Agentforce Nonprofit (Formerly Nonprofit Cloud)

Simplify Program and Case Management Feature Setup

Configure Program Management, Case Management, and Outcome Management features with detailed, step-by-step guidance in Salesforce Go. Complete the entire setup process from a single page without navigating away. You can also track feature usage and access content resources to get started quickly.

Manage More Complex Business Processes with Action Plans

Action Plans now handle bigger workloads without the limits you used to hit. Run reports on the Owner and Target fields of action plan records, so you can accurately track performance and ownership across action plans.

Action plan records now support up to 200 tasks, up from 100. On dependent tasks, you can now change the Assigned To field before you mark the parent task complete, giving you more flexibility to plan resourcing upfront.

Create Households for Person Accounts During Gift Entry

Add donors to households directly from the Gift Entry Grid or the Business Process API without building separate automation.

Gift officers can reduce manual steps and keep donor data organized by creating households during gift entry.

Donor records stay complete from the point of entry, immediately closing reporting gaps.

How: In the Gift Entry Grid, select Auto Create Household when adding a person account as a donor.

If the donor doesn’t already belong to a household, Salesforce creates one and adds the donor to it during the gift entry process.

Automatically Generate and Maintain Household Names

Keep household account names accurate and professional as family dynamics change.

Define formula-based naming patterns to automatically recalculate household names whenever you add, remove, or update members.

The naming engine listens for changes to household membership and member details and then recalculates names in real time.

Why: Without automation, staff manually name every household account and update those names whenever family compositions change through marriage, divorce, or other life events. Household names become outdated or inaccurate, leading to unprofessional communications and a cycle of manual data cleanup. With Automatic Household Naming, your Salesforce admin defines naming rules once, and Household Naming handles ongoing maintenance.

How: From Setup, enter Household, and under Group Membership, select Household Naming Settings. Turn on Automatic Household Naming and create a household naming template.

New Objects for Fundraising

Define the automation that controls household naming and greetings

Use the new HouseholdNamingConfig object.

Changed Objects for Fundraising

Exclude a person account from automatic household naming and greetings

Use the new IsExclFrHshldAutoNaming field on the existing AccountContactRelation object.

Set the order of household members in household naming

Use the new HouseholdAutoNamingSequence field on the existing AccountContactRelation object.

Exclude a household account from automatic naming and greeting updates

Use the new IsExclFrHshldAutoNaming field on the existing PartyRelationshipGroup object.

Create a household automatically for a donor without an existing household

Use the new IsAutoCreateHousehold field on the existing GiftEntry object.

Identify the origin of a gift soft credit, such as a household relationship

Use the new SoftCreditSource field on the existing GiftSoftCredit object.

Track the total value of hard credits and soft credits for household members

Use the new TotalHouseholdCreditsAmount field on the existing DonorGiftSummary object.

Exclude household accounts from soft credit creation with a boolean formula

Use the new HshldSoftCreditExclFormula field on the existing FundraisingConfig object.

Sync a custom account field with the primary household account lookup

Use the new PrimaryHouseholdField field on the existing HouseholdUiConfiguration object.

Standardize and Secure Grant Application Evaluation Stages

Bring consistency and control to grant evaluation workflows.

Create reusable Action Plan Templates to standardize multi-stage reviews, and enable Compliant Data Sharing to restrict reviewers to only the sections relevant to their expertise.

Previously, application evaluations required manual reviews at every grant cycle, creating fragmented review experience that introduced delays and the risk of reviewer bias.

How: To create an Action Plan Template for evaluations, from the App Launcher, find and select Action Plan Templates. Click New, select Application Form Evaluation as the target object, and then add evaluation sections as template items after you save the template.

To enable granular section visibility, from Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter Compliant Data Sharing, and then enable it for the Application Form Evaluation Section entity.

Updated Objects and Fields in Grantmaking

Identify users who have access to an application form evaluation section

Use the new AppFormEvalSectionPtcp object.

Some General Features that would be helpful for Nonprofits

Preview Records from Lightning Reports Without Losing Context (Beta)

You can view Donor or Donation details without having to leave the Report.

Embed Lightning Dashboards in Your Lightning Web Runtime Experience Cloud Sites (Beta)

Build charts and allow your donors, volunteers, partners, facilitators or any external user to view these charts through a portal or a community

Embed Lightning Reports in Your Lightning Web Runtime Experience Cloud Sites (Beta)

Similarly, you can add a particular report for your Portal users to view. This could be “My Donations”.

Let me tell you this and then tell me if you still think I am

- After 5 years of doing Salesforce for Nonprofits again and again, I spot problems 5 times faster, I understand business processes 5 times faster, I build it 5 times faster, I debug 5 times faster.

- If you give the same work to a consultant in their early careers, it will take them at least double the time to figure it out, double the time to deliver.

- When I started out, I would open an error email, keep reading, open the Flow and keep testing again and again, add debug logs and so on, now, quite often, I just know from the email preview without opening the email what went wrong, even better, sometimes after running it, I say what will break before it does.

- This speed in understanding, debugging and delivering means projects get completed in less time, instead of going live in 6 months, we can go live in 3 months, time from discovery to going live is shortened.

- Having tried this path multiple times before, I can make accurate recommendations, ask better questions and anticipate where we are heading. Quite often, we bring to the clients attention what they may miss to think of, that is what consultants do, no?

- Communication is easier, when you speak with an Expert Salesforce Consultant who does not know what Soft Credits are, what Matching Gifts are, what a restricted donation is, you steer away from the implantation to explain these concepts first then come back to it.

- From an Architect point of view, we can build systems that work, but then break as the organization grows, more data, more volume, more users. We have seen it, we experienced it, we know what would break, we plan for it and we prevent it from happening.

- I am not perfect and things may and would go wrong, the nature of software.

It is not $50/H vs $300/H, it is a combination of

- Speed

- Communication

- Understanding

- Planning

- Experience

- etc...

I don’t mind it when a client finds value but find the cost unreachable, however, I do mind it when someone considers this experience not valuable or does not justify the cost.

One of my clients had gone through an implementation for 6 months, gone bad, unusable, paid a ton of money, time and resources, then we started from scratch, they are now live and as successful as it gets.

I will argue that a $50/H resource will cost you more than a $300/H resource. (I hate hourly rates by the way)

I started adopting this myself, I no longer pay for cheap tools or hire individuals at a lower rate, I am now willing to pay premium to get premium.

What I am describing above is not just me, that is any expert in the field, that is what experience means.

This post feels less humble than I intended for it to be, I think sometimes I have to explicitly talk about what I think my value is.

Above is my opinion and my opinion alone and I know this is a sensitive topic to some, but clarity and proper expectations are important.

Or continue with the blog version below

When you open a Salesforce object/table for the first time, this is what it looks like:

Where is the data?

The first question you may ask is ::: Where is the data? Is this table empty?

Maybe, maybe not. You will almost always need to switch from this view to a different view that would show data if any. To do that, hover to the phrase “Recently Viewed” and click, you will notice two options

• Recently Viewed

• All Benefits

It says “All Benefits” in this case because we opened an object/table called “Benefit”, but if you were to open any other object, it will say the name of that object, examples:

• All Opportunities

• All Accounts

• All Contacts

These are called List Views, every object will come with two List Views at least:

• Recently Viewed

• All “Name of Object”

After you switch to All Benefits List View, we notice there is some data now appearing. You can click the Pin icon next to the List View name to Pin this List View, what this means is next time you open this object’s tab, it defaults to the Pinned List View you selected.

List View Controls

List View Controls gives you options to manipulate and change List Views to what you need.

Create a new List View

Create as many Lisa Views as you need, choose a descriptive name. We will be adding Filters and Fields later, but consider thinking about these when naming a List View.

