This post is part 2 in a series of articles aimed at organizations on Common Ground who need to get excited about what’s next if they decide to stay on the Salesforce platform. I started this series by talking about the Nonprofit Starter Pack, now I’m going to focus on Click & Pledge.

Click & Pledge isn’t just a Salesforce application, it’s a platform. And wow, is it robust. An organization can build their forms to “speak” to Click & Pledge’s processor. Similar to Common Ground Fundraising, online gifts are processed and posted to Salesforce within seconds. While custom forms are definitely more complex to set up in Click & Pledge than they were in Common Ground Fundraising, the level of customization makes Click & Pledge definitely worth the effort.

The feature I’ve chosen to highlight is how Click & Pledge handles reconciling donors to Salesforce. So much better than Common Ground. In Common Ground, organizations had very little flexibility to control exactly how contacts were matching against the database.

Just a few checkboxes. On or off. Take it or leave it.

Click & Pledge lets an organization do semi-automatic matching. They can fine-tune exactly what constitutes a match:

And then if a contact doesn’t match, it goes into a special holding place where the organization can review and decide whether it matches an existing contact or to create a new one:

If the contact matched any details to an existing contact, that contact would be auto-suggested for the organization to confirm.

Best yet, this information stays with the contact. So if the donor comes back in the future and makes another donation using the same information that’s not on the contact record, Click & Pledge will auto-match the contact without having to have this intermediate step. Very nice. With Click & Pledge, no organization should be spawning contact dupes from online forms anymore.

In the next post, we’ll look at how Causeview takes campaigns to a whole new level.