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One reason Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM is because it’s so easy to customize. Every industry, from nonprofits to small businesses to enterprise-level organizations, can use this powerful system to organize their supporters, clients, leads, and any other important information.
However, because the Salesforce platform is so customizable, organizations that use it must put in some extra work and strategy on the front-end to build out the system with the apps and integrations they’ll need to reach their unique goals. For nonprofits, the primary Salesforce apps and integrations that will enhance the platform’s functionality include those that support your fundraising strategies.
With these tools and customizations in place, your nonprofit’s Salesforce instance can unlock incredible new levels of growth. You’ll start by building out your platform with the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), an overlay that gives you the core data management tools and Salesforce Cloud functionality you’ll need to get up and running. From there, apps and integrations let you tailor the system to support your goals and business processes.
For nonprofits using Salesforce as their fundraising CRM, there are several front-end solutions to choose from. Here are some of the top apps and integrations that will actively support and contribute to your priorities.
Top Salesforce Donation Apps
- Springboard by Jackson River
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- DonorSearch
- Brickwork by iATS Payments
- 360MatchPro
- Fonteva
- OneCause
- Soapbox Engage
- Classy
- Mogli SMS
- Salsa Engage
- Hootsuite
- WealthEngine
- GetFeedback
- Cvent
Let’s learn more about how each of these top solutions can power your nonprofit’s strategy and enhance your offerings.
Springboard by Jackson River
App Overview
Springboard by Jackson River is a digital-first fundraising, advocacy, events, and peer-to-peer platform, designed specifically for the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. This Salesforce donation app leverages the information already available in your CRM for more effective fundraising and engagement campaigns among your supporters.
With this solution, you can design intuitive branded donation forms, encourage sustainer donations, and provide flexible payment options. You can also gain new insights about a variety of designs, features, and solutions through A/B testing that can help you continually refine your strategies and appeals going forward.
For example, through campaign testing on Springboard, The ASPCA found that adding a recent donor list to their donation forms resulted in a 10% increase in the average donation amount they received, even if conversions decreased slightly.
Springboard by Jackson River is designed for nonprofits to continuously grow and enhance their services and digital engagement opportunities through comprehensive data and analytics.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
Springboard not only provides all of the tools and services that nonprofits need to get started with their digital engagement initiatives, but it also provides a personalized experience for supporters.
Your organization can create specific and dynamic ask strings to personalize outreach to each of your supporters based on the data available in your CRM solution. For example, the system might recognize a donor’s last donation amount and auto-fill a request for one that is the same amount or slightly higher for your next appeal.
Plus, the donor self-service platform allows donors to manage their own preferences and settings, which is particularly useful when they sign up for recurring gifts, becoming sustainers for your fundraising strategy.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
App Overview
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a relationship-building software solution for the Salesforce platform. It has native integration with Salesforce so that you can leverage the existing information in your CRM for a data-driven marketing strategy, while storing new information in your database as you continue your outreach strategy.
Design email drip campaigns to send consistent messages to potential donors, driving them to convert and become lifelong supporters. This can be achieved by designing specific journeys for supporters and segments within your marketing solution.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers features such as a journey builder, email studio, segmentation, and personalization options so that you can reach the right people at the right times. Plus, the centralization of this system in your CRM solution makes it easy to compile reports and gain new insights that will help you continue to drive your strategy forward.
Why We Love this Salesforce App
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud works seamlessly not only with your CRM, but also with our top recommended donation app, Springboard. The Wildlife Conservation Society found that when these tools all work together, they were “able to offer personalized donor and activist journeys; access insightful, centralized data and reporting; and achieve a comprehensive view of each supporter.”
When all of your tools work together, you can use the insights and information from every organization initiative to inform your overall strategy and improve on a larger scale. The image below shows how the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Springboard, and the Salesforce NPSP can all work together to enhance your strategy.
DonorSearch
App Overview
DonorSearch is a prospect research database and app that supplements the information saved in your Salesforce CRM platform. This comprehensive platform uses the DonorSearch database to communicate information about your supporters’ philanthropic and wealth indicators of giving directly in your CRM.