Example Names:

• This Month Donations

• Last Month Donations

• Donations Expected Today

• All Unrestricted Donations

Salesforce will auto set the List API Name from the List Name, even though it can be different, I recommend keeping the API Names the same as the Names, in other words, let Salesforce auto name and keep it as is.

If you set a List Name and click anywhere outside the box, Salesforce will auto set the API Name, if you decide to change the name after this, remember to clear the API Name first so Salesforce auto sets the API Name to the new Name.

We will cover “Who sees this List View? in the #Sharing Settings section.

Clone an existing List View

Very similar to New List Views, the only difference is that it auto sets both the List View Name and the List View API Name, make sure to change these to proper names.

Rename List Views

Self Explanatory, however, notice that we don’t have the option to edit the List API Name, which means the new name will be different from the API Name which I don’t like, in other places that reference this List View such as in code, the List Name does not show up, the List API Name shows up which in this case may not reflect the actual Name or purpose of this List View.

Since I recommend keeping both Name and API Name the same or very similar, I don’t recommend renaming List Views at all, I would rather Clone or Create New List Views with the desired name.

Sharing Settings

This is one of the features that makes Salesforce unique and powerful, granular security, you will see this across the board, you have so much control over who sees what at all levels.

Only I can see this list view

It means it is Private to you, the creator of this List View, to your own user only, nobody else would see this List View.

You would typically use this option for data views that only you care about, others don’t want to see such as

• My tasks

• Donations Without Dates (In case you forgot to set them)

• Created By Me This Week

All users can see this list view

This is when you want to create List Views for yourself AND others, and by others, I mean everyone, any one with a Salesforce user who has access to this object will be able to see this List View.

Use this to create List Views that everyone will benefit from such as

• Past Due Donations

• Unacknowledged Donations

• Constituents Missing Email/Phone Numbers

PRO TIP: All users here literally means all users including external users. The moment you create an Experience Cloud site and start inviting External Users, consider reviewing all List Views and change Sharing Settings from “All users can see this list view” to “Share list view with groups of users” and limit access to Internal users only

Share list view with groups of users

This option lets you share this List View with specific groups of users. notice how it says “Search Public Groups”.

To create custom Public Groups, you would do that from Setup > Public Groups

Salesforce has some standard Public Groups

• All Partner Users → Represents external users, gets auto created when you purchase Experience Cloud licenses of type Partner.

• All Customer Portal Users → Represents external users, gets auto created when you purchase Experience Cloud licenses of type Customer.

• All Internal Users → As in, exclude External Users above.

Feel free to create your own custom Public Groups such as:

• Marketing Team

• Fundraising Team

• Major Gifts Team

• Leadership Team

• Data Auditing Team

Select Fields to Display

Controls what fields or columns to add or remove from this List View, simply use the arrows Left and Right to add or remove, and use the arrows Up and Down to reorder columns.

Reset Column Widths

You can control column widths by clicking and holding in between header cells then dragging left or right.

Doing so may result in the columns extending beyond the screen width, notice below how the Description is cut off by the end of the screen

You can use the horizontal bar below to scroll left and right

Or you can use Reset Column Widths to get all columns to fit the screen

Columns widths are back to normal and we also got to see the dropdown arrow for each row/record, this is where we get to perform operations such as Edit or Delete

Applying Filters to List Views

Applying filters would get the List View to show only the Records/Rows that meet the conditions or filters set.

Click the Filter icon at the very right side to open the Filters panel

A filter can be applied to Fields/Columns, you can add as many filters as needed.

Salesforce automatically applies one filter by default

Filter By Owner set to All records/benefits.

The Owner is a field like all other fields except it has some security dependencies. Records you own may or may not be accessible to others depending on the sharing settings, that is a topic for another time. For now, you want to keep this filter set to All Benefits/Records.

Add Filter

Click on Add Filter to start adding filters

The components of a Filter are

Example Filters:

Filter Logic

When applying more than one condition or one filter, the filters default to an AND logic, meaning, the records that will appear are the ones that meet both conditions or all conditions.

If you would prefer to use an OR logic instead so that all records that meet any of the conditions should appear, you can click Add Filter Logic

Notice how it defaults to AND, you can change this to OR

You can also add any custom logic you want such as

PRO TIP: If a user does not have read access on any of the fields used in the Filters, the filters won’t work and the user may see more data than intended.

Make filters more powerful with formulas

Notice how the Filter Logic is limited to AND and OR statements? What if we want to have a bit more complex List View filters?

Scenario: We want to view donations made by Males and donations made by Females

In Nonprofit Cloud, the data for the gender of the person exists on the Person Account, and it does not live directly on the Gift Transaction object. The Donor field is where the Person Account is populated.

If I were to attempt to select the Donor, it only shows me the Donor and won’t let me access any of the Donor information such as Name, Address, Gender, Birthdate, Email etc…

To perform this filter, we will need to create a Formula field on the Gift Transaction object

We will talk about how to create fields in more detail in future articles, briefly now, from Setup > Object Manager > Gift Transaction > Fields and Relationships > New

Select Formula Data Type, Give it a Name, Return Text and enter this formula

Hit next and save this formula.

Now that we have this new field, we can add it to List Views

and we can use it in Filters

Formulas give you so much power, you can get really creative

Other List View Actions

1. Search This List. You can use this to search this list data, there some fields that are not searchable like formulas or checkboxes or related objects, I usually prefer to use the Global Search instead

   

2. Apply a different view/display to this List, the options are
   

   

   - Table View

   

   
   - Kanban View (A Kanban View requires a Picklist field to be used as the path or the section header, in this case, it is using the Benefit Status)

   

   
   - Split View (Let’s you open a record while seeing the list of records to the left side to navigate between records without leaving the detail view of a record, this view let’s you open two or more tabs without having to close them, perfect for work that involves multiple records)

   

3. Refresh view, in case new records got created, records got deleted or updated and need to pull the most recent updates.

4. Sort. You can sort by multiple columns in an order you specify and you can specify for each field if you would like the order to be ascending or descending.

   

   If you want to sort by one column only, you can click the header of that column. You can click it again to change it from ascending to descending or vice versa.

   

5. Edit List, I am not sure why I would click this button, but it seems to open
   and edit the last cell you clicked on, the alternative way to edit the list is to hover on fields you want to edit, you will see this Pencil icon, click and edit, then click outside, then you will notice a bar appears at the bottom to cancel the edit or save.

   

   To edit records in bulk, select the records, then start editing, you can check “Update X selected items” to bulk update.
   

   

6. Add charts. While it is recommended to build charts and analysis in Reports and Dashboards, this is a quick way to see information at a glance without having to navigate to Reports or Dashboards.
   
   To get started, you will be prompted to create a New Chart the first time.

   

   When you click New Chart, you will see this:

   

   Chart Type options:
   - Vertical Bar Chart
   - Horizontal Bar Chart
   - Donut Chart
   

   Aggregate Type options:
   - Average
   - Sum
   - Count
   
   Aggregate Field (The field the operation above will be on, Count this field, or Sum this field)
   
   Grouping Field (The field to perform the operation against, example, the number of Donations per what? per Campaign or Per Household?)
   
   Here is an example chart setup:

   

   

   You can click this tiny gear icon to perform some edits:

   

   

   

   Works, the chart and its details are squished against that little area of the screen, in a dashboard, you can get a chart to be as big as needed, but it is a cool little feature at List View level.
   Noticed the dropdown? you can create multiple charts and switch between them.

   

   
   

7. New, this is where you can create new records/rows of this object/table. It will open a popup form, fill the fields you need and hit Save.

   

Conclusion

There you have it. A master’s degree on how to manage List Views, I definitely did not expect it to be that long, but this is a great reminder how granular Salesforce can be and how much control we have here.

