Agentic Solutions to Maximize Purpose | Nonprofit Keynote, Dreamforce 2026
Grant Terrell and Andrea Schiller showed how nonprofits are using AI agents to handle specific tasks with controlled access. YMCA San Diego's agent handled 25,000 member interactions with less than 4% needing human help. Blue Star Families' fundraising agent saved 400 staff hours per week.
Chapters
Welcome, welcome. Good morning, good afternoon. Thank you for being here. Welcome to our Salesforce Plus viewers that are virtually all over the globe. My name is Grant Terrell. I have the good fortune of leading our nonprofit practice here in North America. Congratulations, you are about exactly at the halfway point of this Dreamforce event, our multi-day event. We are right there. This is a time for many when the feet start to get a little sore, the back gets a little tight, so take care of yourself. Please stay hydrated. Some people describe Dreamforce as quite stimulating. I would remind you, for all the conversations that I have, and all the meetings, and all the sessions, all nonprofit-focused, having the first name Grant is quite difficult. So, my head, if I look distracted or confused, AI said the word grant at a nonprofit conference is used about 6,000 times. So if we're in conversation and I'm kind of jumping around and a little twitchy, now you know why. First and foremost, thank you to our incredible nonprofits. Thank you. Applause. Society needs your work now more than ever. We are incredibly grateful for the work that you do. You inspire myself, our entire team, our entire global staff. So thank you for that. Next, thank you to our incredible nonprofit community group. Where are you?
Unbelievable.
A mighty force of over 80,000 that volunteer each year with us to help drive the best nonprofit innovations and solutions into our technology. Thank you for always showing up and showing out. You make us better. Salesforce, for over 25 years, has been deeply invested in the nonprofit community. As you all know, over $900 million donations, over 10 million volunteer hours, providing service to over 65,000 global nonprofits. We are deeply committed to this work, and we will not stop. For me personally, I've been with Salesforce.org 10 years now. It's an incredible experience. Like many of you, I'm driven to this work because of my experience and my background, my past. I come from a family of educators that were deeply committed to the communities they served. I often think about my grandfather, a retired union worker. He spent the final 25 years of his life being a full-time volunteer at a Boys and Girls Club, a small town in southern Indiana. His gift was he could build or fix anything. So for his community, he was the contractor, the engineer, the electrician, whatever was needed to provide the best service to his local community. True selflessness. We are at an incredible time in technology. It's moving at an incredible pace. AI, Robotics, social platforms. All the while, nonprofits are facing a challenge. Just last week in Chicago, we hosted over 60 nonprofits. We could feel some tension and frustration in the room. The challenges are real— fundraising, increasing workloads, and an increase in demand and services. However, there is great news. Over 50% of you are now using an AI tool. Of those using Salesforce, 44% are seeing increase in services. So I will tell you, just last night, I had an incredible dinner with 5 incredible nonprofit women. We were at a dinner table in San Francisco. We should have spent the entire time talking about the Bay, the bridge, the food. As we sat there, one individual piped up and said, hey, I've got an idea. I want to give everyone a magic wand, and if you can go around the table, what would you fix at your organization? So for the next hour, we grinded over, supported, commiserated, cheered on one another as we talked about the challenges in our community. It was an incredible experience. Right as we were wrapping up, dessert came around. I thought the exercise was over, And that same individual said, great, tell me what you're going to do about it on Monday morning. They're like, well, we didn't sign up for that part of the exercise. But I think that experience actually represents this community and nonprofits. I think it represents this week. And it's that type of passion and mentality and commitment to the work is what makes us different. So please take a ride with us for the next 50 minutes. We're going to hear some incredible customer stories with their experience with agents and humans to success. We'll talk about the path to an agentic nonprofit, and we've got some incredible announcements. Please welcome to the stage, Ms. Andrea Schiller.