Some of the indicators identified through DonorSearch’s prospect research tool include previous donations to similar organizations, real estate ownership, board membership, SEC transactions, business affiliations, and more. For example, according to DonorSearch, “Individuals who own real estate valued at $2+ million are 17 times more likely to give philanthropically than the average person.”
You can use this information to learn more about your supporters’ affinity to give to your organization and their capacity for giving, which can be invaluable for helping your development team better target their strategies. You can better craft specific fundraising asks that feature the perfect donation amount that supporters could give and mention specific philanthropic interests pulled from their prospect research information.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
Studies show that an average of 88% of nonprofit funding comes from just 12% of donors. DonorSearch’s Salesforce app helps organizations identify new major donors and craft concrete and specific fundraising asks using the new data. This helps bolster the most impactful aspect of your nonprofit’s fundraising strategy.
Brickwork by iATS Payments
App Overview
Brickwork by iATS is a Salesforce back-office processing app that specializes in facilitating nonprofit donations and other transactions. This native Salesforce app streamlines payment processing, integrating with NPSP and other Salesforce tools.
This PCI-compliant payment processor supports one-time payments, recurring donations, and batch processing for all major credit cards and ACH direct debit payments.
These options make it easy to create more opportunities for secure sustainer donations, creating additional stability in your nonprofit’s fundraising efforts. It also ensures that you can handle all payment information directly from the centralized location of your Salesforce platform.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
Brickwork by iATS integrates with a variety of front-end payment forms, from donation pages to merchandise stores. The iATS team is also dedicated to providing technical support to all clients and can easily be reached at any time.
360MatchPro
App Overview
360MatchPro is a matching gift Salesforce app powered by Double the Donation. This Salesforce donation app helps nonprofits identify potential corporate matching gift opportunities through a user self-service database and automatic analysis of email domains.
Once a potential match is identified through the system, you can configure your system to automatically send out an email to the donor, encouraging them to take the next step to secure the donation match from their employer.
With 360MatchPro, your organization can identify and capture the matching donation information from your donors’ employers that would have otherwise likely been left on the table.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
Matching gifts are more common than many donors (and nonprofits) are aware. Double the Donation estimates that over 18 million individuals work for companies with matching gift programs, and 65% of Fortune 500 companies offer a match program. Plus, one in three donors indicate that they’d give larger gifts if they know a match will be applied.
360MatchPro automates every step of the matching gift process, from the identification of new opportunities to the follow-up with eligible donors. Boosting this strategy enables your organization to maximize fundraising potential without asking donors to give additional gifts.
Fonteva
App Overview
Fonteva Events offers a comprehensive event platform built for Salesforce, enabling nonprofits to engage their supporters in a multitude of ways. The Fonteva event platform supports both hybrid and virtual event options, allowing nonprofits to get organized with an agenda builder, microsite, conference tools, and attendee management analysis.
Built for associations, you can host various event types, including conferences, trade shows, and fundraising events through Fonteva’s platform.
To make the most out of Fonteva Events, take advantage of their extensive training opportunities and educated support teams. These important resources can help you increase the ROI for your organization’s event.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
Fonteva Events is 100% native to Salesforce, making it easy to automate the flow of data from your event dashboards and registration solutions to your Salesforce CRM. With this information, you can pull comprehensive reports and gain new insights into your event data that will help you build out your next event and continuously improve.
OneCause
App Overview
OneCause, the creator of Bidpal, offers a Salesforce donation app specifically designed for nonprofit auction events. This comprehensive solution provides all the tools necessary for nonprofits to design in-person, hybrid, or virtual events of any kind, but particularly for auctions.
This software helps keep organizations organized as they work on the item procurement process, manage tables, organize bidding for different items, appeal for donations, and set up raffles. These many opportunities provide plenty of engagement options and syncs the data generated by your events directly with the Salesforce CRM.
Collect engagement information during your event such as the number of attendees, activities participated in, and so on. This way, your organization can gain insights and design data-driven, effective, and impactful events in the future.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
In the age of social distancing, nonprofits learned to lean even more heavily on their virtual and digital solutions for fundraising and engagement, a trend unlikely to change even post-pandemic. A solution like OneCause makes it easy for nonprofits to host completely virtual auctions, preparing organizations like yours for the future in fundraising.