There are some areas we have not even covered here such as Permissions for List View management, some Locked Inline Editing scenarios and some more concepts, but this serves as a general purpose how to manage List Views for Nonprofit Leaders/Staff or Salesforce professionals.

I also tried to keep the screenshots, gifs and examples from Nonprofit Cloud to be as relevant as possible to the Nonprofit world.

Let me know what you think of this format and if you found this helpful.

Leave a comment

Part 1: Who Is It For

Part 2: The Data

Part 3: Provisioning Your Org

Provisioning Your Org

Option 1: A fully configured org (Org means, an organization system or an instance of Salesforce)

Option 2: An unconfigured org (This is not working as of the time of writing this blog post, go with Option 1)

To obtain any of the two orgs: Visit This Link.

If you are interested in trials of other Salesforce systems, feel free to visit the Developer Free Trials sign-up page.

Provisioning a Full Configured Org

1. Click Sign Up under Nonprofit Cloud and Grantmaking * Free Trial or visit this link.

2. Fill in the required fields

   

3. Submit. You should get an email

   

4. In the email you receive, you will have the following information
   Org URL
   Your Username
   A Clickable link/button to set your password, it reads “Verify Account”
   
   This is what the email looks like

   

5. After you click “Verify Account”, you will be prompted to Reset Your Password

   

6. It will then ask you to verify your identity by another email

   

   

   Enter the Verification Code and hit Verify

7. It will then ask you to enter password and security question/s, I recommend using a password manager, we use Keeper at Swift Cloud Solutions. (This is not an affiliate link)

   

   Enter all information and hit “Change Password”, remember to save this information somewhere.

8. You are logged in successfully, this is what it looks like

   

Provisioning an Unconfigured Org

(This LINK is NOT working lol)

1. Click Sign Up under Nonprofit Cloud and Grantmaking* Base Trial or visit this link.

2. Will stop here as the link is not working, may revisit this blog post at another point in the future once this is fixed by Salesforce. We will continue covering the configurations of Program Management on the configured org, some would still be enabled and configured, we will review them anyway.

Remember that Salesforce is what I like to define as “An Advanced Excel”, Salesforce consists of Tables just like Excel, the term we use for Tables in Salesforce is Objects.

To clear the definitions out of the way:

Object = Table
Record = Row
Field = Column

Now, let’s go through all objects you would see or use in Program Management.

Program Management Objects

These are the objects I believe most if not all organizations would use

• Account

  Represents constituents; individuals or organizations.

  • Person Account
    This is a Person or an Individual who would participate in a Program.

  • Business Account
    This is an Organization or Household that would participate in a Program.

• Program
  Your actual Programs such as Hunger Relief or Career Services

  • Program Enrollment
    An Enrollment of a Person or an Organization in a particular Program. If one person signs up for multiple Programs, you would create multiple Program Enrollment records for them.

  • Program Cohort
    A Cohort is a way to group participants or enrollments together, for example, August Cohort or Summer Cohort.

    • Program Cohort Member
      This is where we list the participants of this Cohort.

  • Program Recommendation Rule
    This is meant for internal planning, before our team can run this Program, these criteria must be met or these recommendations should be considered. Examples: Participants must be 18 years of age or this Program must be run within the state of Georgia only or this is a female-only Program.
    This is the list of Rules that must be met before or throughout this Program.

• Benefit
  A benefit is what the participant is getting or receiving such as Food, or Books.

  • Benefit Type
    Classifications or Categorizations of Benefits. Examples:
    A Book Benefit falls under the Benefit Type of Education
    A Food Packet Benefit falls under the Benefit Type of Hunger

  • Benefit Assignment
    Who signed up or showed interest for this Benefit?

  • Benefit Schedule
    How often does this Benefit get distributed? Example: A Class runs on a weekly schedule, every Monday and Wednesday.

  • Benefit Schedule Assignment
    A Benefit may have multiple schedules:
    Schedule 1: Every Monday
    Schedule 2: Every Tuesday
    A Person receiving Benefits (Benefit Assignment) may receive this Benefit only once a week, so they can only participate in only one schedule. Benefit Schedule Assignment links this Person’s Benefit Assignment to a particular Benefit Schedule Assignment.

  • Benefit Session
    The actual Benefit Sessions.
    The Benefit Schedule means Every Monday
    The Benefit Sessions are exactly which Mondays; Monday Aug 17th Session and Monday August 24th Session.

  • Benefit Disbursement
    The sign up/registration to the Benefit Session. This consists of two pieces of information; who and what.
    Example: John signed up for Monday Aug 17th Session

• Application Form
  An application received from a constituent to participate in a Program

  • Application Form Evaluation
    Internal staff and reviewers leave their comments and decision on this application.

  • Application Form Relation
    You could relate this Application Form to any of the following

    • Program Enrollment: If an Applicant is accepted, you would create a Program Enrollment for them, then you can link them together by creating an Application Form Relation, this way you know how this Program Enrollment came from the first place.

    • Benefit: This application was focusing on a particular Benefit or the applicant was interested in a particular Benefit or applying for a particular Benefit.

    • Benefit Assignment: I don’t know why I would specify the Benefit Assignment for the Application really xD

    • Program: Which Program this Application is for.

For those of you nerdy ones, here is the full Data Model by Salesforce:

I will be referencing and quoting the official Salesforce documentation throughout this blog and video series.

Common Use Cases for Program Management Module

Program Recipient Journey

I don’t usually use AI to write, but I needed some help to put this story together.

This is a story to explain the steps a Program Participant goes through as part of the Program and what type of data we log and track at each step.

The objective of this story is to show a thorough example of what you would use Program Management for and how, we will dive deeper in each of these data points in future articles and videos.

Maria’s Journey with a Nonprofit Called Nonprofit Helpdesk

The Organization

Nonprofit Helpdesk is a nonprofit that helps enable and educate individuals to navigate their career as part of a program called Career Readiness Program.

Chapter 1: The Program

Nonprofit Helpdesk defines a Program called “Career Readiness Program.” It’s the umbrella under which they organize everything related to helping people find and keep jobs, benefits that fall under this program are resume help, interview prep, job placement support, and more.

Chapter 2: Maria Enrolls

Maria lost her job six months ago and hears about Nonprofit Helpdesk through a friend. She meets with an intake coordinator, who signs her up for the Career Readiness Program. This creates a Program Enrollment record. Nonprofit Helpdesk can track her journey from here on out.

Chapter 3: Maria Learns about the Program’s Benefits

Nonprofit Helpdesk points Maria toward one of the program’s Benefits: the “Resume Writing Workshop.” Nonprofit Helpdesk categorizes this as a Service-type benefit, measured in hours, so they can later report on how many service-hours they’ve delivered.

Chapter 4: Learning The Schedule

The Resume Writing Workshop isn’t a one-off. it runs on a recurring Benefit Schedule: every Wednesday evening from 6–8 PM for six weeks straight. That is a total of 6 Benefit Sessions.

Chapter 5: Shows Interest

Maria showed interest in participating in Resume Writing Workshops, Nonprofit Helpdesk creates a Benefit Assignment for her.

Chapter 6: Maria Signs Up

Maria checks her calendar and picks the session that works for her: Wednesday, August 12, 6–8 PM, she signs up for one specific Benefit Session on that schedule.

The coordinator adds Maria to the roster for that August 12 session. This creates a Benefit Disbursement with a status of Enrolled, linking Maria to that specific session so Nonprofit Helpdesk knows to expect her.

Chapter 7: Maria Shows Up

Maria attends the workshop on August 12, working one-on-one with a volunteer career coach for two hours to rebuild her resume from scratch. By the end, she walks out with a polished, ready-to-send resume.

