Soapbox Engage Blog

A nonprofit online store can look like a success from the outside: products are selling, revenue is coming in, supporters are checking out without trouble. But if that sales data isn't landing in Salesforce automatically, someone on your team is quietly doing the real work after the fact: exporting orders, matching names to existing Contacts, re-entering totals, and hoping nothing gets missed before the next board report.

For a nonprofit already running Salesforce, the value of ecommerce software isn't just selling products online. It's whether that commerce activity becomes part of the same supporter and fundraising data your team already works from, or lives apart from it as one more system to reconcile. This guide is for development directors, operations staff, and Salesforce admins evaluating ecommerce software with that question in mind. We'll cover what "Salesforce integration" actually means in ecommerce software, what a strong sync should connect, the questions to ask vendors, and the tradeoffs of routing that connection through middleware.

A nonprofit gala without a run of show is a series of things that happen in a room. A gala with one is a program with intention, timing, and a clear chain of responsibility for every transition.

The run of show is the master document your entire event team works from on event night: every segment, every cue, every owner, and every contingency. It's not the event program guests see. It's the internal production document that keeps your team aligned from setup through close.

Setting up a nonprofit online store is more approachable than most teams expect. The technical part, choosing a platform and listing products, usually takes an afternoon. The parts that determine whether the store actually raises money and doesn't create a mess later are the decisions around it: what to sell, how to price it, how sales tax works, and where the revenue ends up being tracked.

This guide walks through setting up a nonprofit online store from scratch, step by step, whether you're launching a year-round merchandise shop or a seasonal fundraiser store for a specific campaign. Your store doesn't have to be a year-round operation: a campaign-specific storefront can work well for seasonal products, event merchandise, holiday sales, or a limited fundraising push.

Donors lapsing is an unfortunate reality every nonprofit faces. Donors lapse for a variety of reasons: they no longer have the capacity to give, they fall out of alignment with your mission, or they simply forget to renew a recurring gift.

However, nonprofits can use their existing efforts to bring lapsed donors back into the fold. Fundraising campaigns, in particular, remind donors why they contribute to your organization and unite your community behind a shared cause. Large-scale initiatives that feature your high-impact goals and future vision make an especially strong opportunity for re-engagement.

When the ask goes out at a live fundraising event, something changes in the room.

The emcee makes the case. The first paddle goes up. Then another. What starts with one person saying yes can quickly become an entire room coming together to support the mission.

That's the power of a paddle raise. Capturing that response in the middle of a fast-moving event, though, takes more than keeping a running tally.

If you're evaluating nonprofit auction software for an upcoming gala or fundraising event, you've almost certainly come across OneCause, GiveSmart, and Soapbox Engage. All three offer mobile bidding, event management tools, and support for live and silent auctions. The differences between them are real, but they're not always obvious from a features page.

This comparison is written for nonprofit development and events professionals who want a clear-eyed look at how these platforms actually stack up, including where each one is strong, where it has limits, and which type of organization it fits best.

We're back with a recap of NPSP Day New York! On September 3, the Salesforce nonprofit community came together at Building Skills NY in the General Electric Building for a day of learning, problem-solving, and, most importantly, community.

New York continues to reign as the host city of the most NPSP Days, and the community always brings the energy. This time was no exception. The room was filled with a great mix of newcomers and old-timers, familiar faces reconnecting and first-time attendees jumping right into the conversation. There was a real willingness to share ideas, ask questions, and help each other tackle the challenges that come with managing Salesforce at a nonprofit.

A confirmation email is one of the messages registrants are most likely to open. Registrants check it for the event time, the venue, and their order details, often more than once between registering and event day. Too often, though, that message is a generic template that repeats the same static text to everyone, forcing attendees to dig through a separate ticket PDF or call your office to confirm the basics.

Merge fields in the Soapbox Engage Events app let confirmation emails automatically pull in each registrant's own registration data, from their name and ticket count to event date, venue, and payment status, without your team writing a custom message for every event. When multiple tickets are purchased in one order, the same message can include details for every attendee.

Every nonprofit event needs more than a name and an email address. You need to know who wants a vegetarian meal, who requires accessibility accommodations, what size shirt to order, or which workshop track someone plans to attend. The usual result is a registration form that asks everyone every question, whether it applies to them or not, followed by a spreadsheet someone manually reconciles against your CRM afterward.

Salesforce custom fields in the Soapbox Engage Events app let you add nonprofit-specific questions directly to your registration form, tied to real Salesforce fields, and shown only to the registrants they actually apply to. The data lands in Salesforce the moment someone registers, with no separate import step.

Published September 2026. Updated regularly.

Picking the wrong ecommerce platform for your nonprofit store is a slow mistake, not a dramatic one. You don't find out on day one. You find out three months in, when inventory counts don't match what actually sold, when someone is manually re-entering orders into your CRM, or when a gala approaches and there's no way to sell the same merchandise at the table that you sell online.

This guide focuses on software that can power a nonprofit online store, from merchandise and sponsorships to digital products and event sales. We compare what each platform actually does, where it falls short, and which organizations it fits best, with a comparison table and a decision guide to help you shortlist quickly.

A silent auction is only as strong as its catalog. The best auction software in the world can't compensate for a catalog of generic gift baskets and restaurant certificates that no one is excited to bid on. Choosing the right silent auction items, pricing them well, and presenting them effectively can make a meaningful difference in how much your auction raises.

This checklist covers the full procurement-to-display workflow: building a balanced catalog, collecting the right item details, setting opening bids and increments that drive competition, and presenting items in a way that generates bids rather than browsers.

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.