For fundraising-focused nonprofits, the challenge of tracking campaigns, engaging donors, and optimizing strategy can be overwhelming. Many nonprofits don’t realize that Salesforce Campaigns—often associated with marketing — are also one of the most powerful tools for fundraising.

In this post, we’ll explore how leveraging Salesforce Campaigns and a strategic Campaign Hierarchy can streamline your fundraising, improve constituent engagement, and enable data-driven decisions to maximize impact.

What are Salesforce campaigns, and why are they valuable for nonprofits?

Salesforce Campaigns are a versatile feature within the Salesforce Data Model, allowing organizations to track fundraising initiatives with the same level of detail that many associate with marketing. Campaigns are particularly useful for nonprofits because they allow organizations to organize, monitor, and analyze fundraising efforts.

Using Account Engagement? Read about the advantages of using Salesforce and Pardot connected campaigns in this blog post from Nick Loeser.

Benefits of Using Salesforce Campaigns for Fundraising

Here’s how Salesforce campaigns can help with fundraising efforts for nonprofits.

Track Funds Raised Across Campaigns

By using Salesforce Campaigns, nonprofits can directly associate dollars raised with specific appeals, campaigns, or events.

Gain Insights into Donor Engagement

Salesforce Campaigns enable organizations to see which constituents engage with various fundraising efforts.

Make Data-Driven Decisions

With clear data on the effectiveness of each campaign, nonprofits can focus on the strategies that drive the best results.

Building a Campaign Hierarchy for Fundraising Success

A Campaign Hierarchy is like an organizational chart for your fundraising efforts. Each level represents different campaigns or appeals, structured in a way that allows you to aggregate or drill down into specific data based on need. This structure provides a “big picture” view and the flexibility to analyze campaign performance at granular levels.

Key Steps to Design Your Campaign Hierarchy

To create a Campaign Hierarchy that aligns with your fundraising goals, start by asking yourself these critical questions:

1. What Are Your Organization’s Recurring Fundraising Efforts? Identify consistent, repeating campaigns, like quarterly appeals or specific annual events. These will form the foundational tiers in your hierarchy.
2. What Is the Timing and Frequency of Each Effort? Consider how often each campaign or appeal occurs. For example, an annual fund may include multiple campaigns, such as end-of-year and quarterly appeals.
3. Do Certain Periods Include Multiple Campaigns? Some fundraising periods may include various appeals, each targeting different audiences or using different methods (e.g., direct mail, online ads). Structuring these as child campaigns under a “parent” campaign (like “Year-End Giving”) allows you to track each specific effort while also reviewing total results.
4. Who Are the Campaigns Targeting? Determine whether campaigns are reaching general audiences or specific segments, such as major donors. For general campaigns, you may skip campaign members, but for targeted campaigns, tracking engagement with specific constituent segments can provide valuable data on who responds to what.

Tips for Designing Your Campaign Hierarchy

• Visualize your structure. Use tools like Lucidchart, a whiteboard, or even pen and paper to sketch your hierarchy before building it in Salesforce. Read Jenna Molby’s blog post on organizing Salesforce campaigns here.
• Cross-check with stakeholders. Ensure your Campaign Hierarchy aligns with other departments’ needs for data reporting and access.

Steps to Set Up Your Campaign Hierarchy in Salesforce

Once you’ve mapped out a Campaign Hierarchy, it’s time to implement it in Salesforce. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Start with the top-level campaign. Begin with a broad, overarching campaign, such as a year-based or major donor-focused campaign, and then add more specific levels.
2. Add sub-campaigns for specific appeals. For instance, if you’re A/B testing different mailers, create individual campaigns for each version. Include Campaign Members to track the results for each segment.
3. Review and reassess annually. Your initial hierarchy may need adjustments as campaigns evolve. Plan to review your structure annually to ensure it still aligns with your fundraising goals and strategies.

Maintain and Optimize Your Campaign Hierarchy

To get the most out of your Campaign Hierarchy, schedule regular maintenance. After a year of active campaigns, sit down with your stakeholders to evaluate the performance and structure.

Are there campaigns to add or remove? Have certain appeals gained traction while others have not?

Use this time to update your hierarchy so it stays relevant and effective.

TIP: Check out this Salesforce Campaign Hierarchy Report blog post from Theron Troxel on how to create a Salesforce report to show the impact of related campaigns within a campaign hierarchy.

Get strategic with your fundraising campaigns

Salesforce Campaigns offer nonprofits an organized, data-driven way to approach fundraising. With a well-thought-out Campaign Hierarchy, your organization can see which campaigns resonate with donors, track funds raised, and make decisions based on real-time data.

Ready to create a streamlined, impactful fundraising strategy? Reach out to us at Sercante to discuss how we can help you set up or optimize your Salesforce Campaign Hierarchy!

Original article: So, You’re an Organization that Fundraises? Here’s What Salesforce Campaigns Can Do for You.

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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In the beautiful sunshine and chill vibes of Clearwater Beach, FL, Salesforce community members of all kinds came together recently for Florida Dreamin’. The Dreamin’ events are community-led Salesforce conferences around the globe each with their personality. Florida Dreamin’ specifically strives to, “provide inspiration, coaching, and guidance on how to truly blaze your own trail.” 

