The Nonprofit Marketing Stack on Salesforce: Email, Print and Where Segmentation Belongs

Nonprofits on Salesforce rarely use a single marketing tool. Email runs through Marketing Cloud, Account Engagement, Mailchimp, Brevo or Optimizely; print appeals go to one or more lettershops; phone and events add their own lists. The tools differ – but the problem behind most stacks is the same: segmentation is limited, scattered across tools, or done in spreadsheets. The fix isn’t another sending tool. It’s building segments once, in Salesforce, and delivering them to every channel. This guide compares the common options and shows how to connect them.

This article is part of our guide to donor segmentation in Salesforce.

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The channels of a fundraising program

Channel	Typical use	Where it runs
Print	Appeals, reactivation, year-end, legacy, thank-you letters	Lettershops and mail houses
Email	Newsletters, appeal follow-ups, welcome series, renewals	Marketing Cloud, Account Engagement, third-party email tools
Phone	Upgrades, failed payments, major donor follow-up	Call lists, telefundraising agencies
SMS	Reminders, emergency appeals	SMS providers, often connected to the email tool
Events	Invitations, volunteer calls	Event tools, Salesforce campaigns

Print is still one of the most important channels for many nonprofits – especially for older donor groups and high-value appeals. Any stack that only thinks about email misses a large part of the program.

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The options compared

Option	Strengths	Watch out for
Marketing Cloud	Deep Salesforce integration, journeys, large volumes, many channels	Cost and complexity; segmentation often moves into SQL queries and data extensions outside Salesforce
Account Engagement (Pardot)	Native Salesforce integration, email and forms, scoring	Built for B2B lead management; lists and dynamic lists see only synced fields, not gifts, households or recurring commitments
Third-party email tools (Mailchimp, Brevo, Optimizely and others)	Affordable, easy to use, good templates	Segments only see what you sync; every tool has its own sync logic and limits
Lettershops and mail houses	Print, personalization, postage optimization	Need a clean file; selection logic often lives in Excel or at the mail house
Data 360	Unifies many data sources into one profile, segments across all of them	Separate platform with consumption-based pricing; only worth it with many sources

Where Data 360 fits

Data 360 solves a specific problem: many data sources – several CRMs, ticketing, e-commerce, web and app behavior – that have to be unified before you can segment. Most nonprofits don’t have that problem. They run Nonprofit Cloud or NPSP with a few add-ons for payments, forms or events, and everything relevant for segmentation – gifts, commitments, households, campaigns, volunteering – is already in Salesforce. For them, Data 360 adds a second data model and a consumption bill on top of data that’s already in one place.

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Why segmentation belongs in Salesforce

Whatever tools you send with, the segmentation should happen where the data lives:

• Complete data. Gifts, soft credits, designations, recurring commitments, households and campaign history are in Salesforce. An email tool only sees the fields you sync – usually a handful of rollups.
• One logic for all channels. The same priority order, the same suppressions and the same household rules for print, email and phone. Segments built in each tool drift apart.
• Print included. Lettershops don’t segment for you – or they do it in a way nobody can trace back. Segments in Salesforce give them a final, documented file.
• Measurable. When every selection lands in a Salesforce campaign, gifts can be attributed and compared against a control group – across channels.
• Independent of the sending tool. Switching from one email tool to another doesn’t mean rebuilding every segment.

The limits of native Salesforce segmentation – reports that can’t combine “with” and “without” conditions across gifts, households and commitments, and the 50,000-record limit of “Add to Campaign” – are exactly what pushes many nonprofits into spreadsheets or into segmenting in each tool. We describe them in our articles on LYBUNT & SYBUNT, major donors, recurring donors and fundraising appeals.

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Three ways from Salesforce to every channel

1. Direct export for print and agencies

Lettershops, mail houses and phone agencies usually want a file. Export the final audience – after prioritization, suppressions and one mailing per household – in the format they expect: Excel, or CSV with the delimiter and encoding their systems read. Keep the same selection in a Salesforce campaign, so you know who was mailed and can attribute the gifts.

2. Via Salesforce campaigns

Most marketing tools can sync from Salesforce campaigns. If your segments fill campaigns, every connected tool picks them up – Account Engagement, many third-party email tools, event and SMS tools. The campaign is the handover point, and it stays the record of who received what.

3. Via direct integrations and APIs

For tools with their own data structures, a direct route is cleaner:

• Marketing Cloud: write segments into data extensions.
• Account Engagement: sync segments into lists.
• Third-party tools: call the tool’s API from a Flow or Apex action, for example to add contacts to a Mailchimp, Brevo or Optimizely list.

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Recommended stacks by size

Organization	Typical stack	Segmentation
Small	NPSP or Nonprofit Cloud, a third-party email tool, one lettershop	Segments in Salesforce, email via campaign sync, print via export
Mid-sized	Nonprofit Cloud, Account Engagement or a third-party email tool, several lettershops, phone agency	Segments in Salesforce with priority sequences, household deduplication and control groups
Large	Nonprofit Cloud, Marketing Cloud, several print and phone partners	Segments in Salesforce feeding data extensions; Data 360 only if many external sources need unifying

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Your marketing stack with Campaign Audience Builder

Campaign Audience Builder builds segments natively on NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud data and delivers them to every channel you use:

• Export: Excel or CSV with the delimiter and encoding your lettershop needs – including a sheet documenting the selection criteria.
• Campaigns: audiences fill and refresh Salesforce campaigns, with campaign cleansing and control groups – the handover point for every connected tool.
• Integrations: Marketing Cloud data extensions, Account Engagement lists, and Flow or Apex actions for any third-party tool with an API.
• One audience, several channels: the same appeal segment can fill a print campaign, an email campaign and a data extension in one run.

Here is one appeal audience delivering to two campaigns – print and email – plus a Marketing Cloud data extension and a Flow action:

Conclusion

The right sending tools depend on your size, budget and channels – and most nonprofits will keep using several. What shouldn’t be scattered is the segmentation. Build segments once in Salesforce, where gifts, households and commitments live, and deliver them by export, campaign or integration to every channel. Data 360 is the answer to many data sources, not to limited segmentation; for most nonprofits on Nonprofit Cloud or NPSP, the data is already where it needs to be.