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Salesforce Agentforce: How Nonprofits & Educational Associations Can Do Greater Good with AI

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This isn’t yet another article about Salesforce Agentforce – a new tech that’s on everybody’s lips. We decided to move away from the all-too-familiar strategy where an author plainly explains what is and calls it a day.

Instead, we took a different approach.

How can Agentforce assist organizations in the nonprofit and educational sectors? Are there any special instructions for that? This is our agenda for today.

So if you are a nonprofit or an educational org using Salesforce and thinking of boosting your operations with Agentforce, you’ve landed on the right article.

What is Salesforce Agentforce?

Salesforce Agentforce is a new layer within the Salesforce Platform that was first introduced in September 2024 at the Dreamforce conference as part of Salesforce’s Service Cloud.

You can spin up AI-brained Agentforce agents with just clicks, not code, and set them sailing autonomously. Or, use some of the many pre-built templates. Create a banking agent, a retail agent, a finance agent, a healthcare agent, or any other. This is an Agentforce Service agent on the Salesforce website:

Salesforce Agentforce

These autonomous agents work together with human ones by taking care of customer interactions, evaluating user queries, routing customer cases smartly, scheduling meetings with customers, gathering unstructured data in one space, and pulling relevant data to make informed decisions.

All in all, agents execute tasks related to marketing, service, sales, or even resolve compliance-related queries. All of it is done intuitively and conversationally.

Inside the Agentforce’s Brain

Agentforce is a suite of tools that involves pre-built Customer 360 agents, an AI-powered agent Builder, Atlas Reasoning Engine (that autonomously analyzes data, makes decisions, and completes tasks), and built-in Trust & Guardrails.

When you create your service agent or any other using the Agent Builder, you provide certain topics, and natural language instructions that would prompt your AI agents (aka apps) to complete certain business tasks. That is, you specify the agent’s role in the Prompt Builder and ask it to take action.

Just imagine that your operations agent can comprise all these characteristics:

  • Easy to deploy
  • Data Cloud integration
  • Customizable
  • Secured with the Agentforce Trust Layer

These autonomous agents process the info and deliver the best possible semantics based on the Customer 360 metadata. They are ideal for handling high-volume customer interactions across multiple channels (chats, emails, phone, etc.).

Play around in the Agent Builder, map out your agent’s plan, and don’t be afraid of oversharing your trusted data: Salesforce puts a premium on security.

Strategic Benefits Salesforce Agentforce Provides for Nonprofits & Education

Salesforce Agentforce can not only actively drive customer success but also serve as an analytics agent for nonprofits and educational institutions. As the recent Capgemini stats show, 82% of mammoth companies plan to use AI agents in their work, which heralds untapped opportunities for Agentforce. Think of it as an ally to support mission-driven goals, elevate customer satisfaction & engagement, and fuel operational efficiency.

If you are still new to the concept, check out the world’s first agent ecosystem – Agentforce Partner Network. This is a network of partner companies that build new third-party AI agents with the Agent Builder and already benefit from them. Agentforce Partner Network includes Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM, and a lot more.

Now, let’s get back to what strategic advantages you as a nonprofit or educational organization can get using those intelligent agents:

  • Optimizing resource allocation for mission-critical engagement: for organizations in your sector, resources are often limited, and time spent on administrative tasks casts a damp over direct impact. With autonomous AI agents, you can automate routine tasks, such as event registrations, managing inquiries, and donor/volunteer/student requests, so that staff focuses on high-impact activities.
  • Deepening community engagement with AI-powered personalization: educational institutions and nonprofits thrive on strong relationships with their community members – whether that’s donors, partners, students, or volunteers. An Agentforce service agent leverages AI-driven insights and harmonizes customer data, which results in personalized interactions across channels. This ensures that each community member feels valued and heard. AI agents can help you deliver tailored responses based on historical interactions, behavior patterns, and preferences. This is what makes human-centered experience actually human.
  • Empowering AI Agents with real-time data and context for wiser decision-making: context is crucial to delivering effective support. A student struggling with coursework or a donor interested in a specific program needs responses that reflect their unique history. Autonomous AI agents are granted real-time access to comprehensive customer profiles and pull in the most relevant data from various Salesforce existing tools. This approach creates a holistic view of each person.
  • Streamlining complex multi-channel communication seamlessly: how often do you interact with people across multiple channels – email, social media, phone, chats? I bet that’s a lot. However, cohesively managing these interactions might pose a challenge sometimes. To overcome that challenge, your Agentforce agent can use a unified interface for omnichannel support and answer queries no matter how they come in.
  • Boosting volunteer & donor retention with proactive communication: this aspect is central to the long-term success of nonprofits and educational organizations and engagement is key to maintaining customer relationships. With a sleek low-code Agent Builder, you can design prompt templates, add some of the most common service requests, and let your agent do its magic. Automate follow-ups, event reminders, and ‘thank you for being our member’ messages. Plus, an Agentforce agent will help you reach out proactively by triggering automated messages based on specific behaviors or milestones (for instance, after a donor makes a contribution or a volunteer completes a certain number of hours).

