We ♥ Engagement Plans

Planning an engagement? This Valentine’s Day, take a moment to show some love to your own process and constituents by exploring Engagement Plans, a Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack feature.

Engagement Plans allow you to easily and efficiently create a series of multiple tasks related to a process. Engagement Plans are great for any process that involves engaging constituents, like volunteer onboarding or outreach to major donors. They can also be used to shower your coworkers with some love by helping you track internal projects between departments.

We will show you how to set up a simple Engagement Plan and how it can help you keep track of your next steps.

1. Choose Your Plan

Every organization has a process that could benefit from Engagement Plans. For inspiration, look at your calendar for status meetings, any Salesforce object with a “status” field, or even your own to-do list! Likely there are steps you or your team are taking that can be tracked with a templated series of tasks.

The best processes for Engagement Plans are the ones that require personalized touch points and cannot be automated, like phone calls, meetings, or handwritten thank you notes. Engagement Plans were originally designed for engaging your organization’s supporters, but they can be used for any series of tasks that you want to track. Consider a volunteer onboarding interview, lunch with a major donor, or getting budgetary approval for a project from your Executive Director or Board of Directors.

2. Plan Your Tasks

First write out your tasks. Include the description, who needs to do it, and when it needs to be done relative to other tasks. In this example, a nonprofit Land Trust is planning a tree planting project that involves recruiting volunteers to participate in an event.

For your first engagement plan, it’s a good idea to take all these tasks and rewrite them to be from the perspective of one person. In this example, since the Stewardship Coordinator is leading the project, they’d rewrite the “Approve Budget” task as “Get Executive Director’s approval for project budget” and then put themselves in the “Who” column instead. This will make the configuration process in later steps a bit easier since the “owner” of all tasks will be the same.

3. Create Your Template

This list of tasks will become your Engagement Plan Template. To create a new one, navigate to the Engagement Plan Template tab and click “New”. This video walks you through the steps of creating the template.

4. Determine Where You Will Track Your Engagement

The next step is to determine the object in Salesforce you want to track your tasks from. By default, Engagement Plans are already configured to work with Account, Contact, Opportunity, Campaign, Case, and Recurring Donation. If you want to track your tasks on any of these objects, navigate to that object and look for the “Engagement Plan” related list.

Any other object can have Engagement Plans as well! To set this up, navigate to the Engagement Plan object in the Object Manager and create a new lookup field to the object you want to add tasks to. In our example video, we are adding that lookup field to the custom object called Stewardship Activity.

The next step is then to add a related list to the Stewardship Activity page layout, so you can see the steps of your Engagement Plan in the appropriate place.

5. Test and Train

The final step is to test adding an engagement plan record on the object you want to track. In our example, we will go to the Stewardship Activity record and navigate to the related lists. Then we click “New” next to “Engagement Plans” and select the “Tree Planting” as the Engagement Plan Template. The system will automatically generate the four tasks created earlier for this specific record.

Now with your tasks created, you can track your progress. You will easily know who you need to reach out to or the next step in your process. Salesforce tasks can then be configured to give you reminders and emails on outstanding items based on your progress. In addition, you can easily see what you have accomplished with Salesforce reporting.

If you would like help getting an engagement plan set up, all you need to do is send a request to your support email.

Resources

Create and Manage Engagement Plans

Engagement Plans and Levels in Nonprofit Success Pack | Salesforce