Plutus Wins Fonteva "Surge Award"

Overview Hasbara Fellowship, a Jewish nonprofit organization that takes Jewish students to the holy land to better connect with their heritage, was looking to better manage the various components of the application process. In order to attend the trip, students need to apply to the program, filling out necessary schooling and family information. The organization then reviews the application, approves or denies the student applicant, and then notifies them of their status. Once the student has been accepted, they then have to fill out further forms and provide additional information in order to attend the trip. All of these steps were previously conducted manually, creating time-consuming and unnecessary work for the organization’s team. Using Salesforce and Formstack, we were able to generate a seamless application process using packages that integrate the entire trip process within a single cloud-based system for the organization. Challenges How do we streamline the application process of students traveling abroad? This organization had a number of issues with their original application process. Previously, the organization had to manually email back and forth with applicants in order to provide applications, approve of applications, provide necessary forms and documents, and obtain trip payments. Staff members would manually have to originate and distribute acceptance or rejection letters and necessary trip forms. They would send out individual Stripe invoices to each of the students. All of these steps created unnecessary problems for the organization’s team as they were having to deal with these issues for thousands of applicants every year. This type of manual process enabled a high margin of error and is not work you want your team to be laboring over. Solutions Using Salesforce and additional applications, Plutus was able to create a workflow to meet Hasbara’s needs. Salesforce Salesforce is a cloud-based CMS software that allows for organizations to simplify the management of their memberships, fundraising, marketing, analytics, and so much more. While Salesforce’s original design was for for-profit groups, they have since created a variety of success packages for nonprofits and associations to utilize Salesforce’s unique capabilities.

Executive Summary A Christian nonprofit tasked Plutus with curating a strategy to better integrate and streamline their donor prospecting and funnel process with their Salesforce CRM. The organization wanted to be able to automate the wealth screening of new donors and the process of allocating and aligning those individuals to the different donor officers. To accomplish, Plutus utilized iWave and the Salesforce platform to create an automated scanning and pipeline distribution process. This strategy allowed the organization to have better insights into new donors, have fundraisers spend more time on raising funds and less time on research, and increased outreach to high-value prospects. This case study will illustrates the ways in which nonprofits can utilize the powerful combination of Salesforce and iWave to take their fundraising to the next-level. Challenges The organization faced a number of challenges with its original process. They had no way to identify wealthy donors without manual research, sort prospects and current donors by different levels and pipelines, and distribute these donors to specific development officer portfolios. These processes were not only inefficient in their original state but also hindered future growth as the organization sought to dramatically increase the scale of its small and mid-level giving operation. Solutions Plutus Plutus is your Nonprofit Success Agency, founded with the purpose of helping nonprofits and associations adopt the Salesforce platform to unify fundraising, memberships, events, and program management, and provide a 360 overview of the individuals your organization interact with. Plutus co-founders have extensive experience working with hundreds of not-for-profit organizations and are proud to have completed over 200 projects — from small configurations to large implementations from legacy systems. Plutus advised and created the strategy to help the organization meet its ambitious goals. Salesforce Salesforce is the world’s leading customer relationship management platform for nonprofit organizations seeking to utilize best-in-class technology. This multifaceted CRM tool allows organizations to manage their donors, constituents, and partners in a strategic and efficient way that can be customized to your processes and needs. Salesforce also integrates with thousands of different products on its app exchange as many leading technologies build a connection with them to gain access to their significant customer base. iWave iWave is a leading fundraising intelligence software that helps organizations find ideal donors with pinpoint accuracy, cultivate strong relationships, and build a better tomorrow. iWave offers a seamless user experience that helps even the smallest not-for-profit organizations gain actionable insight into their existing donor network. iWave also has an integration built into Salesforce so there’s no need for manual data entry or tedious upload via spreadsheet. Strategy Plutus and the nonprofit organization collaborated together to complete a full summary of their requirements and needs around the strategy and solution design. Through this setup, Plutus identified the workflow, identified donor buckets that needed to be implemented, and crafted the customization for iWave to automatically scan new donors being stored in the Salesforce platform. Plutus led the implementation of iWave into the client’s Salesforce environment through iWave’s managed package that installs with ease. Next, Plutus created a process using custom development to automatically wealth-scan donors as they came into the database. This process also wouldn’t scan old donors in order to preserve and efficiently use iWave scanning credits. Following this, Plutus created an automation to assign donors to specific donor “buckets” based on each individual’s estimated giving capacity. This tool was built using native Salesforce automation logic and data being pulled into Salesforce from iWave’s powerful scanning technology. At the end of the process, each donor was assigned a wealth score and donor funnel with no human interaction required. New donors and their recommended buckets were automatically sent to a staff member on a weekly basis using Salesforce reports.

