Charmaine Burtak, Slalom Principal

As a consultant, I’ve always been drawn toward a bigger purpose, and am excited when a client is a nonprofit organization (NPO). Nonprofits lead the way towards the things we care about the most deeply. Whether you want to find a cure to an illness, improve the lives of children, fight hunger, make the planet healthier, or save animals, there’s an NPO already leading the way.

Just like private businesses, NPOs need money to do their work. Unlike private businesses, most of their income goes towards helping others. Every NPO has to answer two questions: “How can we best raise money?” and “Where should we allocate it?”

The combined power of Tableau CRM, Salesforce NPSP, Einstein, and Snowflake can answer these questions. This solution can give an NPO the power to leverage data and insights to inform strategy and decision-making.

Using Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), an NPO can start streamlining its data and processes. NPSP can help with the management of constituents, fundraising, marketing, campaigns, communication, and program management. NPSP provides a way for an NPO to structure and organize their data around constituent activities and fundraising activities.

Add Salesforce’s Tableau CRM to the mix and NPOs gain the ability to visualize Key Performance Indicators such as donor retention, attrition, and gains or losses in fundraising income. In addition, Tableau CRM provides the ability to embed Salesforce Actions within the dashboards. This can help streamline relationships and program management.

With Salesforce’s Einstein Discovery, an NPO can create predictive models using Salesforce Data combined with third-party data. These predictions can then be ingested by Einstein’s Next Best Action to help employees determine their next steps.

When the Snowflake Data Cloud is added to the mix, NPO data becomes supercharged with access to a data marketplace. This gives an NPO access to third-party data in seconds, without costly ETL (extract, transform, load) tools and complex integration projects. This data is continuously kept updated. The NPO doesn’t have to do a thing.

Some use cases that can benefit from this combined solution include:

1. Successful Campaign Planning

Covid-19 made the already challenging task of fundraising even more challenging. Snowflake Data Marketplace has live Covid-19 vaccination data on vaccination rates in different geographical areas. An area with a higher vaccination rate can signal a greater likelihood of recovery from Covid-19 impacts. This data can be combined with historical campaign information residing in the NPSP that contains solid success and failure metrics. When fed into Einstein Discovery, this data can provide predictions on what types of campaigns in what locations are most likely to be successful. When a campaign manager creates a campaign, Einstein’s Next Best Action can use outputs from Einstein Discovery to recommend how a campaign should be configured.

2. Increase Constituents with Likelihood to Donate

Salesforce NPSP contains current donor demographic data which can be considered success metrics for the NPO. Snowflake Marketplace has various data sets that contain demographic, wealth, and consumer behavior data. This data can be merged and processed in Einstein Discovery to predict possible new donors who match demographic profiles with current donors and who have consumer behavior that is aligned with the NPO’s cause. Knowing the profiles of these possible constituents, the NPO can take advantage of Tableau CRM’s new Bulk Action functionality to connect with them.

3. Support the Right Programs

NPSPs Program Management enables NPOs to track various metrics regarding programs they support. Say an NPO has the objective of improving students’ reading levels. Metrics such as the number of students that attended per session, or the number of volunteer tutor hours are helpful in quantifying success. However, the true measure of success sometimes cannot be obtained through simple metrics. Our hypothetical NPO can match their service areas with demographic consumer and zip code data from Snowflake’s Data Cloud to analyze historical trends in literacy rates and consumer behavior to further measure the impact of their programs. When NPOS can share the quantity and quality of their impact, the result is increased donor trust and donations.

4. Provide Intelligent Engagement Plans

Relationship managers can log in to Salesforce and see a Tableau CRM dashboard that provides an overview of the quality of the relationships they manage. They need to understand what activities contributed to the success of a relationship to strengthen that relationship. NPSP’s Engagement Plan can track all activities related to a constituent. Using a stable set of success parameters, Einstein Discovery can analyze historical activities — coupled with donor demographics — to predict which specific activities should be assigned to individual constituents in order to increase donations. Einstein Next Best Action can take these recommendations and directly assign them to specific constituent records.

With the right tools, data can give nonprofits the boost they need to fulfill their purpose. Data can help provide a louder voice to those that need to be heard and be helped. For those of us that are fortunate enough to help, data can help us hear.