Soapbox Engage
App Overview
Soapbox Engage offers a suite of donation and engagement apps for the Salesforce platform. While these apps are not native to Salesforce, they integrate seamlessly with the CRM, making it easy to automate the flow of data from your supporters’ engagement to your donor management system.
The apps offered through Soapbox allow nonprofits to accomplish a variety of functions, like setting up donation forms, launching advocacy campaigns, creating ecommerce stores, and hosting virtual classes.
These apps integrate with one another as well as with Salesforce, making it easy to connect all of the engagement tools that your organization uses to promote complete and well-rounded relationships with donors. This multi-platform engagement strategy keeps them interested in your organization without over-asking for donations.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
Soapbox Engage offers a variety of tools for nonprofits, each of which can be purchased separately. This means your nonprofit only needs to purchase the software for which it has an immediate need, rather than building out a system and paying for tools that won’t be used for years.
Classy
App Overview
Classy offers a Salesforce donation app trusted by over 4,000 nonprofits to collect donations and run a variety of fundraising campaigns. No matter what type of fundraising campaign you’re hosting, you’ll have the virtual tools you need for success.
Classy offers crowdfunding, peer-to-peer fundraising, event software, donation forms, and more through their Salesforce app for nonprofits.
In addition to getting your campaigns up and running with Classy’s intuitive solution, your organization can easily keep an eye on the various campaigns you have running as the data from each is automatically stored in the centralized Salesforce database. Gain new insights by pulling reports and analyzing new information to optimize your campaigns for your audience’s needs.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
With Classy, your nonprofit can brand your nonprofit’s donation pages, crowdfunding campaign page, and event microsite with your own information. Configure the platform to ensure the campaign pages match your nonprofit’s brand, colors, and images. This establishes a sense of trust between your brand and your supporter, showing them that they’re donating to the intended mission.
Mogli SMS
App Overview
Mogli SMS is a Salesforce app that enables nonprofits to send out bulk SMS text messages to their supporters. Research shows that SMS open rates are as high as 98%, compared to just 20% of all emails. Therefore, sending text messages to supporters (when they opt into receiving them) is a great way to get marketing messages out.
It’s important not to become overly reliant on texting your supporters as sending too many messages on this platform could turn them away. However, for occasional marketing campaigns or event notifications, text messages are an ideal way to ensure your supporters see the message you send.
Because Mogli SMS is directly integrated with your CRM, you can easily pull reports and track your communications with supporters to be sure you’re making the most of your texting platform without overwhelming them.
Why We Love this Salesforce App
MogliPay, another offering from Mogli SMS, allows your nonprofit to launch text-to-give fundraising campaigns and raise more through this popular platform.
Mogli also connects nonprofits with WhatsApp, a highly popular messaging platform allowing for international communication. This means that international organizations have the ability to communicate with supporters from across the globe via text message.
Salsa Engage
App Overview
While not an app designed specifically for Salesforce, Salsa Engage is a comprehensive donation and marketing solution that integrates with Salesforce. The bidirectional flow of data allows your organization to pull information from Salesforce to inform your supporter outreach strategy and automatically store new fundraising data into your CRM from your donation pages.
You can use Salsa Engage to create attractive and data-driven web forms, donation pages, fundraising campaigns, email templates, and even advocacy campaigns. Then, from Salesforce, you can pull fundraising reports and other information that can help you continuously improve in the future as well.
The integration between the two solutions is easy to turn on, and synchronization can be set up to occur as often as every five minutes.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
Salsa Engage isn’t just a donation app. With a fully functional CRM, Salsa Engage provides the full package for nonprofits in need of additional software applications, whether they’re just getting started or are looking for a change. The inclusion of their own CRM also means your nonprofit won’t need to worry about integrating your donation app to your donor management tools.
Hootsuite
App Overview
The Hootsuite Salesforce app is specifically designed to help organizations make the most of their social media platforms. Their tool helps organizations like yours to monitor social media campaigns, advertise your latest fundraising initiatives, and publish regularly by scheduling outreach ahead of time.
