The concept of Revenue Operations, or RevOps, typically is used in relation to for-profit companies aligning sales, marketing, and customer success.  However, it is every bit as relevant for non profit organizations.  The key difference is that the sales team often takes the form of donor or grant management.

In 2020, Everpeak was engaged to set up Salesforce Sales & Service Cloud for the organization.  However, by 2023, there were opportunities within the Salesforce product suite to help Centro Cultural with grant management. This provided an opportunity for Everpeak to also take a holistic, strategic assessment of RevOps at Centro Cultural. 

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Let’s take a deep dive into what Revenue Operations looked like in the context of a nonprofit.  The products that we’ll discuss are:

• Salesforce - Sales Cloud & Service Cloud
• Salesforce - Non Profit Success Pack (NSPS)
• SMS Magic 
• Twilio

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Revenue

Centro Cultural derives revenue from both grants and donors. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is built specifically for this sort of use-case, and it would have been an excellent fit. However, Everpeak conducted a lightweight cost/benefit analysis on whether it would be better to migrate entirely to Nonprofit Cloud or, instead, remain on Sales/Service Cloud and utilize the Non Profit Success Pack (NSPS) add-on. We found that NSPS would give Centro Cultural the key features it needed around grant management and that, at this time, remaining within the status quo core instance was less disruptive and higher ROI (return on investment). 

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The NSPS add-on allowed Centro Cultural to better manage the entire donor life-cycle and better track future grant applications through what is similar to a sales pipeline. There were also features that would allow for better volunteer management and coordination for events and campaigns. In this setting, volunteer management fell under what would be considered “Customer Success.”  The native integration between Salesforce products were able to create a high-degree of coordination and visibility between revenue and customer success.

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Customer Success

While the native features of NSPS met many customer success needs around account management, one area that was still lacking was internal communication.  Slack often fills the gap for real-time communication, but Chatter is the feature that allows for historical conversations to be tied to specific donors, accounts, and any record within Salesforce.

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Chatter was added to Sales Cloud way back in 2010, and even now, there are many use-cases where Chatter is a very effective means to collaborate. For Centro Cultural, they needed a way to easily notify internal employees around cases and grants. This could be done with an email, instant message or any other mode of communication. However, the advantage of Chatter is that the notification takes place within Salesforce and is then retained. For instance, if someone wants to notify a colleague of the meeting they just had with a donor, Chatter makes this easy.  

The person who recorded the meeting would simply type in the name of the user they want to notify, and that user will then see the meeting notes. That remains in perpetuity as well. Entire departments or groups can be notified and collaborate with messages in chatter, creating a sort of “paper trail.” 

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Centro Cultural was able to effectively utilize Chatter for internal communication without paying any additional software fees.

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Marketing

The third leg of the RevOps stool is marketing. Centro Cultural already had robust marketing programs in place through its website, email, and in-person events. One area of marketing that had not been fully utilized was SMS text messaging. While email is still an extremely useful tool, each year, email inboxes get more cluttered. For communications to constituents that are time-sensitive and/or have a call-to-action, SMS text is extremely effective.

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SMS Magic is a simple, cost-effective texting tool with which Centro Cultural was already familiar. It allows for 1:1 personalized messaging as well as 1:many messaging with multiple recipients. SMS Magic is the user interface for texting, but it still requires an API connection for the actual sending. We utilized Twilio, which is an industry leading communications platform that can scale from the smallest to the largest organizations. 

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The SMS marketing features made it easy for Centro Cultural to utilize the phone numbers of donors that it had in Salesforce, and then choose whether to text that donor individually or to include in a larger group text that appeared personalized. 

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(Process + Data) > Technology

With any organization, the technology utilized is only as good as the process and the data supporting it. Centro Cultural had excellent data hygiene and governance already in place, and this allowed us to collectively focus on the processes. The technology accelerated these processes, but if the data had been messy, none of this would have been possible. 

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RevOps is much more than a buzzword. However, admittedly, it's broad enough to have different definitions to different people. It’s an extremely valuable discipline with a Client Relationship Management (CRM) software at its center. However, RevOps doesn’t need to be focused on revenue in the traditional for-profit sense. RevOps is valuable for every organization looking to optimize its internal operations.