Not-for-Profit Navigator
With Nicole Aebi-Moyo - SalesFix For Purpose Practice Lead
One of the hardest challenges facing any organisation is how to engage with the people you work with or those that support you. Most For Purpose organisations have an external community of some sort, some have multiple. What’s the best way to engage those communities and how can technology help?
Understand the need
If you’re looking to introduce a piece of technology to help you connect with your communities, first you need to understand what it is they want from you. It’s really critical that you’re not driven by your agenda in this regard. Your driver might be really internally focused: reducing the volume of calls to your donor support services team or your client support team, for example, but if your communities want to engage with you over the phone or by email, it will take considerable effort to convince them otherwise!
You also need to recognise that not everyone is the same. Where some will love the ability to quickly and easily handle a transaction without speaking to another person, others will be looking for that personal connection. So how do you deal with this diversity of requirements?
Start by segmenting your communities and go more granular than “clients”, “donors” or “suppliers”. Hopefully, especially if you’re in the fundraising world, you’ve already done this work by defining personas.
Once you have those segments, you can start to hypothesize about what their motivations for engagement might be. For donors, that might be something as simple as getting a reprint of a donation receipt, all the way through to working with your staff to define a 5 year major donor commitment with clearly defined outcomes.
But these are still hypotheses: next you have to work out what the reality is. You could do this through surveys, workshops, phone interviews, focus groups, and so on. An external consultant would be useful here to help you define the questions you want answered and the number and types of people you need to connect with.
As always, the scale of this work will depend on your organisation’s size, scale and complexity. It will also depend on the level of engagement you already have with your communities. Some organisations already have great connections with their volunteers, for example, and might presume to know what they might want in terms of engagement, but it’s important not to assume.
Define your goals
Before you leap into defining an engagement process or two and picking the technology solution(s) to support this, you need to define what the outcomes you’re trying to achieve are. Are you looking to build long-term relationships; do you want to inspire someone to take action; are you looking to achieve a better outcome for your clients by engaging across multiple channels; and so on.
With an audience and some goals, you can then look at how to achieve them. What’s the best approach for each audience that will help achieve the goal? Map it out. Be really specific and realistic. Test things out with your communities. Don’t make assumptions based on your own personal experience: everyone is different.
Define the best approach
Now that you understand the needs of your communities, how do you meet them? Again, you can’t make assumptions! And probably most importantly, you need to give people choice.
I often have conversations with people about setting up Experience Cloud so their donors/clients/whoever can log on and do “something”. Again, this is usually very internally motivated which is not likely to result in a good outcome.
Think about your own life: outside of work, how many communities are you part of? For your own social activities, your kids’ school life, your volunteering, the For Purpose organisations you support, and so on. How many of those have some sort of technology solution that you’re supposed to engage with for updates? Let’s see, for me there’s:
Orchestra:
- web-based member-only portal. I think I logged in once. No idea where to go now if I wanted to find something out so I resort to the…
- WhatsApp groups: for announcements, general chit chat, asking questions where the answer is on the members’ portal, etc. An annoyingly busy channel, but very effective for getting information out.
Board work:
- Diligent Board which is a web based portal. Only visit it when I receive a notification by email that board papers have been published. Just being used as a glorified document distribution system.
- Email: all conversation outside of board meetings happens by email. Asynchronously and often with multiple threads. Not effective.
Medical stuff:
- Multiple physio, GP, health insurance portals to book appointments, claim benefits, and not a lot more. Lots of tech but not a lot of outcomes.
And of course there’s more adulting stuff like superfund, bank accounts, credit cards etc.
And that’s just for me. The kids have way more of course: every activity has a portal AND a WhatsApp group or two. And of course some social media that you’re supposed to be across. I can’t keep up, so what do I do if I want to find something out? Resort to sending an email or picking up the phone of course!
What would I love to see? I’d love one single channel that consolidates everything together. Personal life over here with a simple interface pulling details from all the portals and messaging channels into one easy interface…wishful thinking or does something like that already exist?!
