Simplifying Payments for Your Members with a Unified Checkout Experience on Salesforce

On November 8th, Advanced Communities hosted an insightful webinar in collaboration with Salesforce. Rebekah Hunter, VP of Strategic Alliances at Advanced Communities, and Nicole Adair, Principal Solution Engineer at Salesforce, explored the power of Salesforce Data & Nonprofit Cloud. They shared actionable tips for optimizing member engagement using Salesforce and Advanced Communities.

This was our final webinar of the year! Read on for a detailed recap of the key takeaways, or watch the full session here:

How Salesforce is Working with Associations

Member expectations are higher than they’ve ever been. The annual Salesforce State of the Connected Customer survey backs this up, showing that 88% of customers claim the experience is as important as the product or service.

How do we make that experience great? 

With Salesforce Advantage. The framework is the surefire way to bring a personalized experience to your members, which involves four key things: 

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – the bread and butter of everything Salesforce does;   
• Data – this is what glues everything up for CRM so that you can receive a 360-degree view of your members and other stakeholders; 
• AI – a new concept that’s gaining momentum as we speak;
• Trust – the Number 1 value for Salesforce, especially with the world moving toward new technologies fast, and such fast movement might seem scary to customers. 

CRM

Nicole Adair talks about CRM as the “house” for all member information you keep in your organization. In Salesforce, you can pick up member interaction where others left off and take action in a personalized and seamless way. On one dashboard, you see member’s contact data, previous conversations, opportunities, membership data, files, and other important data.    

Data

Data is both a challenge and an opportunity for users. They want to know how Salesforce uses and handles it. While siloed data hinders business decisions and performance, Salesforce has a perfect solution – Data Cloud, which unifies all member data in one place.  

Such an add-on might be perfect for your organization if disjointed data is part of the challenge you are facing. Data Cloud lets you bring the data together, connect, harmonize, and activate it with a variety of tools, whether it’s a marketing or analytics platform or anything else.   

Data Cloud is a powerful solution. With its Unified Profile functionality, you can get a holistic view of your member activity and their engagement with your organization. What channels they are using, what they are clicking on your website, whether they are opening emails, etc. – this and other data is perfectly visible, centralized, and manageable with Unified Profile.  

AI

As Nicole aptly put it, AI is the elephant in the room. Salesforce has invested in AI and ensures the ethical and quick implementation of AI technologies. As the pace of technological change is increasing exponentially, Salesforce is committed to taking advantage of this opportunity to bring tangible benefits to its customers.

Besides, Nicole speaks about the predictive and generative AI capabilities that are important for associations and membership organizations. These capabilities include personalized recommendations, predictive analytics, chatbots, and more. 

The AI revolution is here! And now we are at the Autonomous & Agents phase – where Agents can help you assist your members and give you more valuable time with your members.

Earlier this year, Salesforce introduced Agentforce, a new feature (and a user conference) that allows organizations to augment their staff with autonomous agents that handle routine tasks like event registration. This partnership between AI and human agents ensures that humans remain in control while leveraging AI for efficiency.

Trust 

Nicole also mentions the importance of trust in the Salesforce platform. She explains that Salesforce has built-in security measures and additional tools for data protection and identity management:

• Hyperforce – the framework that allows Salesforce to be in a Public Cloud, have data residency in different countries, make sure that they are compliant, and make the Salesforce Clouds sustainable.
• Trust layer – companies can use additional tools if they want to track changes that are happening in metadata, provide identity management, monitor events, etc. 

With its robust array of tools, Salesforce lets its partners – like Advanced Communities – build on its platform purpose-built solutions for different use cases and needs for organizations. Salesforce is adamant about making this process easy and secure for both partners and users.   

How Advanced Communities and AC MemberSmart Help Memberships Operate 

Advanced Communities is a certified Salesforce product and implementation partner. We know firsthand that for nonprofits, getting people “to the door” is just the beginning—keeping them engaged is where the real work lies. That’s why we’ve built a completely Salesforce-native and AI-based AMS platform for memberships and associations. 

Our AMS platform allows users to be more engaged in their community by hosting all sorts of events (virtual, hybrid, in-person), networking with peers via a searchable member directory, simplifying donation management, automating renewals and payments for smooth memberships, and a lot more. All of these functionalities are available in the AC MemberSmart package. 

There are different challenges memberships and nonprofit organizations may encounter, like attracting & retaining members, effective member engagement, adapting to the ever-evolving tech stack, and meeting member expectations. All of them can be perfectly battled with AC MemberSmart by Advanced Communities.  

We Appreciate Your Interest!

2024 has been an incredible year for webinars at Advanced Communities! Thank you for your continued interest in our events, products, and services. Your engagement motivates us to keep providing you with valuable and relevant content.

If you missed any of our webinars this year, don’t worry! You can find all of them listed on this page. And if you have any questions about the webinar or anything else, feel free to reach out to us. Stay tuned for more exciting updates from Advanced Communities, and we look forward to seeing you again soon!