How Nonprofits can use Pardot for Moves Management
Traditionally Pardot has been marketed towards B2B companies, but we’ve seen great results from nonprofits using Pardot. The marketing automation platform allows you to engage with your donors by connecting their online activity with your digital content (such as website, emails, and social media posts) to their record in Salesforce.
Why should we use Pardot at my nonprofit?
Pardot can do wonders for nonprofits who have a moves management strategy in place. While Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) has expanded their features to benefit those using moves management, using a marketing automation solution can take your work farther.
One example of this is Pardot’s ability to score and grade your prospective donors, taking the guesswork out of how good a fit a prospective donor is for your organization.
Think of score as “how interested are they in us” and grade as “how interested are we in them.” The score is based on their online activity with your content and the grade is formed from the information you have on them in Salesforce. Adding in grading and scoring can save your team time and help you hone in on the people you really want to engage with your organization.
Looking for more examples of how Pardot can help nonprofit with their moves management strategy? Look no further. Below I’ve outline just how Pardot can help your organization with each moves management step.
The Identify stage: Welcome them
A welcome series is an email drip campaign introducing the new donor to the organization. Through your welcome series you could explain how their donation helped your mission, with content specific to their donation amount. You could also have a task automatically created to alert a staff member to call the new donor if their donation is above a certain amount. This is all possible through Engagement Studio, an extensive drip campaign style feature of Pardot.
The Qualify Stage: Build out their profile
Knowing more about your prospects (anyone with an email address in your Pardot instance) can help you further customize your communications with them. An easy way to start gathering information without pestering your prospects is to use Completion Actions and Tags.
Completion actions are automated actions taken after a prospect engages with your Pardot content including forms, emails and landing pages. One completion action you could create is to add a Tag, a keyword or phrase added to a prospect record, after a prospect clicks on topic- specific links in an email from your organization. This could help you track what your prospects are interested in without having to ask them or sort through a list of what they’ve clicked on or viewed.
The Cultivate Stage: Send them regular communications
In addition to personal calls and invitations, you should be engaging with your prospects regularly. A great way to do this is through an email newsletters and email invitations. One of Pardot’s most sought after features is email marketing.
Your organization can easily craft an email template and then reuse for each newsletter or invitation. But the features go far beyond what a basic mass email service provider can do. Pardot features include personalization, A/B testing, spam tests, and advanced reporting on your email performance. Not to mention the completion actions I talked about in the section above. With Pardot, it’s pretty easy to get your newsletter out and keep your prospect engaged digitally.
The Solicit Stage: Personalize your ask
You don’t want to just ask for any amount that comes to mind when you’re ready to ask for a donation from a prospect. Coming in at the right amount is going to be extremely helpful to meeting your prospects where they’re at and securing a donation. Whether you’re sending a membership renewal or an end of year donation appeal, Pardot can help you send out a personalized appeal with a personalized ask amount.
One way to do this is to create a custom field in Salesforce and Pardot that calculates a next ask amount. Not sure how to do this? No problem, you can find a great recipe here or follow these tips from our resident NPSP expert Sara Metheny.
The Negotiate Stage: Automate reminders to connect
Once you’ve sent out an email asking for a donation, you don’t want to just let that be the only communication you have. If your ask was attached to an Engagement Studio program you can have Pardot automatically create a task for you or your staff to reach out to the prospect and speak about the ask. And after they’ve made the donation, you can automatically increase their score and add them to a list of recent donors, helping you further see who is most engaged with your organization.
The Advocate Stage: Keep them engaged
Now that your prospect has given your organization a donation, you don’t want to forget them. You can keep them engaged with special offers and event invitations from your organization. Pardot can help you easily email or segment them by automatically adding them to a list when their record shows they have made a donation. You can even create follow up tasks and emails to be automatically created or sent so many days after their donation. Think of all the time you and your staff will save by automating your follow up!
Is Pardot right for my nonprofit?
You’ll want to consider Pardot if you are finding your current suite of marketing tools are not fully connected to Salesforce. Your organization may be a good fit to consider Pardot if you’re already working with a mass email tool, a form solution, and have experimented with segmenting your prospective donors.
Take our quiz: Are you ready for Marketing Automation?
Not sure this sounds like you? We put together an infographic to help you determine what your organization’s next step is with email marketing and automation tools.
Want to learn more about what moves management can do for nonprofits?
We’ve put together our top 5 resources to help you build out a moves management strategy perfect for your organization.
View the Moves Management Resources
