When you consider all the donors, staff members, volunteers, potential donors, event attendees, and other people to maintain relationships with, it can get downright overwhelming. Early on, it was probably manageable to use an Excel spreadsheet or even an old-fashioned Rolodex to manage your donor data and contact lists. But now, you need something that does more than just keep your data organized.

Whether you're a small organization with just a few dozen contacts or you've got thousands of donors, it's essential to be able to keep updated contact information, monitor your interactions, track donations, and grow your relationship with individuals and groups. That's where a CRM system comes in!

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Nonprofits is a name you're likely to hear very frequently in the nonprofit tech space over the next several years.

As Microsoft's own cloud-based CRM platform, Dynamics for Nonprofits offers a new technology option for organizations of all sizes. If you're already using a range of Microsoft products (or have heard of Microsoft's generous Tech for Social Impact initiative) but haven't yet heard of Dynamics, you're definitely going to want to have it on your radar.

Out of the box, the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) offers nonprofits a powerful, scalable, and customizable platform for successful fundraising. By design, the 360-degree view it provides a nonprofit of their constituents and donors enhances an organization's fundraising efforts simply by adopting Salesforce.

What is more, a nonprofit can further optimize the Nonprofit Success Pack for fundraising by leveraging existing optional functionality and adding in some customized elements of their own. Here are our top ideas for optimizing your organization's Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack instance for your fundraising efforts:

All sorts of nonprofit organizations rely on the world’s most popular constituent relationship management platform, Salesforce, for their data and donor management needs. If your organization is already on Salesforce, you have to make sure you’re taking full advantage of this powerful CRM platform.

Plenty of nonprofits recognize the benefits of using a CRM to record, manage, and analyze their data in smarter ways, but fewer realize that using donation apps that integrate with Salesforce can help this flexible platform have an even greater impact on your fundraising and stewardship efforts.

If your organization is in the market for new online donation software, it can be tricky choosing between a Salesforce-integrated donation app and other tools that don’t integrate with Salesforce. There are benefits to each, but donation apps that integrate with Salesforce tend to win out for a few reasons. Let's walk through why, starting with the basics:

In our previous two blog posts here and here, we provided step-by-step instructions for creating reports in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack to evaluate the effectiveness of A/B tests of your online donation forms. For this recipe, we wrangle all twelve metrics onto a single dashboard so you can easily compare the performance of each form in the test.

For more background on this recipe, specifics on the A/B testing process, examples of what to test, and an overview of UTM codes for inbound marketing metrics, watch our webinar, Six Ways to Get Smarter with Your 2018 Fundraising.