Because Maria actually attended and received the service, Nonprofit Helpdesk updates the Benefit Disbursement from Enrolled to Completed: on August 12, Maria received 2 hours of resume-writing services. This is the record that proves the help was actually delivered, not just offered or scheduled.

The Data Points

The story above covered the following data points:

• Program

• Program Enrollment

• Benefits

• Benefit Schedule

• Benefit Sessions

• Benefit Assignment

• Benefit Disbursement

We will talk about these data points in more details in the next episode

• New videos and playlists published on YouTube, examples below

• New Blog Articles, my new favorite, I get to give you details and weeds xD, examples below

• Publishing in new places, Instagram, Shorts on LinkedIn

• More ways to connect and collaborate, Facebook and Slack.

• Join me in whichever channel you prefer, I am happy to connect with you all and share content that you want to read and watch.

Find All Links Here

Get ready for content that is tailored and specific to Nonprofit needs, if you are a Salesforce professional working with Nonprofits, or if you are a Nonprofit leader or staff passionate about technology, this is for you.

Will be sharing content around topics such as:

• CRMs, what they are and how they compare?

• Building Automations and Saving Time.

• All About Data; validating, auditing, reconciling, quantity, integrity and trust.

• How to build stuff yourself; DIY.

• The Technical and Business side of technology.

• Common Pain Points and Problems Nonprofits face.

• Tips and tricks from my 5 years of experience working with Nonprofits.

Recent Publications below:

You have to keep writing these thank you / acknowledgement emails manually after every donation?

You get a call from a constituent and you don’t know their history with your nonprofit instantly?

Having a solid system in place solves the 3 problems above and more.

This is a step by step guide on how to build and implement your own tailored, personalized and customized CRM (Customer Relationship Manager).

Each episode below comes with

• A Blog Post showing the exact steps in a written manner with screenshots. (If a blog link does not show up yet, I am still writing it, stay tuned)

• A YouTube video building live if you prefer watching.

Part 1: The Data Model

The Data Model represents the Tables and the Relationships between tables, this is the foundation to build on

Read the Blog:

Part 2: Entities, Organizations and Households

These are the tables to log information about entities we work and interact with, these could be organizations such as nonprofits, foundations, government or households.

Part 3: Persons (The Constituents)

The actual people, these are our donors and supporters.

Part 4: Affiliations

How individuals relate to organizations, for example, John is the CEO of a company called Delta Developments.

Part 5: Relationships Between Constituents

How individuals relate to each other such as father and son.

Part 6: Donations

The actual donation rows/records, this is where we would log information like the donation amount and the donation date.

A Person attends multiple Events.

An Event has multiple People attending.

We have a table for Person/People and another table for Events, how do we log the attendance?

We could

• Set the attendance on the Person record and link the Person record to the Event table, but this way, we related the Person to one event only, what if we want to relate the Person to another event? and a third event? do we keep creating more links?

• Or set the person on the Event table as an attendee, but then, what if a second Person signs up, do we create a second link? a third and so on?

These 2 approaches above won’t work, and that is why we need a third table called Attendance, this Attendance table links to both tables Event and Person, and we get to create multiple rows/records in this table.

Example Setup

Table: Persons

Table: Events

Table: Event Attendance

See how the Event Attendance table helped us create multiple links without having to duplicate Persons nor Events.

Here is a reading of the Event Attendance table

• John Doe attended 3 Events

• Back-to-School Supply Drive Event had 3 attendees.

• Amara Johnson attended only one Event.

• Community Food Drive & Distribution Day had 2 attendees.

With this setup in place, CRMs and systems give you the ability to perform filters and groupings. Example: show me the list of Events John Doe attended

Are you struggling to get answers to these questions? Do you know that some nonprofit organizations out there get answers to these questions instantly?

It comes down to organized data; and organized data happens in an organized database.

Pinpoint All Your Data Types

It is better to do this at the early stages of building a new system, but it is still a good idea to take this step at any point, this is the first step towards remediating and fixing the data reporting issues.

What data do we want to log, track and report on? Let’s start brainstorming and writing down every possible data we would need, we will think about organizing this data in a second.

Tip: Start talking about your nonprofit, your mission, impact, journeys, deliverables, goals and day to day activities, most key words from what you say there would likely be a data point.

Let’s start jotting down all of those keywords even if they seem similar or redundant, we will start organizing them in a later step.

Let’s take an example nonprofit and extract the types of data we may be tracking and logging:

Feeding America is the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States, working through a nationwide network of over 200 food banks and 60,000 partner agencies including food pantries and meal programs. Its mission is to end hunger by connecting people with food and providing food assistance in the wake of disasters. Feeding America also advocates for policies that address the root causes of hunger and food insecurity, and works with retailers, manufacturers, and farmers to rescue food that would otherwise go to waste.

Keywords for Data:

• Programs

• Food Pantries

• Meals

• Food

• Food Assistance

• Constituents

• Individuals

• People

• Farmers

• Organizations/Entities

• Retailers

• Manufacturers

• Partner Agencies

• Policies

• Causes of Hunger

When working with a database or an excel sheet, we don’t have to create a table for every data type, data types that share common information can be in one table with a category or type field.

Looking back at the data types from above, we notice that Constituents, Individuals, People and Farmers would share common information such as

• Name

• Email

• Phone Number

• Address

Since these are similar except for a classification, we can have all of these under one table with a field called Classification or Category or Type.

Additionally, even though it is not explicitly stated, but every nonprofit receive donations, these are data types we should account for as well.

Applying the concepts above across the remaining data types, we will end up with the following format instead:

• Table 1: Programs

  • Food Pantries

  • Meals

  • Food

  • Food Assistance

• Table 2: Individuals

  • People

  • Farmers

  • Donors

• Table 3: Organizations/Entities

  • Retailers

  • Manufacturers

  • Partner Agencies

• Table 4: Policies

• Table 5: Causes of Hunger

• Table 6: Donations

We concluded what tables to build in a database just from one paragraph about the organization, in a system implementation, we dive deeper by performing Business Analysis to learn more about the Nonprofit, from which we get to learn what other tables we need and set the roadmap for the implementation. I will be writing about Business Analysis for Nonprofits in more details, stay tuned.

How Data Relate To Each Other

Now that we have our tables in place, a bigger question to ask is how do these data points connect or link or relate to each other.

An Example is how do we know that these Donations came from this Donor. A Link must be established between the two. You could add what we call a Relationship field between Donations table and Donor table, meaning, when you enter a new donation row or record, it is required to select a Donor from the Donors table.

I will write about how relationships work in depth in a future article. Feel free to subscribe to know when it is published

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The Outcome

What we have done so far is that we have our data well structured in tables and relationships between tables is established.

With this setup, you already solved many if not most if not all problems with data

• How many unique donors donated last year?

  • That is the number of donors from the Donors table with Donations having a donation date within the last year.

• What is our average gift size for this donor?

  • The system would automatically go through the list of Donations under this Donor and performs the average

• Which donors haven’t given in the last 12 months?

  • Number of Donors where the number of associated Donations is zero for a donation date of the last 12 months.

You can then build reports to show you this data in a dynamic way such that it always pulls the Last 12 Months instead of pulling from January of 2026 to December 2026, this way, data is updated Realtime whenever you view it and you don’t have to build these reports again.

• What is a Data Model?

  • Many To Many Relationships

• Data Types

• Drawing our Data Model

  • Person Table

  • Entity Table

  • Affiliation Table

  • Relationship Table

  • Donation Table

  • Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)

What is a Data Model?

Don’t be deterred by “The Data Model”, you will find this to be very easy in a second, this is also known as “The Schema”, or the ERD “Entity Relationship Diagram”, fancy names for the tables and how the relate to each other.

Example, a Donor makes Donations.

