Moves Management and NPSP: Cultivation with Salesforce

By: Jacqueline Fassett, Marketing Automation Specialist, Idealist Consulting

Moves management, the process by which a prospective donor is moved from cultivation to solicitation, has become an increasingly popular topic for nonprofits. Especially for nonprofits who are new to Salesforce. In late 2016, Salesforce introduced Engagement Plans and Levels, which improved the moves management strategy features available to nonprofits on Salesforce. This gave the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), part of the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, a huge competitive advantage over similar nonprofit CRM options.

Here’s how you can configure NPSP to help your organization with moves management. This customization is geared towards the cultivation step of moves management strategy.

Need a refresher on all the moves management steps? Check out this image and blog post on the moves management steps.

Creating a survey with topics your contacts care about can help you segment your database, so you can send topic-specific drip campaigns on what they care about.

Give your constituents content they care about

In the cultivation step, you’re building a relationship with select constituents. This might be through sending them personal invitations to your events, having your board members call them, or sending regular communications like newsletters.

As you get to know your constituents, you’ll want to tailor your invitations and communication efforts based on their interests, collecting data on their interests and preferences as you go. If this sounds like a marketing concept, that’s because it is. If you’ve ever looked into marketing automation tools, like Pardot, you’ve noticed they provide tools to help you gather data on your audience and then group your audience based on that data. This is what I’m going to show you how to do with Nonprofit Cloud on a smaller scale.

Let’s walk through how you can achieve this in NPSP.

The NPSP Cultivation Hack

This hack is done with a survey, visual workflow, and a text field. Essentially, you’ll be getting to know the interests of your constituents, segmenting them into campaigns in Salesforce, and then sending this group emails or other communication options specific to their interests.

1. Create a list of interests based on your mission.

You don’t want this list to be too long: use 5 or 6 different options. This could be programs your organization offers or general topics that relate to your cause. For example, an animal shelter may want to list dogs, cats, birds, and farm animals.

Note that if you do not store this info in a field in Salesforce currently, you will need to add this field and data before you can proceed with the rest of these steps.

2. Create a campaign for each of these interests.

Here is where you’ll store all your constituents that have this interest. Make sure the names are topic-specific. For example, the animal shelter may want to name their campaigns “Cat Lovers” to group all of the supporters of their cat program. You can use these campaign lists to send emails or direct mail pieces that relate to this interest or topic.

3. Create a text field.

The text field is where you can list, in a simple format, your constituents interests. If there are multiple options they should be separated by a comma or semicolon.

4. Create a visual workflow to send your constituents to the different campaigns.

Have the visual workflow check the text field and then that automatically add contacts to the topic campaigns based on the text field entries.

5. Send a survey asking their interests.

Choose a form tool like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or a paid tool you might already use like FormAssembly. You can send this survey to all new constituents, newly engaged constituents, and/or all past donors to improve the data you have on them. By keeping your survey short and simple and providing a picklist of topic, you can encourage them to spend the small amount of time it takes to fill it out.

6. Create content and drip programs around the topic.

You’re all set up in NPSP! Now begin creating content to keep your constituents up to date on their different interests. For example, if the animal shelter learned through the survey some of their constituents prefer cats over dogs, they can use cat images or a feel-good story of a rescued cat in their emails.

Make this easy on yourself by using email templates and a regular cadence with your emails. The more you can keep consistent, the easier it will be for you and your team to manage and track.

A Trail Guide at Dreamforce helps people find their way

Our Dreamforce presentation on marketing automation for moves management

Want to learn more tips like this? Our 2017 Dreamforce session was focused on how you can leverage your data to take this concept even further using marketing automation. Watch the recorded session.

Make NPSP work for you

We’ve put together a plan for using NPSP and third party apps to create a moves management strategy. Download Idealist’s Moves Management for Salesforce resource bundle to see how you can turn your Salesforce NPSP instance in a moves management machine.

Want to incorporate recurring giving strategy in your moves management planning? Download the Nonprofit Recurring Giving Benchmark Study which shares insights from real recurring donations to 115 organizations that sent 4,117 emails, 534 direct mail letters and 83 phone calls.

About the Author
A certified Pardot Consultant, Jacqueline Fassett joined Idealist Consulting in 2016 with proven experience helping nonprofits and small businesses with marketing campaigns. She’s a bit obsessed with helping nonprofits use Pardot. In her free time, she loves to volunteer and explore Oregon with her friends. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter: @jdfassett