Nice job, Grant. High five. Amazing. Thank you so much, Grant. So I want to start with going back to the question that we opened with. What if your nonprofit had unlimited capacity to deliver on its mission? Or what if you could double your capacity in the next 6 months? We think that that is going to be possible with agents really being the path to more capacity and ultimately more impact, which is so important for many of us in the room. Now, we know that everyone is in a very different part of their AI journey, so we actually wanna start by going back to some basics. So let's talk about what an agent is and isn't. So when we talk about what an agent is, an agent has to have a specific role. Agents overall are working together in various systems, so you need to make sure that they're trained on a very specific task. You wanna make sure that your agent has access to certain information inside of Salesforce, outside of Salesforce, or wherever your team works. And finally, you wanna make sure that your agent can take action and they have the ability to do that within certain guardrails. And all of that together is going to allow an agent to be trained on a certain job that will hopefully save your team a ton of time. Now, when I was a fundraiser, I spent so much time focused on preparing for donor meetings. Now, if I had an agent, I would create an agent focused on donor meeting prep. We would have this agent access information in Salesforce. And then I would ask the agent to summarize the information and send me a calendar reminder to make sure that I reviewed that information prior to a a donor meeting. That would have been an absolute game changer for me and saved me so much time. And all of that is actually possible today with Salesforce for Nonprofits. So Salesforce for Nonprofits gives you an amazing platform to build agents. It also provides trusted context, so that data right within your system so that the agents are making sure that their answers are accurate. All the time, and that you can trust the answers. And when we're talking about trust, we have also invested deeply in a trust layer. So making sure that your data remains your own and that you can pick any model that you would like as you're using agents overall. We've also invested really deeply in making sure that your teams can move faster with a trusted family of agents. So we're gonna hear from an amazing organization in a minute here about how they're using the participant management agent. We also have agents across donor engagement, donor support, prospect research, volunteer capacity and coverage and more. So a lot of goodness to help you on your journey. But enough from me. I want to actually bring up some incredible customers to show us the agents in action within their organization. So it is my pleasure to welcome to the stage Claire Ralphs from Relationships Australia South Australia, Emilio Alvarez from the YMCA of San Diego, and Lindsay Knight from Blue Star Family. Wonderful. Thank you all so much for being here and for traveling so far. We're very grateful that you're gonna be educating and showing what is live within your organization. So Claire, I would love to start with you if you can come on up and if you could tell us a bit about Relationships Australia South Australia. I know you came all the way from Australia. It's a super long flight. Just really appreciate you being here, but We'd love to hear about the mission as well as why the team invested in agents.
Thanks, Andrea. Relationships Australia South Australia is a small organization of 21,000— it sees 21,000 clients a year, more than. It has 400 staff and it runs 25 different services, everything from family mediation to relationships counseling, men's behaviour change programs and gambling harm programs. And the purpose of our services is to strengthen the quality of relationships, to prevent harm and to actually make— improve the wellbeing for the people who use our services and their families. And we need this because we know that when people reach out to services, they're coming with a lot of risk. And so we know, a lot of us know, that when relationships go badly, they can go really badly, and it can be a matter of life and death. And the negative impact can last a lifetime for children. So we created the Family DOORS, Detection of Overall Risk Screen, to systematically identify all of those risks and to make sure we responded. And the data that we've learned from that is very sobering. 1 in 2 people come dealing with family violence, 1 in 4 are struggling with their own unsafe behaviour, and 1 in 10 need a suicide prevention plan. All of this at the first appointment. And so the struggle for us is knowing that at— as people reach out, they're at some of their riskiest, and yet it can be 5 to 6 weeks before we're able to respond. And that's what we think agents are, agents are helping us with.
Amazing. Thank you so much for all the work and the mission of RASA overall. We'd love to hear a little bit more about the agents that the team built. And if you could show us the agent as well, we'd love to see that too.
So we built the Doors agent and we also configured the participant management agent into what we call Agent Atlas. So let me tell you how it works. Imagine Cece. She's a young mum and she's had a really big fight with her partner and rings us to actually make an appointment. And that appointment isn't for 5 weeks. And so with our DORS coach, we send her our screening survey, the DORS survey, straight away that the appointment is confirmed. She fills it out on her phone. And as soon as she resubmits it, our DORS coach analyzes her risks against the 15 years of data that we have from DORS to tell us that she actually has some elevated risks, that she's actually— her safety and her child's safety are a concern, and she's also worried how her partner is traveling. So that triggers a human response, a trained human response, And we call her. We call her within a few days, if not a few hours after we get that information. And we check that she's actually safe until her 5-week appointment. We discover for Cece that she's gone to stay with her mum to let things cool down for a while. And the frontline worker documents all of that in Doors Coach. And when Cece turns up for her appointment in 5 weeks. The practitioner, the skilled practitioner that's going to be meeting with her, has a summary from Agent Atlas about everything that we've learned about Cece and everything that we've done with Cece. So our practitioner can start straight away with where Cece is today. She doesn't have to go back and cover it all again. She just starts— So, Straight away, and then our Doors coach also helps our practitioner document that session and check that we covered off on all of the issues that she comes with. So that's the helpful role that agents are playing for us.
