Unlocking Membership Success with Salesforce: Strategies from the Experts 

Advanced Communities is keeping its streak of hosting webinars this year. On September 12th, 2024, we had the pleasure of sharing a Zoom session with the industry front-runners: Salesforce and Fionta. 

The speaker board consisted of Basil Tilmon from Salesforce, Jenifer Alonzo from Fionta, and Rebekah Hunter from Advanced Communities. During a one-hour session, they guided our webinar attendees perfectly through the ways an organization can use Salesforce as an association management system (AMS) and why they might need an implementation partner for that.

For your convenience, we’ve put together this webinar recap with all the key moments from the event. If you’d like to jump to the original 1-hour video, here’s your cue!

Salesforce for Member Organizations 

Associations face similar challenges and priorities, such as enhancing member experiences, connecting disparate systems, creating efficiencies, and growing membership. Technology is changing the way associations operate, and Salesforce is excited to be a part of that.

Currently, many associations struggle with disparate systems that prevent effective member engagement and internal collaboration. Salesforce can solve this problem by connecting all aspects of the organization, including member experience, marketing, analytics, revenue streams, ticketing, and operations.

The Power of Salesforce Customer 360

Salesforce Customer 360 covers all sorts of industries, including nonprofit. The tools included in the Customer 360 program apply to everything that Salesforce does, from membership sales to delivering customer service to communicating through marketing tools.

How the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Helps Membership Associations 

As Basil has rightfully put it, Salesforce helps associations and membership organizations improve their customer service and communication through marketing tools. He highlighted the power of the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud in providing a connected member experience, delivering a handful of priorities and offbeat opportunities. 

Such an ultimate approach provides organizations with more efficiencies in addition to having the ability to create new automation and new workflows that do more with what they have because the silos are gone. 

What’s more, the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud provides a modern and secure platform that is constantly innovated upon through regular technology releases. It offers interoperability and integration to create a total view of members and their interactions with the organization. This enables the use of automation and artificial intelligence (both predictive and general AI) features to personalize and enhance the member experience.

The Nonprofit Cloud helps associations manage their membership by unifying and protecting data, enriching it through collaboration tools (such as Chatter and Slack), and tailoring communications to individual members. This leads to better engagement and allows employees to spend more time connecting with members.

In addition, the Nonprofit Cloud helps organizations build relationships that drive change across all of the different categories of your potential members:

• New members – accelerate the acquisition
• Existing members – deepen loyalty and engagement
• Inactive members – re-engage inactive members
• Community members – activate community

What Results Does the Nonprofit Cloud Bring?

Using the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud isn’t just going to bring you elusive results. Basil has shared the numbers with the audience. Based on them, the Nonprofit Cloud:

• Boosts time to execute new strategies by 21%
• Increases member satisfaction by 33%
• Increases retention by 27%
• Decreases costs to acquire new members by 17%

Fionta’s Implementation Overview

Being a Salesforce consulting partner, Fionta has already served 1200+ nonprofit and association clients since 2001. The company takes a consultative approach to its work with customers and ensures every one of them is heard every step of their journey. 

According to Jenifer, Fionta wants to hear from their clients about where they want to be rather than telling them where they should be, and then use their expertise to help them get there using Salesforce and AC tools.

As part of the company’s consultative approach, there is a discovery stage. It’s needed to understand the main problems that a client has to work on and for that, Fionta usually holds a survey. This shows which features or areas are of interest to the client. Thanks to the survey, Fionta clearly identifies the client’s business units and personas. Lastly, they bring it all together to start the implementation works. 

After the team’s assignment and discovery stage, there is a design part. Here, Fionta provides a customer with a summary of requirements and definitive assumptions of the project. Jenifer has also walked us through an example of the custom data migration process Fionta generally executes. 

AC MemberSmart Overview and Live Demo

Advanced Communities is the team of Salesforce and Experience Cloud specialists who build class-leading Salesforce portals. Our expertise encompasses nonprofit and commercial organizations, including the development of comprehensive partner portals with Salesforce, Experience Cloud, and our apps. 

AC MemberSmart is a membership management tool that allows organizations to manage their members to the best extent. Features included in the package are events, member directories, ecommerce tools, donations, fundraising, job boards, and continuous professional development specks.

AC MemberSmart has a user-friendly interface and is highly customizable to meet the specific needs of each organization. With the tool, organizations can create different membership levels and set up pricing structures based on the features and benefits offered to members.

We Appreciate Your Interest! 

Thank you for manifesting your interest in our webinar on unlocking membership success with Salesforce! We continue working on other massive sessions coming later on. Meanwhile, you can check out other events the AC is about to attend autumn of 2024 here and catch up with us. Stay tuned and see you next time.