Overview Salesforce is the best customer relationship management (CRM) tool for storing and managing all your organization’s data. The software easily allows you to store all types of data on constituents, donors, members, and grassroots supporters. But what if you want to visualize your and see that? Well, Salesforce has you covered with its powerful dashboard creation feature. This year, Plutus created dashboards for one of our nonprofit clients to help them better visualize and understand from a high-level their network data. Dashboard Generation General Displays Plutus helped this nonprofit organization create a dashboard to visualize their most important network information from the past year. In this dashboard, the organization is able to clearly see the numbers of new members added, key demographics of members, and alumni added. This information selected to be displayed was specifically chosen by this group, and can be altered for whatever is important to your organization. Salesforce also gives you the power and tools to track goals which can be set by your organization. As seen in the chart below, some of the numbers are green, yellow, and red. These colors show the organization’s progress towards its goals for certain segments of its network. As you can see below, the organization met some of its goals, nearly met others, and came up short on some. This high-level display can help executives and team leaders know how close they are to certain goals.

Overview Salesforce’s reporting tool is a sure-fire method to bring your organization’s data together in a viewable manner. Whether you need to collect donor data from the past year or view new membership information from a recent event, reports are the easiest way to gather and easily digest those figures. Recently, Plutus was even able to use Salesforce Reports to bring some Christmas cheer by helping one of our clients build a report of key Contacts for their Christmas card mailing list. Read through this short case study to get the rundown on what we did! Challenge A Plutus client that focuses on advancing democracy in the United States, reached out asking for help building their annual Christmas card list. In past years, this group would manually curate their list through a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and add individuals and their addresses to that spreadsheet one-by-one. This process was tedious, time consuming, and missed key data capture as some new addresses were not being updated back into Salesforce. This list also took many hours to develop instead of being able to be quickly pulled from the database. Solution Plutus was able to streamline this process by first performing some basic data clean up and then creating fields to track Christmas addresses for each Contact to allow for a single report for the organization to conduct the mailing. First, we pulled a comprehensive list of their data from Salesforce in order to perform a v-look up from Excel to match as many Contacts and Accounts as possible. Plutus was then able to match some Contacts and Accounts with their respective IDs to upload a portion of the addresses from the excel file. The rest of the data was then cleaned by hand in conjunction with the organization’s staff.

Overview Salesforce can be used to do almost everything for nonprofits and associations. Nonprofits can track key donor data and demographics, and associations can track memberships and events. But have you ever wanted to generate documents directly from Salesforce with your data? Maybe a year-end report or invoice? We’ve got just the tool for you and it’s called Apsona. Apsona works by pulling information across multiple reports throughout your Salesforce community and uses that information to generate documents with ease and speed! This case study will explore the ways in which Apsona can efficiently and effectively expand your Salesforce capabilities. Document Generation From certificates, to end of year statements and everything in-between, Apsona makes creating custom templates easy and helps turn your Salesforce data into beautiful professional looking documents. Here are a few examples of Apsona documents that we’ve built for our customers. Donor Biographies Plutus has used Apsona to create simple and clean donor briefing biographies for our clients that conduct major gift fundraising. Traditionally, organizations would have to filter through all of their donors individually, gather their “specific information that is not included in the filters within their profiles,” and then one by one generate bio documents for each donor. But with Apsona, our clients generate these briefings on mass with the click of a button. Here’s a simple example we’ve used for showcasing purposes:

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Criss Rennie White, Vice President of Business Operations, EnerGeo Alliance

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