Donor Management with Salesforce: Power of SKU – Click & Pledge

You have the option to use SKUs to help manage your mapping and operations in Salesforce. This article explains the concept and discusses use options.

Concept of SKU
Design SKU Video Tutorial
SKUs in Click & Pledge
Planning a SKU Schema
SKU Best Practices
SKU Suffixes
Example of SKU Schema
Setting the SKU
- CONNECT Forms
- CONNECT Virtual Terminal
- Swiper1
- Salesforce Event Management
- Salesforce Donor Management: Virtual Terminal
- Other Integrations (coming soon)
Receiving the SKU - your work pays off. It's POWERFUL, YEAH!
- C&P Settings > Opportunity
- C&P Settings > Custom Mapping > SKU Map

Concept of SKU

SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit) is a standard retail term for a unique product, and functions as its Id. In the retail world, SKUs are typically used to track inventory and tag merchandise.

Take a look at your grocery receipt this week. You may have a list like this:

STFR BF SALISBRY STK
FL ORIG SOUR CRM
M&M PEANUT PARTY
CMPBL CHKN NDL SOUP

These are SKUs. They don't represent the full name of the product, but do convey important information like Manufacturer or product size. Did you guess the items on the list?

Stouffer's Salisbury Steak
Food Lion Original Sour Cream
M&M Peanut M&Ms (Party pack)
Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup

SKUs are created by the store and are used to track inventory or easily refer to a specific product.

Design SKU Video Tutorial

SKUs with Click & Pledge

Click & Pledge takes advantage of this concept of SKUs. Every Click & Pledge payment form item can have a SKU defined by you.

Donor Management (PaaS) notes the SKUs in every transaction received by Salesforce, and consults the SKU rules in C&P Settings to determine how to record the transaction and how to respond to the Patron with Autoresponder .

Planning a SKU Schema

Write down every 'item' your organization may sell, including donation types. Be thorough.
Go through each item in your list and determine how you to record it or report on it in Salesforce. Does it need a different Record Type? Do you need to populate certain Opportunity fields?
Go through each item again, and note whether you need to send a different Autoresponder to the Patron depending on what they purchased.

This is not that different from planning your Salesforce implementation, except now you are writing instructions for how Donor Management should record each donation/purchase.

You now have a solid start for the potential variations that may need a different SKU.

SKU Best Practices

The next step is to come up with a text-coding process that can account for each variation in a straightforward manner. The text you use for your SKUs is up to you, but it is helpful to follow some general guidelines:

DO use dividers between your SKU 'syllables'. DON-INHONOR
DON'T use special characters.

Allowed: 'Alphanumeric' characters: colon, dash, underscore (good for dividers)

DO set your SKU syllables from larger groupings to smaller

For example, if your Opportunities always have Record Types of "Donation" or "Income", start your SKUs with DON or INCM, working from broad references to more specific ones.

DO be consistent. Don't use DON and GIFT unless your team is clear on the difference. Use the same format and dividers for your dates, and keep them in the same location at either the beginning or end of the SKU.

DO use your SKUs in other internal places where they are helpful. Be sure they are on your Salesforce page layouts and List Views. You can use them in your reports, your event tickets and name badges.
DO make sure your staff is on board with the plan. Explain your date format, and why it's important to use 2 digits for months and days. You are bringing order to your world!

Also,

SKUs are not case sensitive. 'DON' is the same as 'don'
SKUs can be 'codes' , DON, EVT, etc. or complete words, 'Donation;

That's up to you. Full words may seem more definitive and initially be easier to adopt, but codes can be more concrete and memorable long term. Think of how your school classes were organized- HIS for history, ENG for English.

The maximum SKU length is 100 characters. You have plenty of room to work, but it's still better to minimize length where you can.
Rules for Receiving the SKU include flexible conditions such as "Includes" and "Starts With", so avoid using syllables that could be confusing. For example, using MAIL to indicate a direct mailing might be problematic if you're also using EMAIL

SKU Suffixes

Some locations (see Setting the SKU ) offer the option to create a 'SKU Suffix'. SKU Suffixes allow you to append additional information This allows you to add include additional information at the end of the SKU, like a defined response to a custom question.

In this example, we use Conditional Custom Questions to collect information for an 'in Honor' or 'in Memory' tribute donation.

