Maximizing Nonprofit Efficiency With AI and Salesforce

Nonprofit organizations often face a unique set of challenges when it comes to managing their operations. With tight budgets, varied funding sources and numerous programs to oversee, coordinating data and workflows can quickly become overwhelming.

The two biggest challenges non-profits face are managing workload and raising sufficient funds, according to 2023 Nonprofit Trends Report by Salesforce.

To add to the complexity, many nonprofits struggle with insufficient technology and fragmented systems, often having different tools for volunteer management, donor tracking, outreach campaigns, grantmaking and more, making it difficult to work efficiently and effectively.

Having a centralized platform like Salesforce for Nonprofits, which leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to integrate business operations and data, can help nonprofits concentrate on their mission instead of grappling with technology challenges and inefficiencies.

A CRM system is typically used by businesses to organize and manage their interactions with current and potential customers by compiling customer data across different channels and points of contact. Salesforce goes beyond the standard CRM system with AI fueling capabilities and features such as:

Agentforce is Saleforce’s application that organizations can use to build an AI agent to handle repetitive time-consuming tasks, along with more complicated multi-step jobs. Salesforce helps eliminate barriers to AI by providing pre-built skills and workflow integrations.

These templates can help nonprofits deliver always-on customer support, create end-to-end marketing campaigns, help with fundraising outreach, answer business questions from staff members and more. You can personalize Agentforce using a low-code builder to create agents for any role. Specify the role you want your custom agent to perform, choose from pre-built topics with common prompts and use cases, or create your own topic using everyday language to detail how you want the agent to carry out a task.

Maintaining relationships with donors and grant issuers is vital for nonprofit success. Salesforce enables organizations to track donations, manage fundraising campaigns and organize grant applications, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Agentforce can help with grant writing, identify donors most-likely to engage and help provide personalized donor outreach.

Nonprofits can use Salesforce to manage volunteers, optimize program management and improve engagement. Agentforce can help by updating volunteer shifts, track missing applicant information, answer questions, draft impact reports, summarize case notes, match resources with recipients, troubleshoot issues and more.

Salesforce's robust reporting tools enable nonprofits to meet stringent grant reporting requirements with ease. Users can create detailed reports and dashboards to monitor funding sources, program performance and donor engagement metrics. Agentforce makes it easy to analyze information by providing data visualizations and suggest data-drive actions to take.

With marketing software designed just for nonprofits, Salesforce enables users to target messaging, design and deliver personalized journeys, and make branding consistent across all channels. Agentforce can help draft personalized outreach emails, generate campaign briefs, build audience segments and more. It will also analyze performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) and proactively recommend improvements.

Salesforce offers customizable access controls, ensuring sensitive data is secure  while allowing appropriate team members to access relevant information. This safeguarding also applies to Agentforce, which uses data masking and zero data retention to protect data. Additionally, users can score every prompt and out for “toxicity” to ensure no inappropriate or harmful content is being shared. You can also define limits of what an agent can or cannot do before escalating to a human.

Due to fluctuating funds and resources, nonprofits often piece together a variety of tools to handle their diverse data management needs. Over time, however, these disconnected systems can lead to unnecessary costs, inefficiencies and security risks.

Salesforce can help alleviate these issues by consolidating individual systems into one unified platform, enabling nonprofits to enhance workflows, simplify reporting and improve decision-making. For example:

• Eliminating silos: Salesforce integrates multiple systems, making it straightforward to access and act upon data from various organizational activities.
• Streamlined reporting: With stringent grant and funding requirements, nonprofits often struggle with compliance reporting. Salesforce enables automated reporting by housing all relevant data in a single system.
• Enhanced security: Fragmented systems can create data security vulnerabilities. Salesforce allows nonprofits to configure access permissions, ensuring sensitive data is protected while still being accessible to authorized personnel.

Salesforce is passionate about supporting humanitarian causes, and to show this support, offers eligible nonprofits 10 free licenses to use at their organization through the Power of Us Program.

If your nonprofit is ready to harness the power of AI and Salesforce but lacks the dedicated IT personnel to confidently implement Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud, consider consulting with an expert integrator, such as CDW, to tailor the environment to your unique needs.

Partnering with professionals to design and set up the system can help prevent incomplete or inefficient configurations and ensure you maximize ROI, increase adoption and are ready for long-term success.