This comes from a perceived, “gap in Salesforce education when it comes to career pathing and guidance.” From my experience as a first-time attendee, this conference lives up to its vision by serving up an abundance of project management/team dynamics & soft-skill content.  

Of the 44 sessions on offer, over half had a non-technical focus with topics spanning from career path advice and how to negotiate like a pro to advice on building diagrams and running demos that are informative and effective.

Some Soft-Skill Session Highlights

I attended many wonderful sessions across a variety of technical and non-technical topics, but wanted to highlight three soft-skill sessions in particular. Two of them I found especially illuminating and will be taking tips and tricks back to my consulting work and the third one is my speaking session, which I certainly hope provided impactful guidance to those in attendance.

5 Critical Change Management Steps for Successful Adoption

In this session, Paula Cervoni and Stacey Chery of Silverline emphasized the importance of dedicated and continual change management throughout the lifecycle of a project and into the training and adoption phase. Good change management helps get to the end goal of successful happy users which is what we all want! The change management steps Paula and Stacey outlined are:

• Alignment – to the vision and mission of the project with engagement from Stakeholders, SMEs, Executive Team Members, and end users
• Communication – a concerted strategy and communication plan to keep users informed every step of the way, 
• Training – curated applicable training paths for each user group/business role using real-world examples when possible to demonstrate utility, 
• Reinforcement – making sure that users are actively supported and know exactly who to go to when they have issues at go-live, 
• Measurement – getting some data behind adoption and success with both formal and informal measurement methods 

With these steps, you too can change manage with the best of them and help your projects succeed, not just from a technical perspective, but from an adoption and satisfaction perspective as well. 

The Surviving & Thriving Handbook for Accidental Admins 

I was honored to give my first-ever Salesforce speaking session at Florida Dreamin’ and am especially happy to be able to join in on the soft-skills theme. My session highlighted my journey into accidental adminship* at a nonprofit organization and the struggles I faced trying to be successful in my day-to-day job as well as my Salesforce Admin duties. 

To help bring myself from surviving to thriving, I enacted a number of actionable processes which streamlined my responsibilities, set expectations for my end users, and increased buy-in and end-user satisfaction. 

Suggested steps for others facing accidental adminship included:

• Establishing 2x yearly full organization Salesforce expectations and communication meetings 
• Offering regularly scheduled office hours to your end users 
• Identifying and leveraging your super users to be your champions, beta testers, and day-to-day support for other users in their departments
• Setting up a Salesforce Request queue process to allow the Admin to triage, manage, and systematically work through end-user needs and issues
• Bringing in a trusted partner, such as Sercante, for support

If this sounds like a topic you could use some support on please reach out to Sercante! We are here to help ease your Admin burden.

 * An Accidental Admin is, “someone who had not considered a career in Salesforce until some event brought Salesforce into their work life and who juggles Salesforce admin responsibilities in addition to their regular job” – Source: Salesforce Ben 

Just a Demo? Never! Always Demo Like a Pro

Jennifer Kinstle, Principal Architect at Zennify, gave a super practical guide on how to demo like a pro. She highlighted three key steps to a successful demo which ultimately can lead to increased adoption and project success. 

Her recipe for a great demo is the following:

1. Know the business  – Understand the specific audience you will be demoing to. Tailor your demo to the language and topics that will be most understood and valued by the demo audience.

2. Tell the story – A good demo has a beginning, middle, and end and works with an applicable business use case. Jennifer suggested always “share the why”  – making it clear to your audience why the demo is important to them and their business.

3. Prepare & practice – This includes preparing your space, both physical and digital to ensure there are no unexpected interruptions… error messages or chat messages, and the like.

Jennifer also advises tailoring your demo script to what you need. If you need a full line-by-line script, do that, if you do better with bulleted talking points, then go for it. She also highlighted the importance of the run-through, do the demo exactly as you would for the demo audience in the environment where you will be doing the final demo. This is a critical step to mitigate unexpected errors or bugs so you can fix them before show time.

Following the tips in this session, I feel like I will be able to improve the utility of my demos for my clients.

Florida Dreamin’ for the Win!

Florida Dreamin’ was a wonderful conference experience and a great place to give my first ever speaking session. The manageable size of the conference, beautiful location, and focus on soft skills and the Ohana spirit make this an ideal conference for everyone from the seasoned pro to the brand new trailblazer. 

Gorgeous ocean sunsets and delicious tiki drinks aside, this conference has a strong sense of community and inclusion with loads of meetups (including a nonprofit lunch meetup that I attended) and excursions. Folks were there to learn a lot, network, and have a fun time doing it, and I don’t think you can ask for much more out of a Dreamin’ event. 

Be sure to check out these other posts from my fellow dragons who attended Florida Dreamin’ with me and shared details about their favorite sessions there.

