Storing Smart Ask Amounts and Personalization in Salesforce

Why this is worth doing

Personalized giving links convert at roughly twice the rate of a generic giving experience, and Smart Ask Amounts on top of that drive more upgrades and fewer downgrades.

Donors give at amounts in line with what you suggest. Smart Ask Amounts and personalization take this to the next level.

The payoff for a team running appeals out of Marketing Cloud is that the personalization work happens once in GiveCampus and carries forward in every channel: email, direct mail, texting, and even donor portals/

Prerequisites

• Constituent data uploaded into GiveCampus with Constituent ID. Bare minimum is first name, last name, and preferred email.

• Smart Ask Amounts are calculated from uploaded giving history (five years minimum). Once we have it, ask amounts generate automatically and are refreshed based on your latest inbound constituent and gift data.

Step 1: Create the personalization

Go to GC Outreach → Segments, select your segment, and open the Personalization tab. Click Create Personalization, name it something you'll recognize later, and pick the campaign or giving form you're driving traffic to.

Each segment supports one personalization, so different versions for different sub-audiences means separate segments. You can also consider uploading all constituent IDs as an “all constituents segment”.

Step 2: Configure and generate

Set the following:

• Greeting name

• Greeting message (400 characters, no PII since these links aren't authenticated)

• Ask amounts (Smart Ask Amounts or your own imported values)

• Designation (must already exist under Online Giving → School-Level Settings before it appears here)

Click Update Personalization Tokens, then preview a handful of tokens across donor types before you go further.

Step 3: Export for Salesforce

Export the CSV. It contains each constituent's ID alongside their token and a personalized_url column with the complete link.

In Salesforce, add a custom field on Contact / Account to hold the personalized URL, plus fields for ask amounts if you want them visible to gift officers or usable in other messaging. Load via Data Loader matching on your constituent ID.

Some schools may choose to have multiple tokens / ask array combos, such as for an athletics appeal vs a unit-specific appeal.

If you want something evergreen, point one personalization at a standing giving form and keep it separate from your appeal-specific ones. Those tokens hold up over time and don't expire. The one thing that changes them is regenerating the personalization in GiveCampus, so if you do that, re-export and reload the field in Salesforce.

Step 4: Merge into Marketing Cloud

Sync the token into Marketing Cloud through your synchronized data extension and drop it in as a merge field. Two things to watch:

• Don't use short givecampus.com/s/ links. They strip the appeal attribution parameter, so you lose attribution. Use the full URL from the export.

• Set a fallback for null tokens. Anyone without a personalized link still reaches the general form and can give.

The same export works for direct mail via QR code.