Salesforce integrations can be easy or complex, depending on the needs of the organization and the breadth of the data you want to capture. We have a fair amount of experience with this kind of variety of because we work with each client to tailor integrations to their specific needs. While other fundraising software forces you into a one-fits-all plugin, we customize your integration to your particular Salesforce set up and tie it directly into the website we build for you.
Here’s what we’ve learned:
In peer-to-peer fundraising, it’s often not enough to just capture information about donors and their contributions. You also want to capture information about the individuals doing the fundraising and tie those records to corresponding donation records. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
Plan ahead
Often, information about individual fundraisers can lead you down a complex rabbit hole of campaigns, teams, soft credits, year-over-year participation, and various other forms of activity on the part of your constituents. As a result, your Salesforce setup can get messy very quickly if you don’t take the time to plot out a data architecture that will account for all of the information you want to capture.
Consider what you want to use it for
The best way to do that is to first understand what you want to do with that information. Are you using it for targeted email campaigns? For in depth data analysis of engagement level of your peer-to-peer fundraisers? To organize your day-of-event logistics and check-ins? Answering these questions will tell you what information you want to gather and how to build the structure of the relationships between data points.
When in doubt, start simple
Salesforce is a very powerful tool with a ton of functionality that you may or may not wind up using all of. Much as with many behemoths of its kind, knowing how to make the most use of it can be daunting to the uninitiated. Instead of being overwhelmed by all that it has to offer, start small and simple and build on that once you get comfortable. After you feel like you’ve understood the basics, you can dig into the multitude of features that Salesforce offers without being overwhelmed.