Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud

Salesforce offered major improvements over cheaper software platforms we'd used

Commentaires : Data organization and reporting were fantastic tools for our organization. Strategic planning and decision making that previously occurred according to essentially gut feelings were now backed with substantial amounts of hard data and a real, concrete understanding of our business operations. We really remade our organization thanks to the information that Salesforce allowed us to collect, organize, and manipulate.

Avantages :

The robust package of features was entirely unmatched in our experience with a number of other less expensive packages. Reporting tools in particular were incredibly useful for our organization, and really allowed us to dig into our data and glean valuable insights that, in some cases, reformed our understanding of our organization, clients, and industry. We used the many tools in Salesforce to implement an array of positive changes that would not have been possible otherwise.

Inconvénients :

Costs are always a concern for small nonprofits, and that's probably the only part of Salesforce that we struggled with. Of course, we'd had experience with free/cheap software in this space, and all of it had major technical problems. Saelsforce just worked, and gave us everything we needed. In that regard, the cost was much easier to swallow.

Salesforce for Non Profits

Avantages :

It does everything you need it to. It's very capable of using the most up-to-date technology available.

Inconvénients :

It is difficult to manage. Requires a lot of staff time to keep up to date with the latest updates and ensure everything is working smoothly. There's also a lot of add ons which can making initial pricing difficult

Not Created with Nonprofits in Mind

Commentaires : We use Salesforce as our main CRM at my non-profit, mostly so that we can keep track of clients, donors, and volunteers all in one place. I mostly use it to track volunteer participation and hours and pull reports on donor and volunteer activity to include in grants and marketing materials.

Avantages :

Salesforce for Nonprofits does add some additional features that nonprofits are likely to need for donor and volunteer management, and it allows everything to be in one CRM (versus having volunteers, donors, and clients in separate databases)

Inconvénients :

Salesforce for Nonprofits feels like it was a stretch for Salesforce. The way that Salesforce was built doesn't work well for many of the needs non-profits have, and Salesforce for Nonprofits is basically the same platform with just a few added features. It's clunky, and doing things like program management and pulling reports is not as easy as you'd expect given how it's described. Overall, it's clear that Salesforce kept it's sales mindset when building this software, rather than starting from the non-profit perspective.

Overpowered for us, but can do everything we'll ever need

Commentaires : We manage all of our donors, event attendees, volunteers and any other human that's connected with our organization through Salesforce. We spend a lot of time cleaning up the database, and we devote a lot of staff time to Salesforce management in general, but we consider it essential.

Avantages :

The biggest advantage is that it can do ANYTHING related to donor management, and you can tailor it pretty much endlessly. We also like that there is a huge user base so we have lots of places to go for support and to hire data entry staff.

Inconvénients :

The learning curve is as endless as the potential. There's no plug and play here—you have to be prepared to spend a LOT of time wrapping your brain around this software. Intuitive is not a word I would use for Salesforce.

Even after a few years, still overwhelmed.

Commentaires : It helped me to get an introduction to what I could do with a membership database/CRM without investing a lot of money into programs that may or may not do what I wanted them to (because I didn't know what I wanted them to do). It allowed me to get my database set up and organized and begin to understand our donor profiles, locations, amounts, and more.

Avantages :

It certainly is powerful and has many customizations and features and things to build. It has lots of integrations across the web and there is something to be said for being the biggest. Also, it's free for non-profits, so especially if you don't know what you are trying to do with a CRM, it's nice to be able to play around with Salesforce and get an idea of what types of data are useful to you before moving to some other program that requires higher costs up front.

Inconvénients :

If you don't care to become a developer or aren't one already, this software can run away with you real fast. While it's great that Salesforce is so powerful, in many ways it is too powerful and complex. Even with the nonprofit customizations, it's very difficult to navigate and customize, understand what all the different programs within it are, keep up with all the updates and integrations and who even knows. Basically, I get it - this is designed for large groups that can afford to have a dedicated Salesforce employee(s). It's for large databases with many moving parts. If you are small and your employees or board are juggling many jobs and not just database management, this is difficult to use. Plus, the interface looks like it never got past 1992.