Our Dreamforce 2024 in Review
“Agentforce, Agentforce, AI, Nonprofit Cloud, Agentforce, data, security, Agentforce, Nonprofit Cloud” — if you walked into a nonprofit industry room at Dreamforce last week, this is what the “Dreamforce buzz” typically sounded like.
But in all seriousness, I thought this year’s Dreamforce was one of the best in recent years in terms of nonprofit-focused content and community-gathering opportunities.
Community Gatherings
Arkus had the privilege of co-hosting an Arts and Culture Summit at the Salesforce offices alongside their Nonprofit Industry team. Arkus’ CEO, Jason Atwood, presented a hands on workshop around organizing and identifying your data in preparedness for Data Cloud. Salesforce industry experts, Valerie Brown and Mike Brown, also announced the “Arts and Culture Nonprofit User Group” which is a virtual group of industry professionals using Salesforce, alongside Orlando Briceno from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame plus Sara Glas & Sarah Thompson from The Morton Arboretum. See more for yourself at: Arts and Culture Nonprofit User Group.
Our team also had the opportunity to join a roundtable convening of the nonprofit partners in the space, as well as a roundtable discussion for Nonprofit Technology Leaders focused on navigating the future of security, centered around strategies for resilience and innovation.
Arky Rachel Park Brayboy, who leads the Los Angeles Architect Trailblazer Community Group, was also able to co-host the #BobaBlazers event with fellow leaders from the San Francisco Nonprofit, Silicon Valley Women in Tech, and DC Admin Trailblazer Community Groups. This year, in partnership with Asiapacforce (Salesforce’s Employee Resource Group for AANHPI employees and allies) and the Salesforce Nonprofit Community Team, Trailblazer Community members came together to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival with boba, mooncakes, and cheer! Arkus is proud to support our diverse and talented team of experts and celebrate Rachel’s work in bringing together this successful event.
Pictured above: Nonprofit Community Meetup in the Community Cove with over 150+ nonprofit folks coming together to connect about mission-driven work & to talk all things Salesforce! Find Rachel in the Golden Hoodie.
Session Takeaways
The key takeaways from the keynotes, sessions, and hands-on workshops focused around Nonprofit Cloud and its roadmap, AI & Agentforce, and organizing and securing your data.
Regarding Nonprofit Cloud, there is a lot that we are excited about here at Arkus (watch the Keynote here: Nonprofit Keynote). Volunteer Management is on the roadmap, folks! Still a ways off, but the opportunity to participate in the development of these features is available now — talk to our team if you want to get connected to the Salesforce advisory groups. More near term, the future for additional enhancements around Fundraising and Grants Management looks very bright in terms of filling some of today’s known gaps from its NPSP predecessor.
The message was clear that current NPSP customers will continue to be supported for a good long while, but for those organizations who are considering enhancements to their existing org anyways or who are net new to Salesforce, Nonprofit Cloud now provides a very solid additional choice beyond NPSP. That said, our team remains optimistic that NPSP will continue to be a choice for organizations where it may still be a better fit now and into the future.
We continued to learn more about Data Cloud, both in terms of its value today as well as the exciting roadmap. Our team noted that there are 50 new pre-built connectors coming, and now organizations will have the ability to process unstructured data like videos and audio. This is also very exciting because the resounding message around Data Cloud, beyond its benefits for more personalized segmentation in marketing, is that it will enhance customers’ ability to maximize AI to their benefit. By utilizing Data Cloud, organizations will be able to increase the sources that they use to feed into a (secure and personal) LLM that powers an Agent and/or any of the other Einstein tools. Which brings us to what was probably the biggest topic of conversation during the week.
Agentforce was pretty much the talk of the town. Go over to Salesforce’s Instagram to see what I mean. For nonprofits, I really believe that Agentforce may be one of the most significant developments in Salesforce within the past decade. For our over 600+ nonprofit clients, I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of them say “we have too much time on our hands” or “we have all this extra bandwidth and resources we don’t know what to do with it”. Agentforce is a very exciting prospective answer to some of the bandwidth dilemmas that behold the nonprofit industry. From generative AI of donor summaries and grant proposals to predictive AI for recommended services or identifying donors at risk of lapsing, the possibilities really do seem endless right now. We talk a lot about AI internally and with our clients, and while there is some fear in the nonprofit sector around replacement of people by AI, something that comes up a lot is that AI will not be a replacement for humans but it will be something that can enhance the capacity of a team.Humans with AI may replace humans without AI. To read more about the nitty gritty of Agents, check out this blog post from Salesforce Ben “A First Look at Salesforce’s New Agentforce Platform Before Dreamforce”. The author’s delineation between Chatbots and Agents is particularly helpful. A few of our team members even had the chance to create agents hands-on and were able to do so in under 5 minutes - pretty exciting stuff. Salesforce has also made their AI Certifications and some virtual hands-on workshops free: Read more here.
We’re happy to share.
Our team is always happy to share more of what we learned at Dreamforce with the community directly. Feel free to reach out if you want to chat. You can connect with us on LinkedIn or through our contact form.
Where will our team be next? We’ll be co-hosting Dreamforce 2 You for Nonprofits at the Miami Zoo on October 3rd, heading to present at Northeast Dreamin when it takes place in New Hampshire from October 14-16th, and then we’ll be at World Tour in NYC on November 20th (and co-hosting a happy hour with the Classy team — if you’d like the invite, let me know at cate.howes@arkusinc.com).