We will need a table for the Donor, and another table for the Donations and relate these tables together so that we have the ability to filter donations by donor, or see each donor’s donation history.

To answer the question: What tables do we need? we ask:

Any answer here would mostly be a table, here are some examples

What are table relationships?

These tables live in a database, think of a database as an Excel file.

When entering multiple donations from the same person, instead of having to type the person’s name or email multiple times, we create a link between the Donations table and the Donors table which allows us to SELECT the Donor of each donation from the Donors table.

Once we link every Donation to their Donor, we can filter and view each Donor’s Donations.

Many To Many Relationships

There is one special type of relationship that helps us avoid duplicates and keep our database clean called “Many To Many Relationships”, it is really just the regular relationship but you create 2 of.

Example, a Person may attend multiple Events, or one Event can have multiple attendees. In this case we create a new table called “Event Attendance” where we create these rows. More on this topic here:

Data Types

One last thing is that databases give us this nice capability where we get to specify a Data Type for a column or a field, a Data Type is a certain format this field must follow, otherwise, it won’t accept it.

Example: A column of Data Type Email will require you to enter a value in an email format.

Another example: A field of Data Type Number will not let you type text in it.

This helps enforce data quality.

Drawing our Data Model

I will be using Zoom Whiteboards to draw our Data Model, you can use Draw.io or lucid.app, or whatever tool to draw charts and diagrams.

Here is the list of tables we need to build

Person Table

Entity Table

Affiliation Table

Relationship Table

Donation Table

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)

If this sounds relatable, here is only 2 things to do to get it fixed

1. Fix Your Data

2. Analyze Your Data

Read the steps below

Watch the full playlist on YouTube

Fix Your Data

Here is a list of action items to help your system become a trustworthy source of information

Identify all data sources

Start by identifying all the data sources, as in who or what logs data in our system

Examples are:

• Source 1: Website Donations.

  • An integration is setup between our Website and our System / CRM. Data is entered automatically by this integration.

• Source 2: In-Person Cash Donations.

  • We collect In-Person donations from events and galas, we enter those in the system manually.

• Source 3: Event Registration Platform

  • When people sign up to attend our events, registrations and ticket information is logged automatically in our system.

Dive Deeper into how and why to identify the data sources and how to flag them for data analysis:

Organize Your Data (Architecture)

Think of databases as advanced excel sheets, everything comes down to tables.

Data is tables and how these tables relate to each other, that is it.

• A Donor (Table) has multiple Donations (Another Table)

• A Volunteer (Table) attends many Events (Another Table)

• A Coach (Table) trains many students (Another Table)

When these tables are built to reflect the right data in the right place, reporting and analyzing this data becomes easier. A system can give you metrics such as

• Total Number of Donations

  • Row Count in the Donations Table.

• Total Amount of Donations

  • Sum of the Amount field from the Donations Table.

• Total Number of Attendance

  • Number of Event Attendance from the Event Attendance Table.

• Number of Students Per Coach

  • Number of Rows in the Students Table filtered or grouped by the Coach.

A solid structure makes it so much easier to report on data later on, I am a big advocate of learning and DIY, but this is an area where I encourage you to consult with a Software Architect at, this is the foundation, and if the foundation is solid, reporting is solid.

Learn more about organizing your data in a way that makes reporting a breeze.

Confirm all data is entered into the system

We will go through each data source and confirm that all data from that data source get entered into the system and who owns that data source and its data entry and validation.

• Are donations from our website flowing to our system? All of them?

• Did we enter all the donations we received from this gala?

• Did we log all volunteer information we met at that event?

I will be writing a deep dive on auditing and reconciliation especially between nonprofit systems, stay tuned.

Agree on Naming Conventions

When we receive a donation, what term does the team use to say it is received?

• Received

• Posted

• Paid

• Closed

• Won

Let’s pick one and agree to use it across the board, even better, let’s enforce it, we will talk about this next.

How about date formats? is it

• 10/20/2025

• 20/10/2025

• Oct 20, 2025

• Oct 20, 25

Or State/Country Names, is it

• Michigan

• MI

• USA

• United States

• US

• The United States of America

• America

A tip here is to use a single set of values to select from so folks won’t be able to select the wrong value, for example, if you are trying to log the country as the United States and you don’t see any other value that means the United States except the United States, you would select the United States, no?

Validate and enforce entered data is correct

We will forget to enter some details, that is just the nature of humans. Let’s build systems to help us avoid this.

• Make input fields required.

  • Example: Donation Amount

• Make input fields conditionally required

  • Example: Require Lost Reason if you set the Status to Lost

• Use input data types, this enforces a certain format when entering data. Entering data that doesn’t meet the formatting requirements of this option will not be accepted.

  • Examples: Emails and Phone Numbers.

• Use dropdowns or picklists.

  • Example: Donation Acknowledgement Status (Acknowledged, To Be Acknowledged, Do Not Acknowledge)

• Set Matching and Duplicate rules

  • Example: If the name and email match another row/record, flag this as duplicate.

Set Standards of Procedures (Standards for Data Entry)

• Should this gift be logged under the person? or under the household?

• How should household be named? Person 1 Name Or Person 2 Name or both persons names + the word Family or Household?

• Should we type the States in an abbreviated or full form? Michigan or MI?

• Should phone numbers be in local or international format?

• Should we spell out keywords like Street or abbreviate it as in St?

• Should we always create a new donor record whenever we get a donation or should we always search the database first for that donor?

Many of these ways to enter data is not wrong, it is just one person will enter it in one way, another enters it in a different way, we could assign particular team members to take ownership of data entry, validation and auditing, or we could set standards to follow by everyone, or both.

Having the system enforce and validate data in addition to setting standards and training the team on how to enter the data means data quality will be top notch.

ID all data

Oh, IDs, this will come back to bite you in the back if you don’t do it, you won’t feel the need to ID anything early on until you are ready to make the move.

When you are ready to move from spreadsheets to a CRM or from one system to another, you will come to learn of the world of Mapping data between systems.

Having IDs from day 1 for every table get auto generated is a massive time saver when moving data between systems and most importantly, makes it a cleaner and more accurate migration.

Imagine this: We migrated our donations from spreadsheets to a new CRM and we now want to validate that the migration was successful, need to compare the data in the CRM to the spreadsheets.

Many of those donations would have come on the same day, for the same amount, towards the same designation or fund, by donors without emails.

You could use a combination of donation date, amount, donor name and state to make the comparison, but would it not be easier if every donation had an ID and when we performed the migration, we took the ID to the new system as well. Comparing the two systems becomes so much easier.

Learn more about the importance and impact of having IDs for all tables here:

Audit and Reconcile Your Data

You are unstoppable, trying to get as many donations as possible by any means necessary, you end up with many platforms and ways to collect.

• Giving Pages for Online Donations

• Peer To Peer / Crowdfunding

• Matching Gifts

• Event Registrations and Ticketing

• Auction platforms

• Text-To-Give / Mobile Giving

• Point of Sale Giving

• Memberships

• Donor-Advised Fund (DAF)

• In Person Cash Donations

• Checks

Then you have a System where all of this data feeds into, we refer to this as the System of Record.

Regardless of the way data gets entered into the system of record, whether that is through an integration or by manual entry, the chances of missing or forgetting or failing to enter some data exist. That is why regular auditing and reconciliation between systems helps maintain accuracy and trust in the data.

Perform manual or automated checks between the system to confirm that numbers are identical and match. An additional step is to make sure these numbers also match the numbers in the accounting system.

Even if things go wrong, the earlier you capture it, the better.

Imagine realizing that data has not been flowing from one platform into your System of Record for months during which decisions were made and reports were generated and campaigns were launched!

Remove All Unnecessary Input Requirements

This ties to adoption from one angle and ties to data integrity from another angle.

