Modernizing Fundraising and Marketing Operations with Salesforce
AbilityFirst empowers individuals with disabilities to reach their full potential through a range of educational, employment, and community programs. To support its mission more effectively, AbilityFirst sought to modernize its technology infrastructure, streamline its fundraising and event operations, and enhance donor engagement through better data insights and marketing automation.
The Challenge
Before partnering with Prolocity, AbilityFirst relied on various donor management platforms and disconnected systems to manage fundraising, events, and marketing campaigns. As their development and marketing teams grew in complexity and scope, the organization faced key operational challenges:
- Fragmented systems that made it difficult to get a unified view of donors, gifts, and grants
- Manual donation entry processes and limited event tracking capabilities
- Inability to generate timely reports for reconciliation, funder deliverables, or board reporting
- Lack of integration between donation tools, email marketing, and CRM
- No scalable system to support pledge payments, recurring giving, or personalized acknowledgements
AbilityFirst needed a modern CRM platform that could unify its development and marketing functions while providing the scalability and automation required to support long-term growth.
The Solution

Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack

Accounting Subledger

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

S-Docs
Prolocity implemented a customized Salesforce solution built on the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), aligned to AbilityFirst’s fundraising strategy, event model, and marketing goals. The implementation included key integrations and process improvements across multiple teams.
Key components of the solution included:
- Discovery and Requirements Definition: Conducted multiple discovery sessions to define business requirements across fundraising, grant management, events, reconciliation, and marketing.
- Constituent & Donation Management: Configured Accounts, Contacts, and Donations to support donations, grants, events, in-kind gifts, and perpetual trusts. Enabled Soft Credit tracking, Recurring Donations, and GAU allocations.
- Grant Tracking: Built Grant records with custom deliverables and timelines to support funder reporting requirements. Designed dashboards to visualize active funding and submission deadlines.
- Acknowledgement Letters: Deployed S-Docs to automate letter generation for donors, including bulk processing and configuration of acknowledgment templates.
- Accounting Subledger: Installed Salesforce Accounting Subledger and configured fund allocations, ledger entries, and reconciliations aligned to QuickBooks.
- Marketing Automation with Pardot: Installed and configured Pardot for email campaigns, donation follow-ups, and segmented marketing lists. Guided domain authentication, user access, and syncing with Salesforce Campaigns.
- Data Migration: Migrated historical data from Raiser’s Edge including Contacts, Accounts, Donations, Campaigns, Events, Actions, and Notes. Created import templates and cleaned data for seamless transition.
- Reports & Dashboards: Developed reports and dashboards for development, grants, and marketing teams. Configured reports to track gift performance, campaign success, and pledge payment schedules.
- Training & Change Management: Delivered administrator and end-user training on NPSP, Gift Entry, and Pardot. Created documentation and held Q&A sessions to ensure adoption.
The Impact

Centralized System

Automated Acknowledgements

Personalized Engagement

Strategic Guidance
With Salesforce in place, AbilityFirst now has a centralized system for fundraising, event management, and marketing operations. Staff can view real-time donation activity, manage grant deliverables, and automate acknowledgment letters with ease. Gift entry and pledge tracking processes are streamlined, saving significant staff time and reducing errors. Pardot enables personalized, automated engagement with key supporters. Accounting Subledger ensures that donations are correctly allocated and reconciled with finance systems.
Prolocity continues to provide strategic guidance through managed services, ensuring AbilityFirst’s Salesforce environment evolves with the organization’s needs. Today, the organization is better equipped to steward donors, report on outcomes, and grow its mission with confidence.



