Modelling peer-to-peer fundraising in Nonprofit Cloud

Salesforce^® Nonprofit Cloud is Salesforce’s dedicated product for organisations in the nonprofit sector. It’s a relatively new addition to their range, replacing their much-loved Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). Nonprofit Cloud has some fantastic improvements on the old data model and features and it’s a product VRP’s Nonprofit Practice is really excited about for our fundraising clients. There is an area, though, which is still not covered – or is it? Peer-to-peer fundraising in Nonprofit Cloud.

How to tackle this task is not mentioned in their documentation, or how to use the system to map fundraiser and donor data simultaneously without double counting. Salesforce has really had a think about this and has intentionally not built any feature or provided guidance due to the many ways a company may want to map or visualise this data.

But first, some of you may be wondering: “how does peer-to-peer fundraising work?”

What is peer-to-peer fundraising? 

If ‘peer-to-peer fundraising’ is not a term your organisation uses, let’s quickly explain what we mean. This is a supporter of your organisation – not an employee – fundraising on your behalf, sometimes using a giving platform (such as the popular JustGiving in the UK). 

There are two scenarios we should cover here:

1. Where the fundraising is done via a platform gives you, the organisation, access to the donor information.
2. Where the funding is done offline and you do not have visibility on who donated – only the fundraiser’s details – e.g., paid in funds from fundraising events like bake sales or galas.

Either way, what the fundraiser is doing is much like what your internal fundraisers are doing. Internally, these activities are often captured as ‘campaigns’. So, let’s start there. 

Organising fundraising via campaigns

What if for every event a fundraiser held you created a campaign? The campaign hierarchy can be used to group various fundraisers’ efforts under broader campaigns or events, e.g., the London Marathon.  We can think of a campaign as a representation of the fundraiser’s giving page. 

Admin tip: now let’s create some fields. A URL field to capture the giving page link, a lookup to the person account record called ‘Fundraiser’ and an external ID field – maybe called ‘Giving Page ID’ or just ‘External ID’. You also want ‘Target Amount’, and you could use ‘Start Date’ and ‘End Date’ as the ‘Event Dates’. Don’t forget to add a related list on the person account page layout of campaigns that they were the fundraiser for.

Donor and donation data

Now, if we know details of the donors, we can create the donor record as a ‘person’ account. These can then be added to the campaign as campaign members, letting us know that they actively supported this fundraiser for the event. 

We can also create a gift transaction (donation) record and link this to the campaign. This relationship already exists in the Nonprofit Cloud data model. 

Now, if we view the donor’s record, we can see that they were involved as a campaign member with a fundraising event and we can see they have donated, based on their gift transactions. Using the Fundraising Timeline and the Actionable Relationship Center (ARC) can make it really easy to see these relationships.

The Fundraising Timeline shown here has been configured to show that Paula is a donor related to the campaign as well as the donation itself.

The Actionable Relationship Center has been configured to show the campaigns the person is related to as a campaign member. It also relates the individuals, to show that Paula has a relationship to Barbara, who is the fundraiser.

Fundraisers and ‘soft credits’

If we view the fundraiser’s record we can see all the events they have fundraised for, but we can’t see any representation of donations they have fundraised. So as not to double count these, we can use ‘soft credits’. The percentage you credit is up to you as an organisation, but 100% makes sense. Mark them as the fundraiser. 

Admin tip: With a simple flow, you can create a soft credit for any donation linked to a campaign where the fundraiser field is not blank.

We mentioned earlier that we would consider the scenario where the donors are not known. This can be modelled either in the same way or having a holding donor record called ‘Unknown’ and still soft-crediting the fundraiser. This would keep the methodology clean. Or you can add these gift transactions to the fundraiser. The key here would be to ensure understanding that you can tell from the donation source whether these funds were a personal donation or fundraised.

Handling teams of fundraisers

In some instances these giving platforms might have pages with teams that fundraise. There are two ways we would recommend managing this: 

• If each of the teams has a separate fundraising page then you can use the campaign hierarchy to bring together the individual efforts of the team members.
• Because these donations have usually happened before, you (as an organisation) know that the person was thinking of donating. We propose using the Status field on the campaign member record to denote donors or fundraisers. All team members can be added with the status of ‘Fundraiser.’

Now, you can update your automation to soft credit the donations to all members marked as fundraisers, not just the person recorded in the fundraiser field on the campaign.

Mapping data to objects 

Mapping some of the data to all these objects can be tricky – especially if your Salesforce instance is not integrated with the giving platform. Our partner, FinDock, has a great solution called ‘guided matching’ that can take all the hard work out of loading a flat file, such as the report extract you can get from most giving platforms, into multiple related objects in the Nonprofit Cloud data model. 

FinDock also offers terrific payment solutions and giving pages for nonprofits. You can find out more about FinDock and our partnership here.

A visual representation of the data model

Below is an illustration of the data model of the standard objects included in this design. 

Hopefully this gives you a sense of how all the various elements relate to each other and interact. 

Need help with peer-to-peer fundraising in Nonprofit Cloud?

We hope this article has helped you understand the techniques and strategies supporting peer-to-peer fundraising in Nonprofit Cloud. Our team – including the dedicated VRP Nonprofit Practice – has helped all kinds of organisations to make the most of their fundraising using the power of Salesforce, and we’d love to help you, too.

Want to get up and running with Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud as quickly and cost-effectively as possible? We offer QuickStart implementations designed to do exactly that. You can download a brief, free guide to find out more. 

If you would like to dive deeper into the methods we’ve looked at here, or discuss anything else on the topic of peer-to-peer fundraising for nonprofits, make sure to get in touch!

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About the Author

Dan Collis

Solution Architect, VRP Consulting UK

Dan is a Solution Architect and Senior Consultant within VRP Consulting’s UK team. He has more than ten years’ experience implementing the Salesforce platform as well as end-to-end knowledge of Salesforce roadmap management and project delivery.