By now you’ve probably heard of Salesforce.org’s Nonprofit Cloud. In releasing this new Cloud last year, Salesforce elevates and calls out their focus on supporting nonprofits and developing a platform to meet the industry’s needs.

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This is exciting for ECHO. Our team is committed to providing the best fit solutions for each nonprofit we work with, and the introduction of Nonprofit Cloud means more robust solutions from Salesforce are on their way!

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We’ve gotten a lot of questions since the announcement and realize there’s been some confusion around Nonprofit Cloud since another nonprofit tool for Salesforce already exists—Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). Is Nonprofit Cloud the new name for NPSP? If not, what the heck is it?

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We’re glad you asked. If you’re using NPSP, congratulations! You’re already using Nonprofit Cloud. Nonprofit Cloud is an a la carte suite of products and tools, with NPSP at the heart, that addresses three core nonprofit areas: Marketing and Engagement, Fundraising, and Program Management. With Nonprofit Cloud, organizations can increase their impact in each. We all know Salesforce offers a lot of products already, so the question then becomes, what tools are out there, and what’s the right combination for my organization? Each nonprofit will be different, so we walk through each impact area below and just some of the tools available to give you an idea of what’s possible.

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Marketing and Management

Marketing and engagement with your constituents is key to creating a community of supporters. Nonprofit Cloud includes Pardot and Marketing Cloud, both marketing automation tools that allow for targeted emails to constituents, drip campaigns, and list segmentation. Either can be leveraged to motivate fundraisers during your end of year appeal or to spread the word about your organization’s impact with polished, personal messaging and clear ROI. Of course, emails aren’t the only way to engage constituents. Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio gives nonprofits the ability to schedule, create, and monitor social media posts across an organization’s communication channels.

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Fundraising

NPSP provides any nonprofit pre-built components for fundraising and donor management, including ones to manage grants and the grant lifecycle, on top of Salesforce. Not only can NPSP be customized using Salesforce’s flexible platform, but functionality can be extended using partner apps in Salesforce’s AppExchange. Yes, even AppExchange solutions are part of Nonprofit Cloud! Think form-building tools that orgs can use for event registration (like FormAssembly and FormStack), mail merge tools to dynamically send emails and pdf acknowledgements to donors (such as Conga and DocGen), and texting tools to keep donors engaged with the cause (including SMS Magic and Twilio).

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Program Management

No matter what type of services your nonprofit provides, Nonprofit Cloud’s program management solutions are here for you. For nonprofits that want to provide a unique user experience for their supporters, Community Cloud is a powerful solution and one of ECHO’s personal favorites. Communities allow organizations to build custom or templated portals with both original content and data from Salesforce. If you’re a matchmaking organization, Communities can reduce the staff hours to manually pair a volunteer with a family in need, for example, by providing a hub where your constituents can directly connect with each other, effectively removing that staff person as the middleman (or woman). Not only that, Communities can be the channel in which your supporters connect with their peers to ask questions, share best practices or find resources, providing a truly engaging experience.

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With Nonprofit Cloud, Salesforce can become your organization’s command center. And by centralizing applications to a single platform, you can take advantage of native reporting and analytics functionality, including NPSP’s 67 reports and 4 dashboards, to measure your impact.

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This month, Salesforce publicly released its Nonprofit Cloud Consultant Certification for partners, and ECHO is proud to join the first cohort of Certified Nonprofit Cloud Consultants, with three certifications on our team and more to come. Learn more about where Nonprofit Cloud can take your organization.

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