Absolutely love that. Let's give Claire a round of applause here. Just a great example. Thank you so much, Claire.
Yes.
So, thank you. I love the great work that the team is doing. I know you used the participant management agent as well to get started for parts of Agent Atlas overall. So glad that that has been successful. Can you talk about the impact that you've seen from the agents?
Fundamentally, we've closed that safety gap from 5 weeks to just a few days, sometimes just a few hours, which is really important. And because we know how serious it all can be, we know that we're helping people not fall through the cracks. 'Cause it is really important when people reach out that you respond. And for me, as CEO, that helps me sleep at night because these are things to worry about, that they are life and death. And so we're really grateful to our agents. Our agents are not replacing our human care. They're actually making sure we get human care to the right people sooner. So I'd like to thank Salesforce for enabling that for us.
So thank you.
Oh, and thank you so much, Claire. Give her a huge round of applause. Yes. Such important work. So again, thank you to yourself and the, the whole team here that came all the way from Australia to show what incredible work the team is doing. So what we saw from Claire was an organization that was looking at the increase in demand for services and figured out how to use agents alongside their team. Again, not replacing that human care, but really making sure that those agents could work alongside their team to make sure that no one falls through the cracks. Now, we heard from Grant that managing workload more generally is another issue that organizations are facing. So it is my pleasure to welcome Amelia Alvarez up to the stage from YMCA of San Diego to talk about how they solve that challenge.
Yes.
Amazing. Thank you for being here, Amelia, all the way from sunny San Diego. To kick off, can you tell us about the mission of YMCA of San Diego and why the team invested in agents?
No, I'd love to. Thank you, Andrea. You know, the YMCA is a really special place, and part of what makes it special is that it's so many things for so many people. For some, it's where they learn how to swim when they were a toddler. For others, it's a place where they can still go play basketball well into their 80th birthday. And for so many in our community, the Y is a safe space. It's a second home. It's a place where they can go and feel welcome, respected, and valued. At the YMCA, our mission is centered around programs that build a healthy spirit, mind, and body for all. And across our branches, we offer thousands of programs just like that. So you might ask yourself, How does one go about navigating thousands of programs? And I will tell you, not very easily. And add things like acronyms, program terminology, limited language support, and that process just gets that much harder. So this is exactly where we saw the opportunity for Agentforce to rethink how we can do better. How we can make it easier for people to get the help they need when we need it. And to help with that, we built a member service agent, and we called it George. Now, George is named after our founder, George Marston, and George can do all kinds of things. He can answer questions and help with YMCA memberships, programs, and services, and George can even help with program recommendations and complete registrations. We think George is pretty neat.
Yeah, George is very neat. I've seen him before. So can you show the room what George can do?
Absolutely. So to best do that, I'd like to introduce you to Elena. Now, Elena is a Y member, a non-native English speaker, and a busy mom of 2. And like so many, Elena works long hours. So she's looking for swim lessons late at night. Now, she's gotten pretty far in her program search, but she still has questions. And with no one available to help her at this time of night, she's going to turn to George. So first, Elena is going to ask some questions about programs she's been looking at. And because English isn't her first language, watch what happens when she asks George to explain that to her in Spanish. George can immediately respond in her preferred language. Next, back in English, Elena is going to ask for recommendations specific to her kids. Now, notice how she simply refers to them by name. Because Elena is logged into our community experience site, George can securely look up their information and come back with a shortlist of exactly the right options for both kids. Finally, after Elena makes her selections, she simply can ask George to register both kids. And that's it. She is done. Elena can call it a night. No second-guessing whether or not she misunderstood something or if her kids are in the right programs. It really is that easy.
Nicole?
Thank you so much, Emilio.
Yes, round of applause.
Emilio, I love that example. I think it's very straightforward, and so many in the room can hopefully roll out something similar. But we want to talk about impact because it all comes back to impact. Can you talk about the impact that George has had on the organization?