Salesforce Agentforce: Top 6 Use Cases for Nonprofit & Education

Writing natural language instructions for Agentforce agents to complete business tasks is only half the battle. The rest of it hides in how exactly you do that, what situations you teach agents to read, and what data you add to those instructions.

To provide you with a massive head start, I’ve assembled several use cases in which Salesforce Agentforce can help a nonprofit and educational organization like yours, benefiting both your staff and your community. These are just the most common examples – you can go further and give your agents additional abilities.

Use Case 1. Automating Volunteer Onboarding & Training

Let’s assume you work at a nonprofit that organizes large-scale community outreach programs and struggles to manage its growing volunteer base. This leads to inefficient scheduling and confusion about volunteers’ tasks.

With Agentforce, new volunteers can receive an automated series of emails with training resources, onboarding documents, role descriptions, and orientation schedules.

For instance, if a newcomer is assigned to work with a community food bank, they could automatically receive training materials on food safety and handling before their first shift. Or they can get emails with links to complete training modules and watch some videos.

Speaking of shifts, AI agents can automatically assign shifts to volunteers based on their skills and availability. What if a volunteer cancels their shift at the last minute? No worries! Agentforce uses its AI brain to identify and notify the most qualified volunteer available to take over.

After an event or a shift, Agentforce agents can prompt volunteers to fill out feedback surveys. This data can be used to generate real-time reports, helping you to track volunteer performance, customer satisfaction, and areas for improvement.

Use Case 2. Assessing Student Knowledge

Agentforce can transform how educational institutions assess student knowledge and learning progress.

Let’s say a high school uses a blended learning model, combining classroom teaching with online resources but lacks enough staff to assess student progress dynamically.

Agentforce can recommend tailored learning modules based on a student’s performance in initial assessments. Thus, a student who excels in reading comprehension might be directed to more advanced literature, while a student who struggles with math might be directed to remedial content.

The system can assess whether students are missing core knowledge or skills by evaluating quiz results, homework completion rates, and participation in class activities. Agentforce identifies gaps (like a student who is struggling with multiplication) and can automatically trigger alerts for tutors or suggest additional resources.

Use Case 3. Aligning Nonprofit Investors with Startups of Their Interest

Suppose your nonprofit works on climate change issues and wants to match investors with promising startups to drive global change. With an Agentforce AI agent enabled on your platform or a Salesforce Experience Cloud site, you can guide possible investors to support your cause and onboard them with your organization.

They just write in the chat ‘Hi! I am an investor. Can you provide me with steps to onboard with [your company]?’. From there, the onboarding steps may vary but let’s stick with these ones.

The investor might fill in such data as their personal info, professional background, investment thesis, investment track record, collaboration preferences, and strategic contributions (you let the investor choose the area of mentoring a startup on business development, marketing, sales, tech, etc.).

Using the information given by the investor, Agentforce AI helps you analyze this data and recommend the most suitable startup, book a meeting with a startup of their choice, and streamline the investment process by permission-based data sharing.

Such a system may work the same way for startups. It can provide the most suitable investor for their needs. This way, you improve collaboration and matchmaking and deliver the greatest experience to both parties.

Use Case 4. Coordinating Various Types of Events & Fundraising Campaigns

If you’re hosting an annual fundraising gala to support your mission, Agentforce can help manage ticket sales, track donations, and communicate with attendees.

Agentforce can integrate with payment processing systems to allow donors to make contributions directly from their email or through a customized donation or event page. Which, by the way, you can design from scratch with the AC Events Enterprise app by Advanced Communities. When a donation is made, Agentforce automatically updates the donor’s profile in Salesforce, which lets you track the info in real-time.

What about the overall donation progress? Was it not what you expected? Thanks to the improved abilities, AI agents can identify that donations from a specific geographic region are lower than expected, trigger an email campaign for that region, and encourage increased participation.