Systems are meant to make it easier for us to log data without feeling an additional burden.

We get a simple donation; $50 cash donation from John today, and when we try to enter it, we get 20 questions such as

• What is the donor’s address?

• What was the campaign for the donation?

• What is the fund or designation of the donation?

• When was the donation expected vs when was actually made?

• Add Notes or Description for the donation

Not just this, but sometimes, we get those as REQUIRED inputs.

• What are the chances that I enter wrong information?

• What are the chances that I don’t log it altogether?

• What are the chances I talk to other teammates about how awful this system is?

• What are the chances others also refuse to log data in the system?

• What are the chances folks make their own sheets where life is easier and simpler?

Avoid multi-select entries

Multi-Select inputs are a nightmare to work with, a nightmare to run reports and analysis on, and a nightmare to perform automations with.

Example:

Which services does this client need? (Multi Select Question)

• Housing Assistance

• Food

• Education

• Other

If the client selects multiple, let’s say, they select Housing Assistance and Food. Now, let me ask you, What is the primary need for this person? and then let me ask you again, what is the typical primary need across our clients?

The answer: You don’t know, I don’t know, no one knows.

Here is another problem, do you know how this data gets logged in a database? you may have seen it before in an excel sheet, it looks like this

Housing Assistance;Food
/*Or*/
Housing Assistance,Food

Now try to run formulas on this cell, or automations or reporting, you will have to be creative and the results will not be 100% correct, because you don’t have EXACT values, but rather you have to use things like IF this selection CONTAINS “Food”.

You also can’t COUNT them, if a user selects 1 or 10, at the end, it is just one field with one value, yes, the value has multiple entries, but it is not easy to extract these and count them.

The solution is simple, don’t use multi-select, use single-select instead such as

• What is the primary service the client needs?

• What is the secondary service the client needs?

• What is the tertiary service the client needs?

And even if the list is greater than this, a dedicated table where you can create a row for each one with the ability to order them is much better than multi-select.

Add duplicate detection

While it is recommended to always search the database for existing data before creating new ones, we sometimes forget or we search and we may think it is a different set of data or a different person.

We may have also created an automation or an integration where we didn’t account for potential duplicates.

We recommend setting up duplicate detection features and duplicate auditing.

When you are attempting to create a new Donor record, the system would detect if there is another Donor in the system that matches this email and alerts you with such.

If an integration is setup and during testing, the duplicate detection feature will prevent the integration from creating with an error that states as such for the developers then to find the existing donor before creating a new one.

Getting into the habit of reviewing and running reports on potential duplicates and do merging and cleaning once a month is a very good habit that almost 99% of organizations out there don’t do.

Why clean the database! Let’s just leave it clutter for a few years then pay expensive software and expensive service providers to do the cleaning for us.

Add Backups

Another one where very few nonprofit organizations care about.

There are two types of backup we always recommend to have

Data Backup

You are setting up a new system and you keep creating and setting data and templates and perform calculations to get to that perfect data state in the org, and then one ugly export or bulk delete happens by mistake, the measures to prevent this are plenty and there is mostly options to bring those back from a recycle bin, but let’s account for the worst case scenario where data is lost after so much effort. We would not just want the backed up data, but we also want an easy way to RESTORE it.

Metadata Backup

We said that most nonprofits ignore data backup, even more nonprofits ignore metadata backup, metadata here means the system itself.

In the system you have a field called Donor Name and the value in this field is John Doe

Donor Name is Metadata
John Doe is Data

Some additional examples of Metadata are: Tables, Fields, Automations, Pages, Features,Buttons etc…

Similar to how things could go wrong with data, it could also go wrong with metadata

• Making a mistake when building an automation

• Breaking a working functionality

• Releasing a new feature that ends up being disliked by end users or clients

• Messing the page layout or colors or the branding

• Deleting an existing functionality

Similar to how we want the ability to backup data and easily restore them, we also need the ability to backup metadata and easily revert to a previous version, we refer to this as Version Control.

Example Data Backup Solution: OwnBackup

Example Metadata Backup Solution: Gearset (Also offers Data Backups)

Setup History Tracking

While data backup will help us go back to a previous state, data backup is usually needed for a large scale mistake, in situations where one value changes and we need to revert it back to its previous value, we want to enable and setup history tracking on important fields.

Additionally, when debugging or looking at sensitive information, we may want to know WHO changed this, WHEN and FROM what value TO what value.

This does not just help us identify what happened when building new features to confirm if it is updating the data as expected, it also helps with security to know if someone is messing with our data or if someone is trying something fishy.

Set Permissions

We have different departments

The Fundraising team does not have to see Marketing team data and work, and the other way around as well.

It is fine if they do, and it is sometimes beneficial to share work and content across teams, let’s make it optional and separated from the fundraising data.

Even within one department, there are some data that are more relevant, you don’t want any team member to see 10 relevant tables and pages and columns while also having to navigate and ignore 10 other irrelevant items.

Leadership are mostly interested in analysis, reports, charts and dashboards, no need to show weeds unless requested.

Fundraising want to see fundraising specific areas only with an option to view other departmental areas where there may be overlap.

Marketing should have their own marketing space with the ability to view what is needed from fundraising for marketing purposes.

Let everyone see what they need only.

Set Approval Processes

You change a major gift opportunity from the nurturing stage to the Lost stage, another team member changes it back to the Pending stage, another team member marks it as Almost There stage, or whatever stage that is.

While we want to empower end users to take actions and set data, we some times want to approve data changes.

If the donations from last year have already been processed, tax receipts generated, and reconciliation with the accounting system took place, these donations should not be touched until coordinated with the Finance team to make the necessary adjustments on the accounting side.

We still don’t want to block edits by end users, they want to edit it because they learned something new about this data, a refund happened, the person changed where they live, someone asked to be removed from our contact list, there is usually a valid reason behind it.

Most of the times, allow end users to make edits, but in areas where an approval is better be in place or communication with another department is needed or there is some other dependency, collaboration becomes important and this is what Approval Processes and communication channels are for.

Analyze Your Data

Define Your Key Questions

• What metrics would help you make decisions?

• What metrics would the leadership want to see in order to make those decisions?

• What metrics does each department need (Marketing, Fundraising)?

• What metrics do you share with others? as in share publicly on your website, in an event or send a report of to other organizations?

Do NOT ask for every metric you can ask for to be built. From experience with multiple clients, when we build all possible metrics, we end up not looking nor using most of them and the ones we care about the most get lost in the midst of it.

Identify ONLY the metrics that matter, start with the top 5 metrics only and add the ones that give you more insights as needed.

Build your insights for each role.

• Marketing team should see Marketing insights only

• Fundraising team should see Fundraising insights only

• Programming team should see Programming insights only

If it is just one large page with charts for everyone, it is less readable and takes more time to get to the insights we need.

Build Reports First, Dashboards and Charts Second

Reports here mean the analysis on the data that shows the breakdown and the details such as

• A list of donations filtered down to a particular Campaign.

• Donations Grouped By the State.

• Campaigns Sorted By the Revenue from largest to smallest

Reports have details, they don’t show just the total number, but shows the names, the dates, the amounts, and lots of other details.

Dashboards on the other hand provide a high level overview, a Dashboard consists of multiple charts, each Chart pulls from a Report.

A Chart would show top-level numbers only without a breakdown, examples that correspond to the three examples we gave above

• Total Donation Amount Per Campaign Donut Chart

• Number of Donations Per State Horizontal Bar Chart

• Funnel Chart showing top 5 Campaigns with their Total Generated Revenue

Establish Baselines and Benchmarks

How would you know if a Fundraising Campaign is successful or not?

How much revenue should we generate for this Campaign to call it a success?

This number or goal or objective should be realistic!

