Business Analysis Skills for Salesforce Non Profit Cloud

Understand business analysis techniques, skills and the questions you should ask when deploying Fundraising Solutions in the Non-Profit Cloud with our latest blog by Heather Black. 

Join Heather as she shares top tips on Business Analysis techniques more generically and then focussing in on a specific cloud. Sign up to our Weekly Career Boost Bulletin to be notified of each release. 

Over the next 4 weeks, Heather will be sharing top tips on:

• Part 1 – We are giving an introduction to Business Analysis and Sales Cloud
• Part 2 – We are looking at the Business Analysis process and Service Cloud 
• Part 3 – We are looking at how to build a demo and Non Profit Cloud
• Part 4 – We are looking at Business Analysis documentation and E-Marketing 

At Supermums we deliver the Consultancy Skills Course to upskill individuals on Business Analysis, Change Management and Agile Project Management so these skills can be blended and delivered holistically. These skills really are inter-dependent and essential to each other to deliver a project successfully.

Heather Black is the lead trainer on this course and she has overseen over 700+ Salesforce projects whilst running a Salesforce Consultancy for 9 years. During this time she developed a suite of templates and tools to standardise the questions asked on projects to maximise the chance of success of a project and avoid the risk of a question not being asked. Find out more about the Course here. 

How to Present a Great Demo

Showing how and what a system could do for a customer really helps to generate buy-in and understanding, especially for the visual learners and communicators. They need to see and understand what’s possible to engage them in the design process. It can be useful to do an initial run through of the demo at the preparation workshop for business analysis as well as having the demo available during the discovery workshop to showcase specific functionality. Here are some of the top tips we share in our Consultancy Skills Course. We actually encourage all of our trainees to build out demo orgs on the course.

• Have a NPSP/Fundraising Demo all prepared that showcases the range of features. 
• Prepare a narrative that aligns to the customers business need and benefits they desire. 
• Input dummy data that tells a story to align to this narrative with records, reports and dashboards present useful information. 
• Personalise the Demo with their logo and brand colours to feel familiar to them. 
• Practice your Demo in advance so it runs smoothly and you build the trust with your audience. 

What Questions do you want to ask about Fundraising?

The Fundraising Discovery process could include a whole range of aspects including the following high level requirements:

Within the Supermums Consultancy Skills Skills Course, sponsored by Slalom, we provide a full Business Analysis Questionnaire for Fundraising, Online Payments and Non-Functional requirements with a presentation deck and a training session on how to deliver it alongside the technical considerations. If you are worried about what questions to ask then check out our course here. 

Here are 5 of favourite questions you don’t want to miss but there are loads more functional and non-functional requirement questions that you want to include in your questionnaire. 

• What are their different fundraising stream and fundraising teams and where are their teams and customers located globally? This will influence how many different project life cycles you will need to deliver e.g. multiple discovery workshops through to training sessions and also whether global influences are relevant such as languages and currency considerations.
• What are the pain points and key benefits they want to derive from Salesforce as a Fundraising team from different points of view – as an organisation, a team and individually? 
• How would the company measure the ROI of the Salesforce investment and how can this be measured? What are the baseline stats now and what do they want it to be in the future. It can be useful to have some example indicators here to share in case they aren’t sure.. For example, increase in online donations, increase in donor retention, increase in recurring donations. 
• How is Fundraising Performance measured? What are their key reports and dashboard requirements as they will influence how you build the system. Again it can be useful to have some example indicators here to share in case they aren’t sure. e.g. Fundraising achievements v targets, No of net new donors a month, No of one off to recurring donor conversions. 
• What is their Funder/Donor Nurture Process? Within this there will be multiple functional questions and technical considerations to ask, especially to discover whether the NPSP /Fundraising functionality needs extending to include integration of online payment solutions, event management, or financial management solutions.. This will inevitable increase time and budget for any project. 

Assess their current usage of NPSP

If the customer is currently using Salesforce then you want to assess the current usage of the NPSP – with this you are reviewing the product features being used, assessing user adoption, and level of data input and integrity . You can discover this through your BA process by asking the questions in our FREE Health Check Questionnaire and Template and to aid this you can also plug in these two FREE apps and get instant insight into how they are using the product. 

Download Supermums free Health Check Questionnaire Template.

Download Improved Apps free User Adoption Tool to discover who are your high adopters and low adopters.

Be Knowledgeable in the Product and Third Party Apps

• Complete your Non Profit Cloud Training and Certification in Advance.
• Build a Demo so you are proficient in knowing how the product works. 
• Understand the Third Party Apps that can add value to the NPSP. Here are some great ISV apps you should know about:

Create custom docs, forms, apps, e-signatures, and surveys with Titan’s full-suite of enterprise applications designed to integrate seamlessly with Salesforce data across your entire organization to extend your Non Profit Cloud Solution.

Harness the power of video in your Non Profit Cloud Solution to record events. Just tap “Record” during the service call, capture a quick video and then tag it *internal* or *client-ready* or any tag. Then let speech-to-text create automated notes, get unprecedented visibility on your field operations, and delight your customers with video-powered Service Reports.

Integrate Non Profit Cloud with Financial Software brought to you by Breadwinner.