Create and Combine Levels with Engagement Plans

Learning Objectives

• Define what levels are within Nonprofit Success Pack.
  
• Create levels for contacts.
  
• Combine levels and engagement plans.
  

Rank and Group Contacts with Levels

Using levels in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), you can create and assign different ranks to contacts, organize contacts into groups based on those ranks, and then automatically move and regroup contacts if the criteria you set changes.

For example, NMH’s Director of Development Aniyah has been working hard creating tasks to target and nurture prospective donors as part of her engagement plan. She’s also focused on managing NMH’s current donors. She uses levels to assign and automatically re-assign donors to groups based on their total giving history. 

Donors at NMH are grouped into three distinct categories:

• Bronze for those who give $1-100
  
• Silver for those who give $101-199
  
• Gold for those who give $200 or more
  

Donors are automatically assigned a level based on their first donation, but will move when they make additional donations that exceed their current level. If someone in the Bronze group originally gave $75 and then later makes a donation of $100, their total donation of $175 bumps them into the Silver group. 

NMH's Communications Specialist Michael thinks of another way he can use levels: He can create levels for volunteer advocates based on how many events they've hosted. Then, he can create specific support resources based on the unique needs of volunteers at each level.

Level Setting

NMH’s admin agrees that levels are a great way to organize volunteer advocates to better understand their success. Because a level in NPSP must be based on a numeric value, Michael needs to decide on a data point that shows how well a volunteer is doing. The total number of events hosted works perfectly. 

Michael creates names and ranges for the total number of events over time: 

• Awesome Advocate: 0-3 total events
  
• Amazing Advocate: 4-6
  
• Ace Advocate: 7-9
  
• A1 Advocate: 10+
  

While Michael was busy figuring out the ranges for the levels, NMH’s admin customized the contact object. Now, if a person is a volunteer community advocate, their contact record includes fields for Advocate Level, Total Advocate Events, and Previous Advocate Level. 

NMH’s admin also added the Advocate Level field to the highlights area, so it’s ‌ easy for Michael and the whole team to quickly see a contact’s advocate level.

Your admin can add your own level fields to your page layout in a way that works for your team.  See Configure Levels in Salesforce Help for details.

Add Engagement Plans and Level Up

Levels can help the NMH staff understand and report on volunteer advocacy work and donor support, but Michael's goal isn’t to only classify people. Michael wants to use levels to offer custom support and resources based on each group’s unique needs. 

People at the Amazing Advocate level, for example, have hosted at least four events, but relatively small ones. Michael wants to acknowledge the hard work they’ve done so far but also inspire and motivate them to grow their reach. He’d like to send everyone at this level NMH’s tips for hosting a community event and an infographic visualizing the latest data on homelessness in the community. As a thank-you, Michael also wants to mail them each a hand-written card and an NMH tote bag.

Three tasks, all identical for each volunteer advocate. This is the perfect use case for engagement plans. NMH creates one called Ace Advocate Avenue, because it’s meant to inspire Amazing Advocates to become Ace Advocates. NMH also creates more engagement plan templates for moving advocates between other levels, too.

As you get started at your own organization, remember that levels are calculated in a nightly batch, not right away. If there’s an update to someone’s record and they’re ready to move to the next level, that change won’t be reflected in NPSP until the following day. Admins can manually recalculate levels if your team needs to see the change immediately. 

Looking at Levels

Combining levels and engagement plans to build the various plans for advancing advocates has been great for NMH. Everyone on staff likes the consistency and efficiency of automatic task assignment. Volunteers are happy about the rewards and steady communication.

Michael is also honing his Salesforce prowess and has discovered two tricks that make managing levels and engagement plans even easier.

List views

When he first joined the NMH team, Michael learned how to create list views, which organize records into lists based on chosen criteria. Now he’s using them to sort advocates based on their level. With a view for each advocate level in contacts, he can see everyone at a certain level all listed together on the same page. 

Reports

From the Reports tab, Michael found the standard NPSP report called Engagement Plan Tasks. In the report, he can see all open tasks, who they’re assigned to, and the status of each one.

With these tools in hand, Michael feels like he’s taken his volunteer supporter engagement strategy to a whole new level. And if you follow his lead, you can level up, too. 

Now that you understand levels, you can learn about the next helpful tool: engagement scores.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Create and Manage Levels
• Trailhead: Identify Target Prospects
• Salesforce Help: NPSP Reports Workbook
• Trailhead: Create and Customize List Views