Soapbox Engage Blog

Accurate, transparent financial reports build trust with your board, funders, and the community you serve. They also give you the data to make smarter calls about where to allocate limited resources.

For smaller teams juggling multiple roles, pulling together financial data can feel like one more thing on an already long list of responsibilities. But by breaking the process into a few consistent habits, compiling these statements becomes much more manageable. In this guide, we'll break down six key steps to simplify your nonprofit's financial reporting and build reliable processes.

Year-end fundraising events and holiday season auctions represent a critical revenue push for nonprofits. With the right items in your catalog, from exclusive travel packages to autographed memorabilia, you'll have what it takes to drive competitive bidding wars while building long-term partner relationships.

That can make the difference between reaching a Q4 fundraising goal and falling short. Done well, auction item procurement is more than a short-term item search. It's a strategic avenue for long-term corporate engagement. In this guide, we'll answer four questions: how charity auctions benefit from in-kind donations, which donated goods and services work well for year-end auctions, which companies tend to contribute high-value auction items, and what tools help nonprofits run auction fundraising events.

If you're a Salesforce nonprofit looking for a PolicyEngage alternative, Soapbox Engage Actions gives you the advocacy functionality you need while keeping supporter data where it already belongs: your Salesforce org. Action campaigns, legislator targeting, constituent messaging, and campaign tracking all sync directly to Salesforce or Dynamics in real time, with no second database and no manual imports.

Switching platforms doesn't mean giving up the core advocacy capabilities your organization depends on. Here's what the Soapbox Engage Actions app replaces, what it doesn't, and what a switch actually looks like.

At most fundraising events, the only person who knows how close you are to goal is whoever's watching the backend. The room itself, the people actually holding paddles and phones, has no idea whether the event is going well until someone grabs a microphone to announce it.

A live fundraising display projects your event's real-time giving progress on a screen in the room, updating as gifts come in. Instead of momentum living in a spreadsheet, it becomes something everyone at the event can see and react to as it happens.

Event check-in is the first real interaction an attendee has with your event, and a stalled line or an out-of-date printed list is a rough way to start it.

Digital wallet tickets let attendees add their event ticket to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet after registering, and a connected check-in app lets staff scan that ticket or search for the attendee directly, with attendance recorded in real time. Together, they turn arrival into a better first impression instead of a bottleneck.

Nonprofit consent. Transparency. Partnership. Accountability.

These may sound like simple ideas, but they are foundational to the relationship between nonprofits, their donors, and the technology companies that help make fundraising possible.

That's why Soapbox Engage is proud to endorse the National Council of Nonprofits' Principles for Ethical Online Fundraising Platforms.

Galas, conferences with breakout sessions, and multi-day trainings all create the same registration problem. An attendee isn't just signing up for one event, they're choosing from a set of sessions, workshops, or activities within it, and most registration systems force a clumsy workaround: separate forms for every session, or no session-level tracking at all.

A subevent is a session, workshop, or activity nested inside a parent event, so attendees can register for all of it as one connected experience. Done well, it gives attendees a single, guided registration flow, and gives your team a clear picture of which parts of the event people actually plan to attend.

Donors give more confidently when they know exactly where their gift is going. But most nonprofits run more than one program, fund, or initiative, and listing all of them on a donation form without any structure turns a simple decision into a scavenger hunt.

A donation designation lets a donor choose the specific program, fund, or campaign their gift supports, right on the donation form. Done well, it gives donors a clearer connection to the work they care about, and it gives your team better data on what programs are actually resonating.

Most one-time donors are never asked to become monthly donors. They give once, they get a thank-you email, and the relationship ends there, not because they wouldn't have said yes, but because nobody asked at the moment they were already engaged.

Recurring upsells fix that. A recurring upsell is a prompt shown to a donor immediately after they complete a one-time gift, inviting them to convert it into an ongoing monthly donation. Done well, it's one of the simplest, lowest-cost ways to grow a sustainer program, because it reaches donors at the exact moment they've already decided to give.

Nonprofits like yours need more than good storytelling to win lasting donor trust. Building a strong donor base also requires clear, honest financial reporting. When supporters see exactly how your organization manages its resources, they feel secure in their investment and stay committed to your cause over the long term.

However, it's challenging to maintain transparency when the fundraising and finance teams use entirely different software systems. This operational disconnect makes it difficult to reconcile records and show a holistic picture of how your nonprofit is stewarding its gifts. To build credibility and keep donors coming back, your nonprofit needs to bridge these internal gaps and ensure everyone is aligned on accurate, up-to-date information.

Issue 314

Happy Tuesday, fundraisers!

It may still be summer, but year-end fundraising is already starting to creep onto the horizon. This week’s roundup is a good reminder that the best time to get your data, systems, and donor relationships in shape is before things get hectic.

We’re looking at everything from getting your donor data AI-ready and using CRM data to identify major gift prospects, to making giving easier and strengthening the behind-the-scenes stewardship work that keeps donors connected. Read on for more!