Build a chart that shows you progress towards this goal, repeat for other metrics to learn about progress and make decisions along the way.

Segment

Segment by donation amount, you want to know who your major donors are, create donor tiers such as

• Bronze (0-49)

• Silver (50-99)

• Gold (100-499)

• Platinum (500-999)

• Diamond (1000+)

You can also segment by constituent relationship to the organization

• Volunteers

• Parents/Guardians

• Coaches/Facilitators

• Partners

• Employees

You can run reports on how much they interact with our nonprofit, how much they donate or even create newsletters dedicated to each segment.

There are many other ways to segment:

• Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM): How much people give, when and how often.

• Recurring Donors vs One-Time Donors

• Individuals vs Organizations

• Donations By Campaign / Event

• Interactions/Activities Per Program

Reliable Data vs Valid Data

How much do you weigh? Workout, don’t be fat xD

You hop on a scale, you read 100 (Kilos or Pounds)
You step out, you step on it again and now it reads 99
You step out and you step on again, now it reads 98 (don’t worry, you are not losing weight)
You step out, you step on again, now it reads 101

Is this scale giving valid data? Yes
Is this scale reliable? No

Reliable means consistency, if the scale gave the same reading in all 4 times, we would say, this scale is reliable.

You bring another scale, you try it and it gives you the same reading in all 4 times, always reading 100, but then you bring a friend of yours who weighs way less, half your size. You would expect the scale to read around 50. You friend steps on it multiple times and it always reads 100

Is this scale giving valid data? No
Is this scale reliable? Yes

With that said, we are always looking for Data that is BOTH Valid AND Reliable

You run an online fundraising campaign and you share it everywhere, on website, social media, newsletter and we tell everyone in person about it, the first day is a big success; $50K generated in donations.

If this Campaign is meant to be for 10 days, is it safe to say that the Campaign is projected to generated $50K every day for 10 days? This would be a very big fat mistake.

While $50K is definitely valid, it is not the “Reliable” measure of deciding the daily donation amount, waiting until the end of the campaign and finding the average would be the more reliable figure of the daily donation amount.

I write everything in this blog myself, but these following scenarios are written by AI to bring nonprofit specific examples on valid vs reliable data.

Scenario: A donor survey question worded ambiguously, but every respondent interprets it the same (wrong) way and gives consistent answers

Valid: No
Reliable: Yes

Scenario: A "donor retention rate" report in Salesforce that recalculates differently each time you run it due to inconsistent date filters, even though the logic itself is sound

Valid: Sometimes (when it runs correctly)
Reliable: No

Scenario: A volunteer hours tracker that consistently undercounts because it only logs check-ins, not actual time worked

Valid: No
Reliable: Yes (consistent undercounting)

Scenario: A properly configured field that pulls the same accurate value every time it's queried

Valid: Yes
Reliable: Yes

Scenario: A manually entered field where staff sometimes type dates as MM/DD and sometimes DD/MM, giving inconsistent AND sometimes wrong values

Valid: No
Reliable: No

Every Insight Should Translate to Action

Remember when we defined the metrics from which decisions are made, now, it is time to actually use these metrics to make actual decisions.

If a metric always sits there for months and months without any action being taken, it is either this metric is useless or we are not making the proper use of these analytics.

Examples:

• First Time donors don’t give again for 6 Months → Add these donors to an outreach campaign.

• Major Donor has not received emails or interactions from our organization for 60 days → Auto assign a task to the Major Gift Officer to reach out.

• Work Orders have been open for 30 days → Auto Escalate, Reassign and take action.

If insights are not getting translated to action, they are meaningless.

Re-Measure

We got $100K in total donations this year, fantastic, great work. However, when you compare this number to the previous year, you will find out that last year, we generated $130K, and the year before we generated $120K.

This is a Year-Over-Year (YOY) metric, and you realize here that this year, we didn’t perform well. As a matter of fact, last year generated more revenue that the year before, meaning, we were growing in revenue YOY for the last 2 years, but this year, a significant drop happened. This is the kind of metric that tells us something is different, something is wrong, this tells us to revisit and retrospective and analyze what we did this year vs last year to learn and improve.

Another example:

This month, we got 2000 website visitors, nice. Again, how many did we get last month and the month before, this time, we are looking at Month-Over-Month (MOM).

This Month → 2000
Last Month → 1800
2 Months Ago → 1700

Now, this is good, traffic to our website is actually growing. Even though this is good, we still need to learn why and how, what are we doing differently to double down on it, how do we take this improvement and make it even better.

Conclusion

There you have it, 2 simple steps 😉

• Fix Your Data

• Analyze Your Data

Data is missing? Not correct? Filled wrong?

Every nonprofit uses many different tools and platforms and we interact with different people in different places. We have team members, roles and responsibilities.

TL;DR

• Identify what platforms donations are coming from.

• Identify who or what enters the data (people vs automations)

• Flag or Mark the source of the donation on the donation record in the CRM

Identify All the Data Sources

The first step to fixing this problem is to identify all the data sources and who or what is entering this data.

Examples are:

• Source 1: Website Donations.

  • An integration is setup between our Website and our System / CRM. Data is entered automatically by this integration.

• Source 2: In-Person Cash Donations.

  • We collect In-Person donations from events and galas, we enter those in the system manually.

• Source 3: Event Registration Platform

  • When people sign up to attend our events, registrations and ticket information is logged automatically in our system.

• Source 4: Satisfaction Survey

  • After an event, we sent out surveys to measure satisfaction. This is either entered directly by the responder into our database, or we use a third party service like SurveyMonkey and we import this data to our system (or automate it)

Mark the Source

Now that we now identified the sources, let’s make sure these sources are tied to the data.

We may have multiple donation platforms, each serving a different purpose or giving us a unique benefit or reaches a different audience.

Here is a list of possible donation platforms that a nonprofit may use at once with an example for each:

• Online Giving → Fundraise Up

• Peer-to-peer / Crowdfunding → GoFundMe

• Event Registrations → OneCause

• Matching Gifts → Double The Donation

• DAF (Donor Advised Fund)

These are all donations, but they are all different.

At a later time when we need to perform analysis to make decisions, we would be asking questions like

• Which of these platforms is bringing us the most value?

  • Highest Number of Donations

  • Largest Amounts of Donations

• Which one do we use the most?

• Which one is used the most by our audience and constituents?

To be able to answer these questions, we need to mark these donations sources; as in, when the donation gets logged in our CRM, there should be a flag or an identifier saying, this donation came from this platform.

The simplest form of logging this data is to create an input dropdown field with these values and require to have it populated when data is entered.

Create a custom field or column or use a standard field if one already exists in your CRM with any of the following names:

• Type

• Data Source

• Donation Source

• Category

• Platform

Let’s go with Donation Source for the rest of this article.

Data gets entered in one of two ways, either manually or automatically:

• When data is entered automatically such as through integrations, ask your developer to auto set this Donation Source based on the platform the donation came from.

• When entering data manually, make sure the Donation Source is a required field so users would always fill it.

Conclusion

In order to perform proper analysis on data, data needs to be entered and categorized, flagging the sources of donations allows us to analyze what platform generated the most revenue and if our campaign efforts are successful or not.

I will share with you the secrets of successful technology implementations, let’s go.

Clear End Goals / Objectives

Your goal is not to implement Salesforce, your goal is not to implement HubSpot, your goal is not to setup an amazing landing page, your goal is not the most beautiful site.

Thinking about technology usually drifts us away from our Business Goals. Remember that:

Remind yourself and the team of your goals throughout the implementation and ask this question at different milestones:

Are we on the right track towards achieving these goals?

Some example goals are:

• More Donations/Revenue.

• Spread Awareness about what we do.

• Saving Time.