If I use a SKU Suffix, should I map the information using SKU or Custom Question Mapping?

If the question's answers have pre-defined values, best practice is to use SKU, You will need to create a SKU rule to receive each value.

Example of a SKU Schema

Your nonprofit organization wants to accept general donations, but wants to offer donors the chance to donate in honor or in memory of someone. You also have a Membership program, several restricted funds, and host various events over the course of the year, including a large fundraising auction event. You'd also like your transactions to automatically code themselves for accounting.

DON - Anything that will be classified as a donation includes DON in the SKU

DON-GEN - indicates General Donation. This will be your most common, basic donation

DON-HON - donation in Honor
DON-MEM - donation in Memory
DON-ORG - a Business or Group donation

For these, you are also collecting additional information to add to tribute fields on your Opportunity. You may need to send a different letter, or an extra letter to notify someone a gift was made on their behalf.

MEMBER-STU
MEMBER-IND
MEMBER-FAM

These SKUs at your organization will indicate the purchase of student, individual, or family Memberships. You will need to assign a Membership Record Type, record the beginning of the Membership and the Membership Level, and send custom letters to your new Members.

DON-MEDICAL
DON-HABITAT
DON-RESCUE

These SKUs define restricted funds. They need to receive a different accounting code

DIRECTMAIL-Winter2020
EMAIL-Winter2020
FB-Winter2020

Your organization has a Spring and Winter campaign soliciting donations through a mailed letter, email, and facebook posts. SKUs indicate which sub-Campaign of the Winter 2020 'parent' campaign to assign to an incoming donation.

EVT-SPRING5K-2020
EVT-SUMMERCAMP-WK1-2020

For your Events, having EVT in the SKU can be used to classify the Opportunity as Program Income, set a different automatic naming to include the Attendee, and place the sale in the event's Campaign.

Setting the SKU

Locations where you can ‘Set the SKU”.

CONNECT Forms

Fundraising > Campaigns > Campaign Name > Campaign Details > Payment Options - Sets SKUs for donations on the form
Fundraising > Campaigns > Campaign Name > Campaign Details > Additional Fee - Set the SKU for the Additional Fee

CONNECT Virtual Terminal

Swiper1

As a complete store on your mobile device, Swiper1 has multiple locations to specify SKU and SKU Suffix

Swiper1 locations that set SKUs:

Salesforce Event Management

Salesforce Donor Management: Virtual Terminal

Other Integrations (coming soon)

Receiving the SKU

When a transaction arrives in Salesforce, Donor Management (PaaS) looks at the transaction’s SKUs (one for each line item on the transaction) to determine how it should handle creating Salesforce records, and what kind of Autoresponders should be sent.

To define how you want transactions to be managed in Salesforce, you set rules based on how to handle the transaction under specific conditions.

Your rules include setting a Condition to apply to the transaction. The conditions include flexible options like 'Contains', Starts With', etc. Best practice is to stay as specific as possible, so that your rules do not start conflicting with each other.

C&P Settings > Opportunity

C&P Settings > Opportunity sets SKU rules to determine how to create the Opportunity

Navigate to C&P Settings, and click Opportunity in the left menu.

SKUs can set the value for Contact Roles

or can be used to customize the Opportunity Name.

NOTE: NPSP Opportunty (Donation) Name Customization overrides rules set here. If you opt to use C&P only for your custom naming, you can include the Event Name and Attendee Name for Event Tickets.
Most NPSP automatic name formats can be duplicated with C&P Settings Opportunity Naming.

Use SKUs to customize Record Type

and set the Opportunity 's Primary Campaign

C&P Settings > Custom Mapping > SKU Map

SKU Map sets SKU rules to determine how to update the Opportunity record.

Donor Management creates the Opportunity first, allows NPSP to run any automations triggered by a new Opportunity record, then updates the Opportunity record to set values for Custom Mappings.
This means that Custom Mapping settings will override values set in C&P Settings Opportunity or set by NPSP for a new Opportunity.

If you truly understand that "Create Opportunity-NPSP Update-Custom Mapping Update" order, and realize that you can map any field on the Account, Contact, or Opportunity, you can make SKUs work for you!

We've included a lot of examples below to help you get started. Every Salesforce instance may track data differently, but these examples are all effective uses of SKUs and Custom Mapping. So get going, the sky's the limit!