Absolutely. So when we first introduced George, we set out to accomplish what we call our 50-50-20 goal. That's 50% faster resolutions, 50% less admin time, and 20% higher member satisfaction. 30,000 sessions and 9 months later, we're seeing incredible results with over 25,000 meaningful interactions, less than 4% of which have required an escalation to a live agent. So we estimate that translates to nearly 2,000 hours back to our teams. So the numbers are impressive, but what does it really mean? Well, what it means is that It's not only us who are seeing the value of this technology. Our community is too. They're actively seeking it out. They're engaging with it. And most importantly, they're getting the help they need when they need it. And we're just getting started. This year, we're working towards giving George a voice, extending that same intelligent support to more than 6,000 calls that come into our branches every month. And we're using AI and intelligent document processing to transform financial assistance, helping families move from application to award in moments rather than days or sometimes weeks. So for us, this is what innovation looks like— using the technology to remove barriers and help our community get access to the help programs and services they need While giving back valuable time to our staff to focus on the work that matters.
Amazing.
Thank you so much, Emilio, for being here and for showing us Agent George and all the impact that that Agent George has had on the organization. And as a Mexican American, it is so helpful to make sure that anyone, regardless of language, can access your program. So thank you again.
Un placer.
Gracias, Andrea. Okay. So we are we are at our last example. What we just saw from Emilio was a great example of managing workload, especially after hours. But we're now going to turn to the number. number one challenge many of you are facing in the room, which is around raising sufficient funds. So it is my pleasure to welcome Lindsay Knight from Blue Star Families up to the stage. Thank you, Lindsay, for being here all the way from Washington, DC. Uh, so to kick off, can you tell us about the mission of Blue Star Families and why the team invested in Agents?
I would love to. Thank you, Andrea. Um, Blue Star Families was founded in 2009 and is currently the nation's largest military and veteran family-serving organization. We have over 450,000 members, and we grow about 20% year over year. Now, I also want to frame that we are in San Francisco. We are in the heart of Silicon Valley. And a lot of you might actually have the question in your minds about why is— why does Blue Star Families need to exist? So I'm going to paint a picture for you before we go into the fundraising piece. First of all, only 1% of our nation serves. Secondly, the all-volunteer force looks very different in 2026 than it did in the 1980s. Third, 70%— 70%— of military families no longer live on base and installations, and they move every 2 to 3 years. Now, I do know every person in this, in this room has experienced moving, whether that was for a job, for school, because you met somebody on the other side of the country, and you decided to move to be with them, and you have experienced the disconnection that happens as a result of that movement. Imagine doing that every 2 to 3 years, and then you also don't get to pick where you move to. Your spouse doesn't get to pick the labor market they enter. You don't necessarily know about the schools. You don't know where to find a doctor. Your friend and support and family network isn't there. There are a lot of challenges associated with the military family lifestyle that Blue Star families sole purpose is to solve. So we have a 2-part mission. One is to make military and veteran family lifestyle awesome, and 2, to support the future of the all-volunteer force. We do that through every imaginable pathway. Those are through national partnerships, they're through individual-level connections, they're through grassroots efforts at the local community level. It is connecting military families with other military and veteran families, but also with the everyday Americans that they call their neighbors so that we can create thriving communities of support. Now, I think what will resonate with everyone in this audience is that raising funds to put a mission forward is particularly challenging. Blue Star Families is not an exception to that. I also want to call out Salesforce. We have been partners with Salesforce since 2015 in this mission, and we would not have been able to scale nationally without that partnership. So thank you to every single Salesforce team member in this room. You're awesome. What we discovered about 2 years ago is that our donor managers were spending approximately 20% of their time on low-impact manual data entry. If you're spending time on that, I think we all know you're not spending time on the important work, which is one-to-one donor cultivation and stewardship that is required for the long-term financial viability of every single nonprofit in this room. So, we also knew we had a really good foundation with Nonprofit Cloud. and that we just needed another tool to add to our toolkit. So we wanted, we wanted something that was going to make our donor managers both more efficient and also create cleaner records and have a lot higher data accuracy.
Amazing.
Lindsay, can you talk about what that looks like and show us the agent that the team built?
I would absolutely love to. So we answered that challenge by creating our STAR agent. Also, we are a military-adjacent organization, so we just cannot get away from an acronym. So help us. So STAR stands for saving time and resources. And what we're about to see here in a quick demo is, first of all, this is our Blue Star Families fundraising page in Salesforce. I would love you all to imagine you are Fran, our donor manager. You have a potential new lead, and you just have a lot of information to add into that opportunity record within Salesforce. So, previously, Fran would've had to add in 12 different objects across 3, or sorry, 12 different fields across 3 different objects. Now, she simply calls up Star. Star tells her in a very succinct short list the necessary information she gets to add, and it automatically creates that opportunity record that is both accurate, clear, and incredibly time efficient. Star has a couple other features to her, and that is that she can create new account records and also record Amazing.