Have a wonderful week!

You can receive the Fundraising Weekly newsletter each Tuesday by subscribing today!

Most "AI for nonprofits" content this year falls into one of two camps: breathless claims that AI will transform fundraising overnight, or vague caution that doesn't say what's actually changing. What's happening on the ground with development and operations teams is narrower than the hype and more useful than the caution. AI is taking over specific, well-defined tasks, prioritizing a list, drafting a first version, flagging a signal, not replacing the judgment calls sitting on either side of those tasks.

Here's a grounded look at where that shift is actually showing up across fundraising, donor engagement, and the day-to-day operations behind both.

Happy Monday, Trailblazers!

August is here, and we’ve got a good mix for you this week. There are some practical conversations around NPSP data management, along with ideas for making Salesforce administration a little more manageable. There are also a couple of broader community conversations worth a read, including a thoughtful look at DEI in the Salesforce ecosystem. Plus, NPSP Day New York is one month away, so now’s a good time to get it on your calendar!

Have a wonderful week!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

Ask most development teams where their next major gift prospects will come from, and the answer usually involves buying something: a wealth screening tool, a research subscription, a consultant. Those resources have their place. But before spending on any of them, it's worth asking a simpler question: what does the data already sitting in your CRM tell you?

For most nonprofits on Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, the answer is: more than they're using. Giving history, event attendance, campaign engagement, and relationship notes are all signals of major gift readiness, and they're already in the system your team logs into every day. This post walks through how to turn that existing data into a prioritized prospect list your gift officers can actually work from.

Issue 313

Happy Tuesday, fundraisers!

As we wrap up July, this week’s roundup focuses on making the tools and strategies behind your fundraising work smarter. From getting more out of your Salesforce data to understanding which supporters are most likely to engage, these pieces explore how the right information and systems can help you build stronger fundraising programs.

Scroll down for some guidance on prioritizing major gift prospects, creating better alignment between your website and social channels, and thinking strategically about technology as your campaigns grow!

Have a wonderful week!

You can receive the Fundraising Weekly newsletter each Tuesday by subscribing today!

AI-powered fundraising tools, predictive gift scoring, AI-drafted donor communications, automated segmentation, are getting a lot of attention right now, and for good reason: done well, they save development teams real time. But every one of these tools runs on the same input: the donor data already sitting in your CRM. If that data is inconsistent, duplicated, or stale, the tool doesn't correct for it. It learns from it, and repeats it back with more confidence than it deserves.

Before adding an AI tool to your fundraising stack, it's worth taking an honest look at what you're feeding it. This post walks through what to check, and why the shape of your data pipeline matters as much as the data itself.

Happy Monday, Trailblazers! Can you believe we’re wrapping up July?

There’s a lot to dig into this week! Scroll down for fresh technical content from Salesforce Break, another excellent AMA recap, a thoughtful look at how associations are evolving their fundraising strategies, and more.

And we hope to catch you at an upcoming NPSP Day!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

Issue 312

Happy Tuesday, fundraisers!

Summer has a reputation for being the "quiet season," but this week's roundup makes a strong case for using it wisely. Whether you're strengthening donor relationships, refining your messaging, or laying the groundwork for your next major campaign, now is a great time to invest in the work that pays off later!

Scroll down for some practical strategies for major gifts, donor stewardship, and writing donation appeals that inspire action. We're also sharing a step-by-step guide to launching a nonprofit advocacy campaign, insights into the psychology of newly wealthy donors, and ideas from fundraisers on what's actually working in 2026.

Here's to making the most of the season and setting yourself up for a strong finish to the year!

You can receive the Fundraising Weekly newsletter each Tuesday by subscribing today!

"Salesforce fundraising apps" isn't really one category, and most guides to it read like it is. In practice, a nonprofit searching that phrase is usually trying to solve one specific problem, donations, event registration, auction bidding, forms, or petitions, and trying to figure out whether the app that solves it will actually talk to the Salesforce org the rest of the organization already runs on, or just claim to.

This guide covers the one question that determines that (real-time sync vs. batch import), a five-question checklist for vetting any vendor's answer, and what to actually look for in each major app category: donations, events, auctions, forms, petitions, and actions.

Updated July 2026

EveryAction, now part of Bonterra, is one of the most widely adopted nonprofit CRMs with advocacy built in alongside fundraising, email, and event tools. For a lot of organizations, that bundling is the whole appeal: one login, one database, one vendor relationship covering everything from donation processing to action alerts.

But "built in" and "integrates directly with Salesforce" are different things. If your organization already runs Salesforce or Nonprofit Success Pack as its system of record, EveryAction's advocacy tools live inside a separate database first, and how that data reaches Salesforce depends on the specific integration setup, not on the CRM your fundraising and program teams already use every day. Here's what that distinction actually means in practice, and when a narrower advocacy tool with real-time Salesforce sync is worth a serious look instead.