Who are your most important people? Who are the people most likely to recommend your organization? Who can you ask over and over for help without much risk of “ticking” off (i.e., the dreaded unsubscribe)? Your most engaged people. You know some of them, but most of us cannot manage a portfolio of more than 25 to 35 people in our heads. So you make lists. But what if you could get that list from your database automatically and all the time? And what if you could dial into those at the top of your list, top 20, top 50, top 100? Or those now quite at the top yet? And easily send them email customized to them as well as your ask? I think you’d enjoy a high level of productivity and leverage!
We measure engagement in many areas: direct financial and indirect financial. The latter is “soft money,” i.e., being an influencer in a business gift, a grant decision maker, or a social fundraiser. But we also measure engagement back at the start of our pipeline: advocacy. And then at the intermediate levels of in-kind donation and volunteering. Together, these give us a pretty good view of engagement. We assigned 4 points to each for a total of 20 in the perfect fully engaged person! And we asked our database to generate the list. Here’s how…
First we decided how to assign points in each area. Not all areas have a way to get to four points right now. We’ll be working on this in future.
- Direct finance was assigned by account giving engagement score. That one was easy and resulted in 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 points.
- Indirect Giving: NPSP provides a number of soft gifts and we can find dates of the first soft gift and last soft gift. So we can assign points based on the number of gifts and whether you are “current” or not.
- For Volunteering, we basically did the same thing using volunteer rollup statistics. Once, twice, or current.
- For in-kind donations, we did exactly the same things for our in-kind donation records.
- Finally, for advocacy we award 1 point if you subscribe to our newsletters, 2 points if you are “engaged” by opening newsletter campaign records, and another point if you have referred people to us (as evidenced by a referred-by relationship to contact).
We added a short number to hold a number indicating how engaged a person is overall, including a 4 point scale in each of 5 areas: advocacy (newsletters and referrals), in-kind donations, volunteerism, and influencing donations from others (soft money).
We provided a list view for contacts selected by score greater than some level.
We provided a report that groups them by score so we could easily add people to campaigns. The report shows us that of our 10,000 contacts, most are only slightly engaged. That’s not surprising. What was awesome is that it showed us our very top tier engaged contacts. And we could have named those without all the trouble. But as we go a little down the list, we started to find names that we didn’t recognize or that surprised us. These are our hidden advocates.
Our top three levels have only 4 people in them. But the next level was 6 and the next 9 with a couple of surprises. And the next levels have more than 30 each. This is the last prospected gold!
We wrote a flow that works on one contact and assigns values per the requirements. The flow generally gets the contact, calculates the score for each of the 5 areas, adds it up, and then saves it back to the contact if requested by a parameter passed in. It also returns the value of each sub-component in case we want to calculate each one separately.
Here is how the soft money is calculated 0, 1, 2, 3. It gets the relevant soft OCR and determines how many there are. It then makes a decision on awarding, 0 or 1 points. If 2 or more then, it makes further database query to get the first and last soft OCR. Then it determines if the contact has recently made a soft donation or not based on the average time period between contributions. This determines whether they get 2 or 3 points.
Here is how engagement is calculated. First we get the records we’ll need including the most recent campaign membership for which the user opened or responded as well as the latest relationship where the contact referred someone to us. They get one point if they are a subscriber to any of our newsletters. They get another if they have opened or responded to a campaign in the last 6 months. They get one point if they have ever referred someone to us, and they get two points if it’s in the last 6 months.
We calculate in-kind and volunteerism in the same way using our Volunteer hour records. First we do it for “pure” volunteerism (i.e., no out-of-pocket value assigned) and then repeat it for those records with out-of-pocket value assigned. That’s a specific SYM customization of Volunteers for Salesforce but very simple. You may use Opportunities to record in-kind donations instead. 1 point is assigned for every participating, 2 points for at least twice, and three points if you are current as defined by the average participation rate so far. Participation rate is determined with first date, last date, and number of records.
Finally, after calculating all 5 types, the flow adds the total and saves the number back to the contact record if requested. The flow is long but simple:
We scheduled a Mass Action Schedule to create a SOQL driven update of the Contacts that have any newsletters, relationships, out of pocket costs, work hours, soft donations, or household gifts. It runs with a batch size of 100. At the time of release it’s about 8500 contacts. It runs every Sunday morning. It is scheduled to run after the Account Engagement Score since it uses the Account numbers.