I love the time savings and would love to talk about the impact. So can you tell us how STAR is influencing Blue Star Families?
STAR has had an incredible amount of impact on the whole organization, but really truly our development and fundraising team. We have saved over 400 hours of staff time on a weekly basis, which translates into over $20,000 of staff capacity that is directed into really truly mission-driven work. And there are— yes, please applaud. That's a huge one, right? There are 3 really huge outcomes here. One, it's better access to better information. 2, it enables our fundraising staff to spend more time cultivating those one-on-one donor relationships. And 3, it enables us to raise more money to build more community and serve the military families that are part of our membership. So we just couldn't be more thrilled, and we thank you again for the partnership.
Oh, thank you so much, Lindsay. I have one last question for you. Your team was one of the first agents that I saw overall. Would love to hear any advice that you have for those that are rolling out agents?
I am not the best person on our team to answer that question, so I would love to call Jeanine on up to the stage.
Amazing. Jeanine, come on up. Jeanine is an incredible force behind the Star Agent actually going and being built and rolled out to BlueStar families. So Jeanine, can you— one, first, welcome to the Dreamforce stage.
Thank you.
And can you share the biggest lesson learned in rolling out The star agent?
Absolutely. So many of you in this room, perhaps you're at the start of your agentic journey, or maybe you've taken a half step in, a full step in. But one of the things our team learned is lean into your discovery. If you did not do a thorough discovery at the beginning, take a step, take a pause, take a beat. I have to shout out the team that I worked with because we— Thank you. Thank you all. We really thought at the beginning, oh my gosh, we're going to ask everybody, what's your biggest thing? If you could wave your magic wand, as Grant said at the beginning, and fix our Salesforce, whatever that is, what would it be? And we thought they were going to say, oh my gosh, I want to be able to make fancy reports, and I want visualizations, and I want all these things. And they do, we all want that. But what we found out is that the single biggest drag on Blue Star Families continuing our mission at the pace that we need to was data entry.
Yeah.
Great for us, but also great for us to know upfront exactly what an agent is there for. So lean into your discovery, listen to your end users, We love to say data-driven decision-making in the nonprofit industry. I know that's currently our buzzword. This is your data. This is how you show ROI. As you can see, 400 hours a week that we all get to spend doing the work that we are actually here to do, that we love. So—
Amazing.
Well, Janine, thank you so much for all the work that you've done for the STAR Agent and for We Star Families and your important role in the community. And we actually want to honor you today with something special that goes to some of our best Trailblazers that are investing in all of the incredible work training others around agents. So we would love to honor you with a golden hoodie.
Yay! Thank you.
Yes!
Congratulations! Yes, you've done such incredible work. Thank you for everything.
Yay.
I'm actually going to get choked up. Thank you.
A huge thank you, Janine, for everything that you do.
I'm so—
that's usually my line. I'm supposed to be thanking you, thanking all of Salesforce, you all have been such a partner to Blue Star Families. I am so honored to wear this jacket, but really this is a team effort. So to all my teammates who have been on this journey with me, this one's for you too.
So amazing.
Thank you, Denise.
Thank you all.
So we saw some incredible stories here. A huge thank you to all All of our presenters who have agents in action, thank you, Janine. Thank you all for being here today. And we will go on to the next section, make sure everyone can get started as well. So a huge thank you. One more round of applause for our presenters. Oh, yeah, you can just go down that way. You can just go down that way. Yeah. Okay. Amazing. Okay, so some things that we just saw that all of the agents had in common, strong data context and a foundation, a targeted use case with guardrails, and measurable success. And as a reminder, teams can work in any surface overall. So all these organizations that we saw on stage were agentic nonprofits having humans and agents work together. So it is my pleasure to welcome Lori Freeman to the stage to talk about how we can actually get to that path to impact.