What if your gala event has already started but a donor/attendee came without their ticket? Agentforce helps here too. If you have an agent on your website, they can type in “Hey! My name is [X] and I am visiting [X event]. Though I don’t have my ticket with me. Can I please get it here?“. Based on the donor’s and event name, Agentforce pulls a related record in your org, and sends the ticket right in the chat. Convenient, isn’t it?

You don’t even have to worry about event follow-ups, Agentforce can do its magic. Not only it sends automated confirmation emails with details about the event (location, time, special guests) but also triggers a reminder email encouraging them to complete event registration. Do you have a hybrid event? Agentforce can add Zoom links to that email or other virtual attendance emails.

During live events, Agentforce can enable real-time Q&A and polling. Event attendees just submit questions for questions via a chat or participate in live polls, with results instantly displayed. These interactions are immediately captured in Salesforce, creating insightful data for future engagement and improving customer success.

Use Case 5. Supporting Students’ Admissions

Suppose you are a large university and it’s admissions season. You know your way around Salesforce, use it as a CRM and that’s it. However, it’d have been nice to somehow manage a flood of student inquiries during the admissions cycle and want to streamline the application and enrolment process.

Prospective students can contact Agentforce through multiple channels, such as emails, chat, phone, and social media, and everything will be centralized in Salesforce. For example, when a student lands on your Experience Cloud site, engages with one of the Service agents, and writes something like “Hi! Can I please get course prerequisites?”. The intelligent system will recognize the inquiry thanks to natural language processing & Atlas Reasoning Engine and route the case to the admissions team. Can your service reps be so dextrous?

As Agentforce has access to your Salesforce CRM data, it can perform personalized admissions. Say, a student has been accepted but some critical documents are missing from their account. Agentforce steps in, analyzes the data, and sends a tailored email to that student with a list of other docs needed. A perfect example is College Possible which is using AI agents to guide college coaches to better serve students with resources and deadlines.

Agentforce can be trained to track the process of each student’s application, ensuring that no steps are missed. If a student hasn’t completed a required part of the application (like submitting a school certificate), they can be automatically reminded.

You can also train your agent to send students automated reminders about upcoming deadlines, meetings with academic advisors, or counseling appointments.

Use Case 6. Matching Donations to Those in Need

How many unsold, unused goods are there and how do people usually manage them? Imagine that your company helps thousands of customers return their goods and give them a new life by repurposing them to communities in need. How does Agentforce fit in?

Suppose you have a new Opportunity in your Salesforce org. Ask Agentforce to summarize it and supervise the distribution of some essential items. A split of a second – and Agentforce comes up with a summary for this very Opportunity, how much funds were gained, what the focus is (for instance, disaster recovery needs), what upcoming events are connected to it (like a pickup at a warehouse), and what open tasks there are (like matching the donation to a nonprofit partner).

The agent listens and matches the perfect nonprofit based on the focus area. No manual operations, no water-logged process – everything is done manually. Agentforce does the heavy lifting pulling out the right data so that human agents don’t have to. This will allow your employees to focus on critical frontline responses.

Final Thoughts

We step into a new era of AI with Agentforce in charge. Numerous organizations have already dipped their toes into what the system provides. Hopefully, you want to do that too after reading the most common use cases! Yet, there are dozens of them, you just have to align them with your mission.

Feeling overwhelmed by the new Salesforce Agentforce? Don’t be! We at Advanced Communities know our way with all things Salesforce and will be excited to lend you a helping hand. Just contact us and let’s have a chat.

FAQ

1. What is Agentforce in Salesforce?

Agentforce agents are a new realm in customer service and interactions. Agentforce is Salesforce’s proprietary system which comprises the best of Salesforce – human agents’ behavior and the ability to pull in CRM data and process it in the right way. It represents a suite of tools with pre-built Customer 360 agents, an AI-powered agent Builder, Atlas Reasoning Engine (that autonomously analyzes data, makes decisions, and completes tasks), and built-in Trust & Guardrails.

2. Is Agentforce Free?

Agentforce is now free for all existing Salesforce customers. You may need to pay for upgrades as you progress with conversations. A free plan includes 1000 Agentforce conversations, 250K Data Cloud credits, as well as Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce tools.

3. What is the Difference Between a Chatbot and Agentforce?

The difference between a chatbot and a Salesforce Agentforce is vivid. On the one hand, a chatbot is an automated tool to handle simple customer questions and deliver instant responses with AI-powered language models. It can operate autonomously on a website or within a mobile app 24/7. On the other hand, Agentforce in Salesforce is a comprehensive suite designed for service agents, helping them manage and resolve more complex customer issues with omnichannel support. It also works autonomously, enhancing human agents’ productivity, collaboration, and case management.

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