Current State vs Dream State

While Dream State may or may not be feasible, it is important to articulate where we are now and where we would love to be.

When traveling, we specify point A and point B, it would not make sense to say:

Please help me travel, I need a good travel, an improved travel, let’s do it.

Well, maybe some people would do that, that would not work in Software.

Both yourself and the provider will benefit from learning about

The Current State

• Current Systems

• Current Pain Points

• Current Time Spent

• Current Amounts of Donations

The Dream State

• Less Time Spent

• More processes automated

• More Revenue

• Better Analysis and clear data.

Reverse Engineering

Many developers and builders will start building right away thinking about the beginning and then move towards the destination, a better approach is to think about the destination and go backwards.

One of the early steps of a software implementation is a design phase, this is where we plan what we will do to achieve our defined goals. In this phase, it is important to start with the end goal and then think about that one step before that end goal, then what other steps do we need to take to get to that step and repeat.

Let’s take a scenario:

Objective

We want to increase our number of donations or amounts of donations.

Current State

We collect donations using a PayPal form on our website, we also learned that many of our supporters use different methods to pay online. We ran some surveys and spoke with some of our supporters and learned that it takes them a lot of time to fill this form. Running analysis on our website, we came to learn many donors drop halfway.

Future State

Would be lovely to make it easy and convenient for supporters to donate with whatever method they prefer.

Resolution

Knowing this information, we identified what problems to fix, and what features to look for.

• More ways to donate

  • Online

  • SMS

  • In-Person

• More Payment Methods

  • Card

  • Bank

  • Google Pay

  • Apple Pay

  • Venmo

  • Wire Transfer

• Less questions on the form

See how we reverse engineer this; in order to increase revenue, we ran an analysis of the current situation and problems, upon identifying those problems, we came up with solutions to these problems, these solutions, tools and platforms will determine what to build.

Phased Approach

Never do 12-Month software implementation projects. What happens if you go live after one entire year to realize that it is missing this and that feature and it does not do this and that thing and it doesn’t meet our expectations and we keep asking where and how?!

Follow a Phased Approach instead, and always go for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Go live after every phase, collect feedback, enhance and learn for future phases, repeat.

Let’s say you have the following areas at your Nonprofit:

• Fundraising

• Volunteer Management

• Event Management

• Program Management

Instead of building all 4 in a 12-Month Project, try to do 4 Projects instead, 3 months each, go live and repeat.

After every phase, we get to learn about the new software, what we could have done better, what went wrong and make those improvements into future phases.

If you are working with a provider, you want to know if they are doing a good job or a bad job early, and the best way to know is to use the software that they built for you as early as possible.

Even within each project, break it down into smaller milestones that either you can go live with or at least you get to try and experiment as early as possible.

How is your digital transformation journey coming along?
Have you experienced failed implementations before? What were the reasons behind those failures? How did you address or fix them?

You paid for Salesforce license (Or you get 10 free licenses), you spent thousands of dollars and many months on implementation to then realize the team are still using spreadsheets.

Not just you spent so much time , effort and money for nothing, you returned to the same problems you had before

• Data scattered across sheets.

• Getting answers requires digging.

• Nothing is automated.

• No single view of constituent data.

What happened?

Why did we stop using this amazing good-looking pretty CRM we spent months building?

Before I tell you the possible reasons, you could find out on your own.

Anything else is just secondary

• Beautiful components and nice borders.

• Happy font and sporty animations.

• Features that we never used nor asked for.

The first step I would encourage you to take is to talk to the team, put on the investigation hat and let’s find out what happened. 👓

• Why did we stop using the system?

• Why did we use it first then stopped later?

• In an ideal world, what would encourage you to use the system?

• What problems did you face with the system?

• If we were to start over, what would you think we should have done differently?

The reason behind these questions is to find out what the problem is first, what went wrong.

The Plan

Upon identifying the problem, it's time to start working on a solution.

After working on hundreds of projects, I can tell you the problem is usually one or more of the following:

Missing Charts

Yes, the biggest objective of any CRM is to perform analysis, read metrics and know at a glance how we are doing.

Metrics gives you the information you need to make big decisions

• How much did we generate in revenue this year

• Which fundraise campaign was the most successful

• How many recurring donors do we have this year vs last year

• Are we growing in revenue?

• How many people attended our events?

Leadership in particular need a quick overview, leadership is looking for instant answers. If it takes us hours or days or even minutes to share those metrics, it is a problem.

No tangible outcome

If it takes me 2 hours to do it in spreadsheets and it takes me the same 2 hours to enter it in the CRM, what difference did it make. As a matter of fact, it may be taking end users more time to do the same thing in the CRM, as they have to log in and navigate a new system.

No data quality enforcement

I keep forgetting to enter some information about an interaction with a constituent

Users enter dates differently , some users type Jan, some type January, reporting suffers.

I get asked to answer 20 questions to enter a simple transaction.

No automation

• I still enter and calculate everything myself.

• I am still sending all emails manually.

• I am still setting reminders to follow up with donors.

No extra features

• I can do data in excel just fine, what are you giving me that I can't do in excel?

• Processing donations?

• Sending tax letters?

• Sending SMS or Whatsapp messages?

• A portal for our volunteers?

• What are you giving me beyond just data cells

These are some reasons users refuse to adopt a new system, but why get here in the first place

• Get everyone involved early on, from the very early discussions , before putting the first stone in this building, early feedback is best feedback.

• Let the driver be the business, not the system. List your business needs first and then find a System or build a system that checks and addresses those needs.

• Go with milestones, don’t build a massive system that takes months and thousands of dollars at once, instead, break it down into smaller milestones, build the first one, go live, collect feedback, enhance, iterate.

• Empower Superusers, a few team members must be part of the project from early days, trained and empowered, they act as the ambassadors, they talk to the team about this awesome new system, they train the team, they make announcements and they build the hype, they make it happen.

The biggest reason systems fail is not knowing what the end goal is, let’s identify the destination first, the journey follows.

Here is a quick video on how to setup and use Business Rules Engine, a very easy and clean way to create tables instead of fancy if statements or decision elements.

Let me know what you think

Salesforce MVP program is a program that recognizes individuals who contribute to the Salesforce community.

If my content—like YouTube videos, live streams, or nonprofit cloud resources—has been helpful to you, I’d be honored if you could nominate me.

Here is the link to submit a nomination

The nomination period will be open until February 7, 2025

In an effort to make it easier to submit a nomination, may I share some information that may be requested and questions you will be asked

Information About me

• Name: Islam Ayoub

• Work Email: islam.ayoub@swift-cloud-solutions.com

• Personal Email Address: devislamayoub@gmail.com

• Role: Consultant

• Product Expertise: Experience Cloud and Nonprofit Cloud

• Country: Egypt

• Name Pronunciation: is-LAHM ah-YOOB

• Primary Contribution Channels: Social and Content

• Trailblazer.me Profile Link: https://www.salesforce.com/trailblazer/islam-ayoub

• X Username: @flow_specialist

• LinkedIn Profile Link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salesforce-flow-specialist-islam

• GitHub Profile Link: https://github.com/islamahmadayoub

• Blog: https://www.swift-cloud-solutions.com/blog

• Other: (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@Swift-Cloud-Solutions

Questions you will be asked

• How long have you known Islam Ayoub?

• How do you know Islam Ayoub?

• Include any stories about how this person has personally impacted you in your life, career, and participation in the Salesforce Community. Don't be shy, tell us why this person is so amazing! If you'd like to refer to the examples below while writing your answers, please check out the Help Article

• Share a story about how this person's product expertise has helped you in your Salesforce journey. What’s something we wouldn’t know about Islam Ayoub?

• Is there anything else you would like to add?

Your support means the world to me!

Thank you,
Islam