I don't know if it's good news or bad news. We're running a little short on time and And so I'm gonna talk fast, but before I jump into the agentic nonprofit, I'm going to start with a personal story. So as I've had a chance to work with many of you, some of you know that I grew up in the Midwest, and some of you maybe even know that my parents owned and operated a donut shop for 40 years. The first time I got to go to work with my dad to make the donuts, it was around midnight. I was 6 years old. He was incredibly old school. There were absolutely no jobs in his mind that a 6-year-old wasn't allowed to do. Roll up your sleeves and get in there. You got time to lean, you got time to clean. Just get busy. And I loved it. But years later, when we took my 4-year-old nephew into work, it sort of struck me that I wasn't really comfortable with him having a very sharp knife. And I most certainly wasn't comfortable with him standing on a bucket shown here, In this picture in front of a fryer. I wanted him to have guardrails. And as, why am I telling you this story? As I look around the sector and work with so many organizations, I'm seeing folks fall into 2 camps. We're seeing the Wendell Freeman, roll your sleeves up, get in there. No job we can't do. We're also seeing more of the Lori Freeman. Wait a second. I wanna make sure my data's ready. I wanna make sure I've thought about all the scenarios, that I've planned things, that I have the right guardrails in place. I think it's important to have a bit of a balance. So I've heard Dan Kershaw speak about AI as the largest unrestricted gift possible. It's pretty empowering when you think about that for your organization. I've not yet worked with an organization that says we have more money than we know what to do with. We have more humans than we have the work to do. So as we think about how we put agentic technology to work, I'm gonna give you what we think of as a 4-step cheat sheet that you can take back with your organization that will help you think through those guardrails. And it will help you think through as you work with technology providers that trust has to be at the center because We don't want anybody standing on a bucket in front of a fryer. It's just not a good decision. I still stand by that. So it starts with your data, and your data is your data. You need to make the decisions about how that data's going to be used. Your data should not be used by other providers unless it's something that you've given careful consideration to. Trust has always been our number one value. Your data is your data. The second layer is your application. Now, I take a lot of pride in the work that we've done across this community, working together with all of you to build the Nonprofit Cloud. It's addressing your largest problems, fundraising, programs, grants, outcomes, engagement. Those are the things that you need to be able to develop governance around. You need rules for the road for how that information is going to be leveraged and used no matter which surface you're on. Third layer, agents. Now, it was in March that I worked with the first organization that actually had agents on their org charts. And I'm not gonna lie, when I saw it on this slide, I thought, that's a little wooey. It's kind of crazy, but it keeps happening. And it's because it's new capacity and it's sending a message to the folks that are working in these missions. There's more help on the way. So I encourage you to lean into those thoughts. The 4th layer is the new one. Every year at Dreamforce, we get new words. We get new examples of how to use those words. This year it's all about AI force and it's all about surfaces. In the old world, you went to Salesforce. In the new world, Salesforce comes to you. And your takeaway for this part is making sure that you're thinking through the experiences for all of your different stakeholders because there's not going to be a single winner user interface. There's not gonna be a single application that we're trying to get everybody to go to. We're gonna have to create experiences across surfaces that none of us have even considered yet. Now, while I think it's really exciting to share these details with you, and I love seeing all the features and demos, I think the most important part is strategy and culture. And I would like to welcome to the stage Dorada and Claudio from World Food Program USA to share with you a little bit about their leadership experience in this. Thank you both so much for being here. I am observing again how short I am, but we've got the pink on pink. Claudio, if he'd gotten the memo, was gonna wear pink as well. But in any case, you round us out. Dorota, I'm gonna start with you. Tell everybody a little bit about World Food Program USA.
Happy to. World Food Program USA is a US nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the mission of the United Nations World Food Program to end global hunger. We do it through fundraising, advocacy, and awareness campaigns for US audiences. World Food Programme is the world's largest humanitarian organization. WFP is on the front lines of conflict, climate disasters, and other disasters, reaching more than 100 million people in 120 countries and territories with life-saving food assistance and working with communities to bring long-term resilience, and food security. We bring together philanthropists, corporations, foundations, and faith-based partners to raise critical funding for this work and build partnerships for impact. In a world where more than 260 million people face extreme hunger, the urgency of our work has never been higher. That's why we have been relentlessly focused on increasing our fundraising impact.
And Devotee, as you've begun to work with Salesforce, you've had some success. Can you share a little bit of context about that with folks here online and in the room?
Absolutely.
