Salesforce Fundraising App/Software for Nonprofits/NGOs in Australia

For organisations in Australia that haven’t been properly supported to set up Salesforce for fundraising, or haven’t maintained their Salesforce App or Software instance for a while, there are some common problems that you may experience when fundraising in Salesforce:

Receipting

As Salesforce is not a native fundraising software solution, it only has very rudimentary receipting capabilities. Nonprofits will often use a document generation tool like Conga or SDocs to produce receipts. Unfortunately these commercial solutions don’t always cater well to complex nonprofit needs, like EOFY regular giving receipts or mass producing physical receipts in a single file for printing. It’s absolutely possible to build a document generation process that is low touch and well automated, but it does take some work.

Payment Processing

Like receipting, payment processing is not available with standard Salesforce app or the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and must be built into the solution. The three most common options for payment processing are to install an app for fundraising in Salesforce that enables payment processing such as Payments2Us, to custom build an integration to a payment gateway, or to use an external platform to process donations such as Raisely or Funraisin. Each of these options has pros and cons, and you may end up with a solution that is a mix of the above options.

Regular Giving

As regular giving is a very complex set of processes, it can become a painful administrative spiral of manual processes, compromises on best practice fundraising and inability to report effectively. Because Salesforce is such a powerful and customisable solution, it’s easy to end up with a solution that doesn’t give you what you need, let alone what you want.

Marketing

As Salesforce fundraising software is a technology platform, you can install apps in Salesforce to extend out of the box functionality. You can also integrate with external marketing platforms and of course Salesforce also has a couple of marketing products that integrate well with the platform. But this flexibility can be a liability as well as a strength. It means you need to be able to manage integrations, data quality and list building processes in a way that supports your organisation’s marketing goals and reduces admin overhead. You also need to consider a communication preference management system that allows your supporters to have control over their preferences and also talks to your CRM so all preferences are up to date and applied for every piece of communication.

Fundraising Benefits of Salesforce

If you’re experiencing any of the above issues and you are in Australia, you’ve probably tried to get help from a Salesforce partner, Salesforce support or by searching online for a blog or community post. All of these options are powerful resources and have their place, but often they focus on doing the work for you or present the answer in a way that is tricky to apply. Mentoring is about engaging in a long term process to build the capacity of your team around Salesforce, with the end goal of changing the culture of an organisation to be more focused on innovation and change. During the pandemic, the organisations that thrived were the organisations that were already working digitally, making it easier to work from home, and were already using cloud software, making it easy to collaborate remotely. Salesforce enables organisations to be constantly improving their processes and technology if the culture supports this way of working.