This, of course, is just my experience and expectations. What experience and expectations do others have?
Just because you want a portal and think it would make your lives easier, doesn’t mean those you want to use the portal will agree. It might be a brilliant idea, but it might just be another channel for them to check.
“Build it and they will come” does not apply when it comes to community engagement platforms.
“So what is the best approach? Are you suggesting not making use of the technology that’s out there Nicole?” I hear you ask.
No, of course not, technology is often the best option. The question is, what solution(s) should you use, how should you choose, how do you manage the biggest challenge, change, and how do you make sure you’re still giving your communities choice?
There are no right or wrong answers sadly. Or perhaps that’s a good thing? Each organisation needs to find a path forward that’s right for them, and technology certainly plays an important role.
Find the technology to suit
We’ve recently helped one of our clients find a new volunteer engagement platform as theirs was being discontinued. They’re going through a complete review of all of their technology platforms (a true digital transformation!) so there are a lot of moving parts. They needed to focus down onto just a few key factors to determine what the best option was:
Volunteer Experience: Would it give their volunteers the same feeling of “community” their current platform had achieved? Would the volunteers feel as much ownership and control of the platform as the organisation did?
Functionality: They defined a handful of very specific functional requirements that they felt they couldn’t live without (such as being able to post videos on behalf of the CEO) and ruled platforms in and out based on these requirements.
Single Source of Truth: was it built on, or could it be easily integrated to, Salesforce?
They didn’t write a long list of complex requirements and wish list items, they kept it simple to start off with to rule things in or out quickly. Once they’d narrowed it down to 2-3 options, they then got deeper: working through in detail how the platform worked, showing it to some of their more engaged volunteers, and so on.
In the old days (like yesterday!), the mantra always used to be “build everything in Salesforce” but we don’t believe that’s true anymore. Whilst there are Salesforce solutions that offer “volunteer management”, and Nonprofit Cloud now has volunteer management capability, these solutions are typically focused on setting up shifts so that volunteers can sign up. We looked at Experience Cloud and Slack as an option, but ultimately decided that there wasn’t a valid Salesforce.
So then we focused on helping the team find a solution that would integrate well into Salesforce so that volunteers could be managed through the same engagement experience as other communities.
Your engagement plans and goals are likely to be very different to another organisation’s, even if you do similar things and want to engage the same sorts of communities. You can learn from what others have done for sure, but don’t look to choose a solution just because a similar organisation has.
On the flip side, it’s very easy to get a sense of FOMO and worry that you’ve not considered all the options, but don’t get bogged down in analysis paralysis.
Summary
Understand Community Needs First: Before introducing technology, deeply understand what your communities want and need from you, rather than being driven by internal organizational agendas.
Segment and Validate: Segment your communities granularly and hypothesize their motivations for engagement, then validate these hypotheses through surveys, workshops, and interviews.
Define Clear Outcomes: Establish specific outcomes you aim to achieve through community engagement before selecting any technology solutions.
Offer Choice, Don’t Assume “Build It and They Will Come”: Recognise that different community members have diverse engagement preferences and provide choices. A new platform won’t automatically guarantee adoption.
Strategic Technology Selection: Choose technology based on defined goals, volunteer/user experience, core functional requirements, and integration capabilities (e.g., with Salesforce), rather than simply copying other organizations.
If you would like to have a chat with me about how to choose your technology based on your defined goals, feel free to reach out I am always happy to help: [email protected]
Until next time,
Nicole
Useful Resources
Tax appeals: what makes your donors give? Check out this latest report from the Institute of Community Directors
Information about Free AI Consulting from InfoExchange
Check out Guy Fisher’s newsletter that has all the details from Salesforce about latest releases and more.
Upcoming Events to Attend
F&P Events for a year of great fundraising conferences
For Purpose Alliance have a range of events and masterclasses throughout the year
Australian Salesforce user groups
If you use Salesforce and you’re not part of a user group, you’re missing out! There’s over 30 groups in Australia and New Zealand alone, and many now meet online so there’s no excuse for not joining in and finding out more.