• The Art of Delivering Empathetic and Joyful User Experiences | Catherine Williams

• How to Write like a Marketer: Intro to AMPscript for Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Kayla Border

Original article: Florida Dreamin’: A Conference Where Soft Skills Shine

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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At 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday 9/13, the second full day of Dreamforce, I was sitting in front of my computer curious and a little anxious. I was using my usual evening streaming service catch up hour to tune into the live Salesforce+ broadcast of Dreamforce session, Empowering Nonprofits in Times of Change with Data + AI + CRM + Trust. 

As a former boots-on-the-ground nonprofit employee and current consultant primarily working with nonprofit clients, I am acutely aware of the ever-increasing demands on nonprofits. I understand and empathize with the daunting task nonprofits face to tell their story and convey their impact in novel ways and through a multichannel approach. 

I also am acutely aware that nonprofits are frequently hindered by low ROI on donor dollars due to the immense staff effort needed to cultivate donations. I was especially eager to hear what Salesforce has to say about the future of nonprofits on their platform and how they might help solve some of these big issues for the sector.

A Year of Change for Nonprofits on Salesforce

This has been a year of big changes for nonprofits and Salesforce. A few headlines were the sunset of Elevate and the rollout of the new Nonprofit Cloud platform. 

This session added a few more items to the list of highlights, namely the announcement of Einstein, Salesforce’s proprietary AI, for Nonprofit Cloud*. This promises to allow nonprofits to tap into predictive and generative AI to go further and dive deeper with their donor data, with their programmatic metrics and outcomes, and with their tenacious and often time-strapped staff. 

Having the ability to leverage data more robustly than ever before is further extended by the offerings of Data Cloud — Salesforce’s data management and harmonization tool. At the core of Salesforce’s Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud + Data Cloud message, they vow to help you do more with less.

* Currently, the Einstein AI features advertised in the session Empowering Nonprofits in Times of Change with Data + AI + CRM + Trust are only available as a part of the Nonprofit Cloud curated solution package.

Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud + Data Cloud Promise to Make Annual Reports Easier and Better than Ever

I am going to use the example of building an annual report (a thought that may give former or current nonprofit employees shudders of anxiety) to illustrate the key promises of Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud + Data Cloud. 

First let’s start with a short overview of what an annual report is from a nonprofit standpoint. An annual report usually serves as a physically manifested summation of the prior year for a nonprofit. They typically contain programmatic impact data (frequently with fancy charts), thank yous and recognitions of various groups from the highest dollar donors to volunteers, financial data for the year, and a call to action. They are intended to be compelling, illustrate transparency, and highlight mission, vision and outcomes. They are also an absolute BEAST to create.

Here are some of the ways Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud + Data Cloud can help nonprofits complete the daunting task of creating an annual report:

Compiling Programmatic Data and Communicating Meaning

Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud offers the ability to summarize programmatic data over a specific amount of time with consideration to the intended audience. In the case of an annual report this would look like a summary of your programmatic data for the prior year, intended for an external audience. 

Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud also allows you to choose if this summary should be long form (more detailed) or short form (less detailed) increasing flexibility to help you meet the needs of your specific annual report requirements with less manual work.

Segmenting and Standardizing People Data for Acknowledgement Lists

Data Cloud shines in its potential ability to solve the problem of disjointed data for Nonprofits. We all know the pain of manually sleuthing through and deduplicating your database and external systems of that one historical volunteer record for one of your major donors who is also an event attendee and auction lot buyer. This hypothetical generous philanthropist could have upwards of 4 records in your Salesforce CRM and connected systems! Data Cloud to the rescue! 

Through the power of the unified profile you can see all of that disorganized and disconnected data in one place. This is especially helpful in the annual report example as it allows you to be absolutely sure you are thanking and acknowledging your kind supporters for ALL the ways they support, financial contributions, event support, volunteerism through a single 360 view.

Crafting a Compelling Donation Appeal

Admit it or not, a key function of an annual report is to compel folks to donate. Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud + Data Cloud have your back in your daunting donor segmentation and compelling storytelling efforts. 

Through use of the 360 Constituent view made possible by Data Cloud, you can use Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud to segment your donors and its predictive AI capabilities to draw conclusions based on historical data. 

You could put together a segment of those donors identified as having high propensity to give, high affinity for your organization and high capacity and really hit them in the feels with your call to action. Generative AI can then help you craft an irresistible donation appeal and from there the dollars are sure to roll in to support your important work.

Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud + Data Cloud: Getting Nonprofits Closer to their Core Missions

Overall, I am cautiously optimistic that, together, Einstein for Nonprofit Cloud + Data Cloud have the potential to improve the way nonprofits communicate with their donors and the public. By automating time-consuming tasks and providing insights that were previously unavailable, or extremely time or resource-intensive to procure, these tools can help nonprofits focus on their core mission of making a difference in the world. 

I encourage nonprofit leadership to explore and invest in these powerful tools. I think they can help support and extend the capabilities and impact of a nonprofit’s greatest strength, its team.

Need help navigating these new announcements and ever growing suite of Salesforce products? Sercante is here to guide you through and help you achieve your nonprofit’s mission by leveraging the power of the Salesforce platform. Reach out!

Original article: Dreamforce 2023 Recap: Salesforce Leans in to AI + Data Cloud as the Future of Nonprofit Success

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