Not to get philosophical, but have you ever wondered why we seem to be working longer hours despite all the technological advancements? We have machines, bots, and robots doing a ton of our work, from dishwashing to bulk email sending, yet our working hours don’t seem to be shorter.
We can reach 100K email subscribers with the push of a button. It would take ages to send 100K emails by hand, so what do we do with the dozens of hours we saved through automation? Well, there’s always something to do, isn’t there?
Whether we spend them scrutinizing our reports, strategizing, or plotting our next campaign to take over the world, we still spend them somehow. Perhaps no other industry feels this so acutely as nonprofits do.
We know this for a fact because we’ve been serving nonprofits for nearly two decades now, and one of our main areas of focus has been making their lives easier and their hours shorter.
Why?
Because nonprofits are notoriously short-staffed, they always need to do more with less. So, integration and automation are essential in this field.
We made it our mission to support nonprofits and NGOs with affordable integration solutions because we know their missions make the world a better place for all of us — as trite as that may sound, it’s true. Whenever governments or legislators can’t or won’t fix social and environmental issues, nonprofits step in.
Curious how SyncApps supports nonprofits? Read more about it here.
We also made it our mission because…well, they need us as much as we need them. Here’s why:
The first reason is pretty straightforward, and we’ve already covered it — short-staffed and overworked, nonprofit staff need all the help they can get. But there’s more:
Everyone has a different preferred payment method, a different cadence to their donations, and a different amount they donate.
This makes tracking who donated, how much, and when very hard. Plus, it would be best if you had a way to segment your donors based on when they donate (everyone’s more generous around the holidays, for instance) and how much they donate.
Thus, you can easily target them with relevant campaigns sent at precisely the right time.
Bank statements and PayPal reports can be very, very hard to track back to actual names without integration. This is why most nonprofits struggle with transparent reporting.
Integration solutions like SyncApps help them keep their financial house in order, avoid hefty fines, and attract new, more prominent donors who value transparency. With SyncApps:
This reason applies across industries. Data integration allows you to make informed decisions and create more precisely targeted campaigns. You don’t have to guess who wants which offer, you know.
In the short-staffed nonprofit world, this means that you no longer need to waste precious time on cold outreach; you can have your team focus on the leads with the highest potential of being turned into donors.
Most of our nonprofit customers use NPSP, Salesforce’s solution for nonprofits, so we’ve made it easy for them to integrate it with their marketing automation platform of their choice, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, or others.
The Packard Foundation, Gary Sinise Foundation, The USA Basketball Foundation, Transcendental Meditation, and other nonprofits use our over 250+ prebuilt automations to manage their constituent marketing and put their marketing on auto-pilot.
Qsource, for instance, uses Salesforce and Mailchimp. You can read their full story here and get inspired by their processes.
The Trevor Project is on a crucial suicide prevention mission. They use the Salesforce NPSP integration on SyncApps to automate their Salesforce Campaigns, Checkboxes to Mailchimp Tags, and Groups for their constituent segmentation management. They also bring back their Mailchimp metrics to Salesforce for reporting purposes.
Nexell, who sets up many worldwide Salesforce nonprofits, uses the Constant Contact to Salesforce integration to say goodbye to data silos and hello to improved productivity and efficiency.
Aside from these three stories, the most prevalent use cases we see are:
Remember what I said above about everyone being more generous during the holiday season? This is a trend that nonprofits need to capitalize on. While occasional donations aren’t usually huge, they add up.
With Constant Contact for Salesforce or Mailchimp for Salesforce, you can easily target those occasional donors right around the time they feel the most generous.
Aiming for more considerable donations? It would be best if you had different campaigns for significant individual or corporate donors. Perhaps you’d like to invite them to your fundraiser or remind them about a campaign of yours that needs extra support.
Target big individual or corporate donors by simply assigning them different labels in Salesforce that will be automatically migrated to your marketing automation platform. No hassle, no human errors.
Speaking of hassles and human errors:
One of the best things about working with large corporate donors is that you can get donations from the corporation and some of the employees who work there. Staff members tend to align their values with their employers, which is a widespread scenario.
These are different target audiences, though, and, unfortunately, very difficult to segment without automation. You can’t rely on the email address alone since some of the employees of your corporate donors only handle donations on behalf of the company and don’t donate individually.
An integration between your two mission-critical systems will fix that issue instantly. You’ll see at a glance who’s who and who donates on behalf of whom.
Instead of syncing the Company name in Constant Contact to the Company name/Account name/Organization name in the Salesforce NPSP, SyncApps will create an Affiliation (Household account) for that record instead.
Got donors who contribute to your cause frequently? Set them up with a monthly plan that comes with no extra hassle for them or you.
You can use your combined insights to remind people to donate or simply ask them to opt into their card being charged regularly.
In nonprofits, you’re bound to focus on donors, who else? They keep the lights on, and they help you help your stakeholders.
However, they are not the only segment that matters. There are a lot of people out there who believe in your mission, they just don’t have the financial power to support it…yet.
But they can support it in other ways:
In other words, they are your brand ambassadors. They raise awareness of the cause you support and of your nonprofit. In doing so, they help you attract more donors. They are the key to unlocking a wider top of the funnel for you.
They are not, however, people you should hound for donations. It would be best if you had a different list segment for them and different campaigns with different asks of support.
Through integration, you can, for instance, identify everyone who clicked on a link or shared an email of yours BUT never donated (cross-reference with Salesforce data to get this info). You can then send them a different campaign that asks them to share your story, cause, or mission instead of asking for donations.
There are literally countless ways to segment your audience and to use integration to spark nonprofit growth. And we’re here to help you uncover as many of them as possible.
Did you know that all the SyncApps plans come with HUMAN support? That’s right — you’ll always have an experienced integration consultant to help you maximize your subscription.
Plus, we have exclusive discounts for nonprofits — told you we believed in you! Reach out to our support department after starting your free trial, and let’s get you set up with a fabulous discount!
