He could also set the interaction summary to Draft, meaning that he’s still working on his notes.
Talk with your Salesforce admin about privacy settings for interaction summaries in your org.
Create and Manage an Opportunity
Later on, Sujan invites Candace for a site visit at an HNMI cafe near her home so she can see the nonprofit’s mission at work. The visit goes well and Candace is qualified and engaged, so it’s time to start planning a solicitation for a donation.
In Fundraising, you track potential major gifts and grants using the Opportunity object. Opportunities track deals for any industry and organization type, and come with many helpful features. Learn more in Sales Cloud documentation and Trailhead modules such as Opportunity Record: Step-by-Step.
Sujan creates an opportunity to plan for his donation request.
- Click Opportunities on Candace’s person account.
- Click New on the Opportunities related list.
- Specify these details:
- Opportunity Name:
Candace Evans Major Gift Donation
- Close Date: Three months from today
- Stage: Qualification
- Amount:
10000
- Opportunity Name:
- Save your work.
The opportunity is the place that Sujan can track all of his work on this particular solicitation. Depending on the type of opportunity, opportunities are where you can add meeting notes, letters of interests, proposals, and other important information.
Interaction summaries and other records can be related to both a person account and an opportunity. Track all details about an opportunity from either record.
Close and Process Gifts
Sujan works to build his relationship with Candace and eventually is ready to ask for a significant gift. Sujan is able to secure a gift slightly bigger than he planned!
He works with HNMI’s Fundraising Operations team to set up a gift commitment tied to the opportunity and transactions to track Candace’s payments on her gift. You can learn more about these records and processes in the Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising Operations module.
In this module, you learned the basics of Fundraising’s Philanthropy and Partnerships app and how it fits in the donor lifecycle. You toured a fundraiser’s donor portfolio and a donor profile, then followed along as Sujan cultivated a relationship using Fundraising features.
You can do so much more with Philanthropy and Partnerships, though. Work with your admin to discuss your processes and how you can put the features to work for your organization—and your donors—to drive your mission forward.