P2P fundraising: how to give donors the credit they’re due and track it in Salesforce
Today’s blog comes from our partners at RallyBound, an online fundraising platform that’s helping nonprofits harness the power of their networks and raise money more effectively than ever.
Most nonprofits make it a priority to track both “hard” and “soft” donations, giving the appropriate “credit” where it’s due, whether the donor is an individual, company or other entity. Wondering what the difference is between these credit types? Let’s take a look.
Hard and soft credits
Essentially, a “hard credit” is given to the donor (again, it could be an individual, company, or other entity) that gives the actual monetary donation, e.g. they make the payment. This is pretty straightforward - if a person makes a donation to a charity, they are assigned a hard credit.
Soft credits are where it gets a little complicated. Nonprofits like to recognize the people or organizations that helped influence or facilitate the donation. This could be a friend that referred someone, a company program, or, as is the case with all peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising, a donation made to a charity through the efforts of an active fundraiser or team of fundraisers. These soft credits can be tricky to suss out and associate.
This is especially true for family or company-related donations, and often requires that nonprofits take the extra step of reaching out to the person making the hard donation to ask them if they would like to additionally give anyone else recognition. Beyond the manual nature of this, another downside is that the person or group that made the hard donation might not remember how they came upon the charity or what prompted them to make the donation when they did.
How nonprofits use hard and soft credits
This would be fine if soft credits were simply about recognition, but it goes much deeper. Nonprofits use soft credit information to expand their fundraiser and donor bases, so missing out on this valuable data would be a significant loss to a nonprofit’s long-term fundraising and outreach goals. With this in mind, let’s look at how you can use Salesforce to assign these credits.
In a peer-to-peer fundraising system, all donations should be automatically assigned to a Contact (the donor) and an Opportunity (the donation itself). The donation can be related to a specific fundraiser or fundraising team in Salesforce, and everything is tracked from start to finish: the fundraiser is associated with the Contacts, Opportunities, and Accounts that represent the hard and soft credits they’ve worked so hard for.
This will provide nonprofits with accurate information for reporting and allow them to scale their next fundraising push. Nonprofits are also able to thank and build relationships with all the donors (hard and soft) that were involved. Of course, depending on a nonprofit’s needs, it may change these standard assignment rules as it sees fit.
RallyBound handles hard and soft credits (and all other fundraising data) in Salesforce with their Salesforce sync app, available on the App Exchange, or through the API. Young Survival Coalition, Homeboy Industries and AIDS Walk are just a few of the nonprofits that use the RallyBound fundraising platform together with Salesforce.
You can contact RallyBound here for more information. If you’re wondering how RallyBound can work with your current Salesforce set up, reach out to us and we’ll take a look.