So since 2019, we have achieved really exciting fundraising growth. We went from raising $19 million a year to about $130 million a year. We have grounded our philanthropy by putting the donor at the center. Everything we do through donor-centric fundraising is trying to understand donor interests. We know that if we are able to show the donor the impact they're creating, if we're able to respond to their philanthropic interests, their giving and engagement increases. This so far has helped to increase our individual giving by 40%, and it will continue to drive our impact and strategies moving forward. And that's where data and technology comes into play, and Salesforce has been a very important enabler of this growth for us. What you see here This is where we are able to capture insights on each individual donor's programmatic interests. This is really, really important to enable us to do the donor-centric fundraising more effectively. We use it when we plan larger campaigns where we want to, for example, activate for an emergency for a specific country and we need a pool of donors to reach. It also is really helpful for individual fundraisers to be able to target their outreach to specific donors. So, this when is really, really cool. they're trying to prepare for individual donor meetings. And that's— all of it is possible because of the strong data foundations in Salesforce.
And also because of the hard work of Claudio and team. You've really leaned into agentic. Can you talk a little bit about that decision with folks in the room?
Yeah, so it started a number of years ago with our president and CEO, Bernd Sieger, who really challenged me and the senior leadership team to lean into data and agentic work to maximize our impact, to be able to give more support for the lifesaving work that the World Food Program does. And Salesforce helped us by— we convened a meeting, an all-day retreat with about 30 people from every division in the organization and across all levels of the organization. We talked about— we grounded ourselves in what is data unification, why is it important, what is agentic work, and what does it mean for us. We talked about what excites us about it. We talked about our fears around agentic work. And by the end of the day, we left with about 20 brainstormed solutions of how an agent could help us do our work. From there, we put into a multi-phase approach where we built, we unified our data, we started the journey from NPSP to Nonprofit Cloud, we layered on Agentforce, and developed and implemented our own agent. And all of this was in service of the challenge from our president and CEO to do more with the resources that we have.
And there is an enormous amount of complexity across an architecture like that. Can you talk a little bit about the architecture?
Absolutely, and architecture is clearly important, but the purpose is to get the right data in the right context in the hands of the right people at the right time to allow them to make data-informed decisions. And you can see from the slide that we collect data from our donors from a myriad of different places. It can be from their giving history, whether they gave to a specific emergency, country, or campaign, but it could also be from did they open an email, did they click on a link, Did they register for an in-person or virtual event? All of that information gets into the donor interest hub that Dorota talked about, and what it means for our staff is they no longer have to go to 5 different places to collect information. They can have the one unified source of truth about that donor, about their giving history, about what matters to them and what motivates them, to allow them to make a focus on that information to build a human connection.
The partnership that the two of you share is really extraordinary. What would be the parting words and advice that you would share with those organizations that are early in their journey?
Absolutely make sure that all the stakeholders are at the table, both your technical units, your database unit, but also your business units to make sure that you get a buy-in, but also to ensure that they understand. Like, often the business units are a little removed from technology, and really that will help with adaptation.
My advice is this is not a sprint. It's more of a marathon with a poorly defined finish line. And make sure that you take a step, take your step, and do whatever's reasonable for you. But start on that journey and bring others along with you.
It is always on. I know you have teammates that were not able to make the trip. So we want to give a shout out to Alfred and Ebenezer, who have been amazing members of this community. And big round of applause to each of you. Thank you very much. Now, I— who's ready to see some demonstrations? Please join me in welcoming for the first time to the Dreamforce stage, Sophie Green, and also DJ Chrissy and DJ Katrin on the ones and twos to take us out.
