The second annual Salesforce.org Nonprofit Summit took place virtually from May 17-18 2022, bringing together thousands of trailblazers across the world to connect and learn together.
If you missed it, you can still signup to view virtual content.
In my role as a Community Group Leader for the Midlands (Virtual) Nonprofit Community Group, I was fortunate enough to be one of the eighty people invited to Salesforce Tower, London, to attend the Nonprofit Summit watch party. This brought together Salesforce Partners, Staff and most importantly Nonprofits, with elements of theatre-style viewing of the main event, breakout sessions led by people in the community and networking.
With more than 30 sessions, over 5 channels, plus the live content, here’s my overview of some of the highlights of the event…
The virtual event was hosted by nonprofit rockstar Joan Garry, who introduced us to the virtual sessions. Joan described nonprofit #collaboration like nothing in the corporate world – and she’s right – we were about to see nonprofits working together and sharing their solutions on how Salesforce helps them work towards their mission.
The Main Stage – Virtual
Joan introduced us to Mary’s Meals, who support worldwide school feeding programmes. Their mission is to ensure that every child in the world gets one good meal in their place of education. Currently, they feed over 2 million children a day. Mary’s Meals have used Salesforce to centralise data, allowing them to connect to their supporters, with a 360-degree view. This allows them to have authentic and genuine connections with their donors. Mary’s Meals came two brother’s jumping into a van to support people impacted by the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This has parallels to the war in the Ukraine, so the question from their CEO is what incredible organisations might come from the Ukrainian crisis? This left us all with food for thought…
Breakout Collaboration Session
Next up was a breakout session hosted by Alex Day from the Big Give, the leading online match funding platform. They are ‘matching donations: multiplying impact’. The Big Give use a mixture of Sales Cloud – for customer data, reports and dashboards (allowing real-time tracking of campaigns), case management for inbound comms (instead of a messy Gmail inbox) and opportunities for matching funding pipeline. They use Experience Cloud for their portals for Charity and Funding Partners, taking advantage of login authentication, minimising the load on their team by providing a space for charity onboarding, hosting their applications and giving the right access, at the right time, to customer data – allowing the charity to see their own analytics. They also shared how they keep their team lean by utilising TestingBot for automated testing…pretty cool right…
MyClubHub powered by Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
Back with Joan Garry, where we heard from Boys and Girls Clubs of America. They have launched MyClubHub powered by Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. This allows them access to real-time data: how many kids are attending? which programs they are attending? what are their achievements? And most importantly which programs are having the greatest outcomes? They can use this insight to develop and scale those programs having the greatest impact. You can find out more about this in their customer success story.
Our afternoon breakout session was hosted by Oxfam, whose session was focused on how they managed such a large volume of data, especially when they have to consider Salesforce storage limits, Marketing Cloud contacts and, most importantly, data cleanliness. They shared their strategy of archiving Salesforce data with Odaseva and utilising a data lake to store older data, for example for donors who have not given for 5 years. They demoed how they use DemandTools to merge duplicate records (both manually and automatically) and AddressTools for data hygiene. It’s amazing to see how technology can help this powerhouse of a charity keep its data clean and useable, can you imagine handling that in Spreadsheets?!
You can find out more about Odaseva Oxfam Story here.
Measuring Impact
Our final live speaker was Melodie Kinet, Sr Manager at Salesforce for Global Impact Innovation Strategy. Melodie covered the fundamentals of impact, and for this I am going to share my notes…
- What is impact? The change in the world because an organisation exists.
- What are the differences between outputs, outcomes and impact?
- Outputs and Outcomes can be observed and counted, but Impact is estimated.
- Outputs and Outcomes: How many people run the race? How many finished?
- Impact: How many finished who wouldn’t have otherwise?
- Impact management is continuously improving programs for greater impact.
Crucially, foundations and funders want impact metrics, which is why it is so important to have reporting and analytics – plus those estimates of impact – to be able to share with them. There are some great resources for learning more about impact metrics, including the Accelerate Your Mission with Impact Management on Trailhead, and many Salesforce.org blogs, including How to Right-Size Impact Management for Your Organisation. Salesforce.org also hosts a series of impact cohorts, speak to your Customer Success Team to find out more.
Time for Home and Virtual Day 2
After a great day at the tower it was time for home…and back into my office for the second virtual day full of hands-on training, such as Reports and Dashboards, and the eagerly awaited Nonprofit Cloud Roadmap. The roadmap shows that focus continues to be around building relationships, building change, with a focus on data-driven, relationship-centric, and connected solutions. 2022 will see Einstein for Nonprofits with Predictive and RFM Metrics, deepened Marketing Cloud for Nonprofits with the future focus on AI-driven Major Giving, Impact Data Model and Metrics for Impact and Program Success, and further collaboration tools for nonprofits with Slack.
Final Thoughts
In summary, the Nonprofit Summit was a fantastic way to see how Salesforce can empower Nonprofits to achieve their mission, highlighting the benefits of the Trailblazer Community to bring together likeminded individuals to share and learn from one another. A big thank you to everyone at Salesforce.org for a fantastic event, and to the Salesforce Customer Success EMEA team for hosting the watch party (and for permission to use the official photos in this blog!)
