Call our team 0207 526 9201

Home » Insights » Top 5 Pardot Tips for Nonprofits

Top 5 Pardot Tips for Nonprofits!

Safiyyah Gareeboo Pardot expert

Safiyyah Gareeboo is a Pardot expert at Cirrico, she has run large Pardot and Salesforce implementations during her career. Laura interviewed her about what nonprofits can learn from her experience, and about working smarter with Marketing Automation.

Safiyyah, as a Pardot expert what would you tell nonprofits about the top 5 ways they Pardot can be used across their work, and how it integrates with other technology they may be using?

Fundraising
Pardot is part of the Salesforce platform so you can integrate this with payment tools and fundraising pages that your team and constituents are already using. Data from systems like JustGiving or the donation page on your website can be pulled into Salesforce and recorded against donors. Once you have those connected, it’s possible to send emails to thank donors or fundraisers and even put them on journeys with a series of emails and actions within your organisation.

Pardot could allow you to do something like this – once someone has completed a sponsored marathon, send them a thank you email with dynamic content that reflects the amount raised and information about the event. If they have raised over a certain threshold, send an email to your Head of Fundraising to call and personally thank them. You could then use this data to send them on a bespoke journey ahead of next year’s marathon, with links to fundraising resources and tasks for your fundraising team to reach out to people who sign up.

 

Events
Tools such as Eventbrite, Eventable and webinar tools like Zoom, GoToWebinar and more can be used alongside or integrated with Pardot. These may be tools your Events team use to collect registrations and host virtual events, so bringing that data into Pardot allows you to do much more. These can be simple things like email reminders or follow up journeys, but in the last couple of years Salesforce has really enhanced what can be done here. My personal favourite use is by making the most of the Campaign object, which is built to track engagement with a range of marketing initiatives and facilitate reporting. Pardot and Salesforce could enable an Events team to see how much was raised from an event by linking donations to a Campaign record in Salesforce. I could talk loads about this but I will stop there for now and would recommend this Trailhead module as an introduction!

 

Volunteer Management
This is usually a great use case for Engagement Journeys! If you have an onboarding series of emails or tasks that volunteers need to complete, then managing that in Pardot can make things much more streamlined. A Volunteering Team could map out the emails, actions and trigger specific events ahead of time, so that when new recruits are onboarded, they can be added to this journey and ensure that they get all of the information. The great thing about Pardot is that you can view reports on engagement like clicks and file downloads, so if there is key information which people need to read, the journey can send them reminders until they have! If someone doesn’t engage with the online content, you could create a notification or task for the team to speak to them in person or over the phone instead. This can save time and also provide a good record of key tasks being completed as required.

 

Email/ Donor Journeys 

I’m sure you’ve already noticed, but Engagement Journeys are my favourite feature in Pardot! That’s a bit of a cheeky favourite to have because really, they are pulling from every other feature, so I’m having my cake and eating it here. As we’ve seen, they can be used for a few different things but often when I see clients dipping their toes in, it’s with email journeys. In those, I love teaching clients how to use Dynamic Content, which is a feature that shows different content depending on who is viewing it. For example, you could have dynamic content which shows a different regional office address based on the location of your donor. In one case, we built out a series of six emails which had so many dynamic content components within each that it had up to 1500 email variations! There’s no way we would have built out that many email versions, but it was possible with dynamic content and meant that each recipient received a highly personalised email along each step of the journey.

 

Reporting on a non-profits impact 

Okay so this is HUGE with Pardot. A lot has changed recently with Pardot reporting…in the time since I started using it, we have seen reports go from asset metrics like clicks/views/downloads to now using AI with Einstein Analytics! As always when starting with a new strategy, I recommend a crawl, walk, run approach. Most nonprofits I speak to are very confident at the “crawl”  stage and know what they want to work towards, but are limited by data or technology. Some are at the “walk” stage but it is time consuming and labour intensive, so to get everyone “running” it’s important to get the data and technology at its best. As Pardot is part of the Salesforce Platform now, we can tap into the powerhouse of reporting we know and love to really provide that insight from your first touchpoint with a donor, all the way to seeing where the money is spent and the impact it has!

 

For people who haven’t come across Pardot before, where can they go to learn more about Pardot? 

Pardot Basics Lightning

Pardot Engagement Studio Lightning

Join a Community Group!

 

Where can people contact you to find out more about using Pardot?
I’m a co-leader of the London User Group and we would love to welcome you, wherever you are based. You can also connect via LinkedIn or email me at [email protected].


This error message is only visible to WordPress admins

Error: Connected account for the user cirrico_uk does not have permission to use this feed type.

Close