Social media is an important aspect of your nonprofit’s marketing automation efforts and can create additional touchpoints with supporters when well-crafted posts are available in the right places.
With Hootsuite, you can automate your social media outreach, while helping train your team with skills that will help you maintain personalization and engagement across your social platforms.
Why We Love this Salesforce App
With Hootsuite, you’re not only empowered to get your message across social platforms to the appropriate audience, but you can also measure the success of your message with comprehensive analytics available directly through Salesforce. You can measure performance of different posts, A/B test different campaigns and post formats, and even find your ROI of your social media investment.
WealthEngine
App Overview
WealthEngine is another prospect research tool that helps enrich your nonprofit’s donor data through wealth screening technology. Their Salesforce app focuses specifically on gathering more wealth indicators about your organization’s supporters, allowing you to increase the ROI of your fundraising initiatives by crafting careful asks and finding new major prospects.
This app creates wealth scores and ratings within your donor database to identify the greatest opportunity for new mid-tier and major supporters. From there, you can create donor segments and track stewardship initiatives in Salesforce to build relationships with these individuals.
With WealthEngine, your nonprofit can prioritize your fundraising strategy and management tactics to hone in on those who will be most likely to create the greatest impact for your mission, boosting potential capacity.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
The WealthEngine Salesforce app allows you to centralize your information and data in your CRM, while seamlessly obtaining your data with a single click. Within the Salesforce platform, you can analyze the wealth insights for a single donor or import that information in bulk for up to 100K records.
GetFeedback
App Overview
GetFeedback’s Salesforce app enables your organization to send surveys and receive feedback from supporters, then leverage that information to enhance and improve your fundraising campaigns. Consistently receiving feedback over the years enables you to track your success rates for various strategies and to watch how slight changes and improvements result in real conversions and donations.
This solution makes it easy for nonprofits to craft and design mobile-friendly surveys from scratch or from prebuilt templates including types such as customer satisfaction, net promoter score, or customer effort score surveys.
Not only do surveys help you improve, but they also show that you care about your supporters’ opinions, building relationships with your community and boosting retention in the long-run.
Why We Love this Salesforce Donation App
With GetFeedback, your organization can create and automate workflows to send surveys after specific interactions. For instance, after a supporter donates, you might trigger a survey asking about their experience with your donation form.
Cvent
App Overview
Cvent is a well-known and highly functional event management solution that can handle events of any size, including your nonprofit’s next fundraising event. Their Salesforce app allows organizations to track attendance, build revenue, and gain deeper insights into their events’ impact and ROI.
This solution makes it easy for your organization to track your attendee journey from all events that they attend with your organization. From their initial contact with your marketing materials, to the follow-up after the event, you’ll gain insights from all engagement activities of your attendees. Use past data from your CRM to reach out and find new attendees or new donors from past events. Plus, store all recent data automatically in Salesforce as you kick off your event plans.
Cvent’s support team helps them stand out among their competitors. Not only do they offer 24/7 support, but Cvent also offers a catalog of training resources that you can use to maximize your event plans using their tools.
Why We Love this Salesforce App
In addition to offering in-person options, Cvent has extended its services to also incorporate completely virtual or hybrid events to build online engagement. This change was made quickly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, showing that their team is responsive to the needs of the community.
Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM in part because it can be customized so specifically to meet the needs of each organization. Building out your Salesforce system with the right apps and integrations will ensure that all of your data is stored securely in your CRM and can be leveraged to strengthen supporter relationships.
These essential Salesforce donation apps and integrations are just the start. There are thousands of avenues to explore in order to get your system just right. Therefore, continue your research with these additional resources and learn more about our top pick:
- Springboard by Jackson River. Springboard is our favorite Salesforce donation app because it contains many of the tools and solutions that you need to get the most out of your Salesforce system. Learn more about Springboard and how it can help your nonprofit.
- Best Salesforce Apps for Nonprofits. If you’re looking to continue your research about the different Salesforce apps available for nonprofits to use, check out this Double the Donation guide to read about more potential solutions.