All right. Thank you, Lori, and thank you to the team at WFP. I've been lucky enough to work directly with them. And can honestly say, one, they're the nicest group of people I've ever worked with, but two, they're also just so thoughtful and visionary with their approach. And it's organizations like them that show us that a different future is possible. But I want to take that vision a step further today because I want everyone here to ask themselves, what could a new fundraising experience look like? So if you were going to design a fundraising experience from scratch, what would that involve? Would it build— mean building a campaign, sending an email, and bringing donors into your donation page? Or can you imagine something bigger? Can you imagine a reality when giving can happen anytime, anywhere, or anyplace? Well, that is the reality that we're leaning into with Salesforce for Nonprofits. We're going all the way in with AI Force, so you can meet your donors wherever you are. So like Lori said, let's see what that actually looks like in reality. And then we're gonna start here in Nonprofit Cloud in our donor profile page. And this is where you can see all of the data together on one donor. So let me introduce you to Sarah. Sarah is passionate about South America food insecurity, and that passion shows here by her being an active volunteer and a loyal donor. We can then scroll down, down to the interest tab, and you can see even more background information on her. But there's more. By connecting data from inside and outside of Salesforce, we can see at a really deep level how Sarah wants to engage with the organization. So here we can see that she's been in the mobile fundraising hub. She's been on the gamified learning platform where a correct answer triggers a donation. Love it or hate it, she's done a little bit of crypto giving. And finally, she's also taken part in livestream fundraising events. But because we know Sarah as a person, we also know she's never going to read that email that lands in her inbox, but she is going to respond to an SMS, and so that's the action that we take. We send a personalized message to her, thanking her for her recent volunteer work and asking for a $10 microdonation. That meets Sarah where she's at, and it drives up her long-term commitment to the organization. And with AI and agents, that's something that we can do at scale so we can meet all of your donors where they're at and drive up overall donations. Now, I know that that's great and what lots of people want to hear, but I also know there'll be tons of fundraisers in the room who think that's just going to lead to a ton more admin. I'm going to spend even more time manually updating my credit card details or resending tax receipts. Well, here is where an agent can step in. So when a donor like Sarah messages back and says, I want to increase my donation from $10 to $50, our donor support agent can do that right there and then. So she gets instant self-service and the team gets those critical hours back. And what better way to end and cement Sarah's loyalty by— than showing the impact that we're making? All right, I want to switch gears now and look at how AI and agents can help with major giving. And here we're gonna start in the prospect portfolio page in Nonprofit Cloud, and you can see that our fundraising predictions show the likelihood to make a major gift. And I want everyone to use their imagination again because we're meeting Sarah, but time's moved on a bit. She's been wildly successful in her career. She's accumulated a lot of wealth, and she's remained committed to the cause overall. And so she's been flagged as likely to make a major gift. But when our major gift officer prepares for a meeting, they don't have to spend tons of time going back through history. Because instead they can ask the donor engagement agent to do that for them. That summary will include all of the relevant context, previous touchpoints, and key milestones along the way. And then right after that meeting, updates happen with a voice note. Our gift officer says, great meeting with Sarah. She's gonna make a major donation into the South America El Niño relief program. Put a follow-up in for 2 weeks' time and remind me it's her birthday next month. And again, we don't just end there, but this time we switch to our major gift officer because we want to show the amazing impact that her work is having. So she can see that here on her dashboard, but she can also turn to the donor engagement agent to ask for those common trends that she's seeing across her major donors. And that's all— that's making her better at her job, but I think more importantly, reconnecting her back to her purpose and why she joined that organization in the first place. So when we reimagine the future of fundraising, we don't think it's going to be about redesigning the donation form because that will no longer be at the center. Instead, your donors will be at the center, and we will meet them where they are. With the power of Nonprofit Cloud, we use AI and agents to really do that at scale so that we can give fundraisers back the time that we need. And everything that I've just shown you is live and available today, from those predictions, the agents, as well as Slack and Tableau for nonprofits. But also delighted to announce that in October, we will be launching, for the grantmakers in the room, our grantmaking agent. We will be bringing voice to our participant management agent. And then huge news in February across Salesforce, we will be launching events management. All right, I'm going to take a deep breath because they've given me another 2 minutes on the clock, which always helps. And we've also been on a huge journey today. So that journey has been really focused on how do we give you more capacity? How do we enable you to do more with less so that you can focus on what matters back? And I hope that you've just seen some of the really inspiring ways that our customers showed us on how they've been able to do that. We're not done there, sorry to tell you. There is tons more coming. So if you want to hear more from both Rasa and YMCA, they have sessions over the next 2 days. There's roadmap sessions, there's different sessions on data and AI and ethics. So please come and join for those. Also, if you haven't yet met our brilliant solutions team, come check them out on the nonprofit booth at the campground. It's at Moscone North. We'd love to say hello and see a little bit more of what we have in place for you. And the final shout-out today, we started with it, we'll end with it, is to our community. They are the beating heart of everything we do, so thank you so much. If you haven't connected with them yet, do. If your social battery is totally dead, you don't have to do it this week. They've done things like Ask Me Anythings, user groups, community sprints. There's loads of ways to get involved, so I definitely recommend that. So I think really that just leaves me to say a final thank you. Thank you to our speakers today. Thank you to our demo drivers or our resident DJs. Massive thank you to our customers who were brave enough to join us on stage as well. Really appreciate it. And also thank you to you for joining us. Have a great rest of Dreamforce. Thank you.
Thank you.
