Fortium Partners, in response to and in anticipation of our clients’ needs in a world where nonprofit relationship management is a critical reality, has developed a comprehensive Nonprofit SFDC Quick Launch Service Offering available immediately to Fortium clients.

The changing nature of relationship management

Traditionally, the fundamental focus of the small nonprofit has been to generate a commitment to its mission and to raise much need funds to make that happen. More recently, the donor experience and relationship management has become an important new source of value, and is increasing at an appreciable rate in almost every nonprofit, small or large.

Today, there is a tremendous need for nonprofits to take advantage of what is perceived to be expensive solutions when funds to do so are constrained.

The expanding responsibilities of the development function

The development department/function possesses mechanisms for acquiring new donors, building relationships, and renewing gifts. Where are the strategy, people, process and technology-managing mechanisms for our increasingly valuable donors at a small nonprofit that is constrained by limited budgets?  The Fortium SFDC Quick Launch Service Offering helps answer these and other important questions.

Today’s nonprofits exist in a world constantly susceptible to inconsistent donor experiences. The number of donors not renewing their gifts is growing and expanding at an alarming rate:

• Traditional direct mail efforts are increasingly ineffective
• Special events are great for acquiring donors but challenging to renew gifts
• Program participants and advocates want to connect with the mission but aren’t always sure why they should give financially

The need for a different approach

For these reasons and more, Fortium’s Nonprofit SFDC Quick Launch Service considers more responsive methodology and architecture for addressing this challenging environment.

The Fortium model is a comprehensive and, maybe even more importantly, a sustainable Donor (CRM) program for organizations seeking to get up and running very fast, increase engagement sooner rather than later and to take advantage of the Salesforce.com platform to “manage down” the uncertainty level. We help you discover where you are today, plan for where you want to go in the future, create real action that produces results and optimize your donor initiatives for continuous improvement.

Why a Fortium Nonprofit SFDC Quick Launch Service Offering

Fortium Partners is focused on providing executive-level guidance to nonprofits with an immediate need for transformation and support to improve donor relations and the donor experience. Fortium’s Partners have served as CIOs and/or CTOs of significant, recognizable companies and each possess 25+ years of experience helping CEOs, Boards, and Executives lead substantial initiatives and solve complex problems.

Fortium can offer our Quick Launch Service to small and mid-sized nonprofits at a well-defined, fixed-price project. As a 2-month project, a Quick Launch will help your staff and volunteers get up and running to improve productivity and make insightful decisions for your constituents. By taking advantage of dashboards and automated workflow, a consistent donor experience is delivered. The Salesforce.com platform also offers many other essential services (e.g., Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud) that can be taken advantage of over time.

Donor and grant information is the lifeblood of a nonprofit organization. These assets need to be carefully preserved, managed, and leveraged. Home-grown solutions or commercial products with limited installed base and support community introduce significant risk and limitations. A far better choice is adoption of a market-leading platform offering robust functionality and widespread use. When that use spans both the nonprofit and commercial sectors, the resulting robust pace and breadth of innovation offers significant upside value.

Salesforce is not the only strong option for consideration. However, the vendor’s commitment to the nonprofit sector, including free licensing and support for up to 10 users and a 76% discount above that make it a very attractive option from a cost standpoint. The community of third-parties providing both add-on applications as well as development and customization services is very large and growing. Once on the Salesforce platform, a nonprofit can easily and quickly expand the utility of its donor and grant data for campaigns, on-line fundraising, effectiveness analytics, etc. Much of this is supported by standard SFDC functionality, but where not, one or more third-party applications likely are available.

A nonprofit organization might consider evaluating, selecting and implementing a platform themselves, either with in-house staff, a supportive volunteer, or another vendor. A formalized offering from Fortium reduces risk, provides a clearly-defined set of objectives, and establishes a reliable price point regardless of data volume or inherent complexities.

A Summary of the Offering

For many nonprofits, management of data concerning donors, donations and grant requests is handled in spreadsheets, PC-based databases, financial accounting applications, or similar “poor choices.” Often this is a result of early practices perpetuated, even as the organization has grown.

There are a variety of donor management platforms available, for small to mid-sized nonprofits, however, the expense and complexity of adoption can be unattractive. Most of these commercial products carry licensing and support fees. Further, the majority were developed specifically for nonprofit donor management and so have a limited market and limited availability of experienced talent available to assist.

While perhaps not the only exception to this situation, Salesforce.com is a powerful option. Its widespread use in a broad range of industries and support for third-party applications embedded and integrated within the platform has resulted in a huge market for third-party products and services. From an affordability standpoint, through the Salesforce Foundation, SFDC provides its Enterprise Edition plus the nonprofit starter pack (NPSP) at no cost to qualified nonprofits for the first 10 users and at a discount of 76% for users in excess of 10. Even for mid-sized nonprofits, the users actually involved with donor and grant management may fall within the free seat count.

While SFDC is affordable, the complexity of implementation and conversion as well as understanding of best practices pose significant barriers to adoption. This is the focus of Fortium’s Nonprofit SFDC Quick Launch Service. We assume responsibility for quickly and successfully migrating the client’s donor and grant tracking operations onto SFDC. Our deliverables include;

• Discovery discussion – current state of information, major challenges, objectives (short and long term), what to expect from our initial effort, how to leverage the SFDC platform over time
• Submitting an application to the Salesforce Foundation to obtain licensing under the nonprofit program
• Reviewing and preparing client’s legacy data for import into SFDC
• Initial SFDC orientation session for client staff – intro to SFDC, how their data will appear in the platform, information stewardship once they go live
• Performing a test conversion to validate data preparedness
• Any necessary further data preparation to ensure as complete a conversion as possible
• SFDC orientation session #2 – procedural review, screen details, reports and dashboards
• Conversion into the production environment
• First week of post go-live support – calls days 1, 3 and 5 as well as on-call
• 12 months of ongoing support – weekly calls month 1, monthly calls months 2-12, response to email/vmail within 1 business day, faster for critical issues