The Power of Nonprofit Cloud: Maximize Your CRM Investment

Salesforce offers two main products for nonprofits to manage their operations: Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and Nonprofit Cloud (NPC). Where NPSP is a series of managed packages, NPC offers solutions built on the Salesforce core and explicitly designed for nonprofits.

While this solution is powerful, other tools and apps exist to extend its capabilities, which allows nonprofits to further their missions by boosting engagement, optimizing donations, streamlining event management, and more. By choosing tools like Blackthorn native to Salesforce, data flows seamlessly into your CRM to keep the dataset up-to-date.

Additionally, partnerships between these products and technology consultants simplify finding and implementing the best solutions for your nonprofit. In this guide, we’ll cover the benefits of these partnerships and the top apps nonprofits can use to maximize their CRM investment.

Leverage Powerful Partnerships

As mentioned, Blackthorn offers Salesforce apps designed to help organizations better manage events and other core areas of their operations—Blackthorn partners with Fíonta, a technology consulting firm with Salesforce expertise.

Here’s what each party in this partnership offers nonprofit clients:

• Blackthorn is an independent software vendor (ISV) or product partner that offers Salesforce-native applications for nonprofits, healthcare, higher education, and public sector organizations. Blackthorn provides products to manage events, payments, compliance, and messaging.
• Fíonta is a system integrator (SI) or consulting partner that introduces and implements Blackthorn for its nonprofit clients. Fíonta is a technology consulting firm specializing in digital services for nonprofits and associations through Salesforce, UX/UI, and web development.

In this partnership, Fíonta works with its nonprofit clients to understand their technology needs and preferences. If a client needs a solution Blackthorn offers, Fíonta introduces the client to that tool and handles the more complex tasks such as implementation, configuration, and integration. The firm also provides ongoing support to ensure the nonprofit can successfully leverage the tool.

In turn, Blackthorn works with Fíonta to provide training, align on customer success goals, and more to help nonprofit clients get the best possible outcomes.

 

Benefits of Blackthorn’s Partnership with Fíonta

There are many reasons why this partnership is advantageous for nonprofit clients. Some of the top benefits include:

• More comprehensive solutions: Through this partnership, nonprofits gain comprehensive technology without having to invest their own limited time, effort, and energy into finding the best solution, migrating data, and customizing the platform.

• Complementary expertise: Each partner brings a distinct area of expertise. Fíonta is skilled in implementing and configuring Salesforce products, while Blackthorn is an expert in developing and using apps that enhance Salesforce technology. These skills and knowledge complement each other to bring nonprofits the best product and experience.

• Better coordination: Because there is a relationship between the two parties, the partnership yields better, more harmonized support, troubleshooting, and training. Additionally, both parties align on customer success, yielding more unified outcomes.

• Enhanced customization and functionality: Blackthorn offers the additional functionality nonprofits need to complement Nonprofit Cloud’s capabilities. Fíonta can tailor both Salesforce and additional apps to the organization’s requirements. This ensures the nonprofit has the best, most efficient process and technology to manage its operations and unique workflows.
• Cost-effectiveness: Leveraging the strengths of both parties helps nonprofits effectively firm up their Salesforce investment without unnecessary—and costly—trial and error. Additionally, the app is configured to their needs from the beginning, making it a valuable asset from implementation.

These benefits help nonprofits maximize their resources and work more efficiently. Combined, this allows organizations like yours to dedicate more time toward mission-critical activities.

Expand Nonprofit Cloud’s Capabilities with Blackthorn

Blackthorn’s applications are uniquely configured to meet nonprofits’ needs and supplement their existing technology. Its core solutions include:

• Events: This app enables nonprofits to manage events and registration processes for online, virtual, and hybrid events. Your organization can execute events on a local or even global level and monitor registration and attendance metrics all from the app. Additionally, it makes infusing fundraising, sponsorships, and community outreach into your event simple and easy.

• Payments: The Payments app centralizes your payment processes, consolidating transaction data from subscriptions, merchandise or product sales, and more.This makes payment processes more flexible and convenient for supporters, and you can rest assured that transactions are secure.

• Messaging: Engage your audience and deepen relationships with compelling, automated text communications. Share targeted direct messages, send bulk texts, quickly view your conversation history with individuals, and automate communications with the power of Flows. Templates with merge fields make it easy to personalize content, even on a large scale.

• Compliance: Secure customer data to protect your nonprofit’s most valuable asset—supporter trust.. This app helps nonprofits safeguard data, proactively identify and address potential vulnerabilities, and limit the possibility of human error. As a result, nonprofits can achieve and maintain compliance with payment method security (PCI-DSS) and personal information (PII).

 

Based on feedback from nonprofit clients, Fíonta can identify the organization that would benefit from these tools, implement the app, and ensure all of their Salesforce technology functions seamlessly. From there, they can offer ongoing support—for example, adjusting the technology as the nonprofit grows or adjusts its priorities.

Strategic partnerships like the one between Blackthorn and Fíonta are smart investments for nonprofits using Salesforce. They bring the right technology to the organizations that need it, leading to better outcomes for a more streamlined, positive experience.