Candid GuideStar vs. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

It is just my go-to for any information I need on a potential client as I work in the non-profit consulting space and need to better understand my prospects. As a former nonprofit exec, I valued what we could share on the site as a gold seal for others to learn about our worthiness to invest.

Incentivized

I’d say it’s very well suited for organizations looking to move toward AI integrations and make more data-driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’ve also used the competing product from Blackbaud, which is a very closed system — you can’t really pull out the data. Salesforce, on the other hand, has a big advantage with its APIs, allowing you to extract data, store it in Data Cloud, and do much more with it.
However, if your requirements aren’t clearly defined or if there’s heavy customization involved, the implementation can get messy. So I wouldn’t recommend using Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud in cases where the requirements and structure aren’t clearly laid out.

Incentivized

• Identifying information from funder 990s
• Gives credence to transparency claims

Incentivized

• NPSP is designed to help with donor management.
• There are free add-ons for volunteer management.
• There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance.
• Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials.

Incentivized

• Most 990s are typically a few years behind.
• Organization profiles are only as complete as the organization makes them.

Incentivized

• Not an easy lift right out of the box unless you completely rule out customization
• Not "free to own" even if the grant is free because you'll need about 0.25 FTE to maintain it
• Constantly being updated which is cool but many items are "forced" and you must respond
• Lots and lots of customization are required to equal many canned solutions available for any one particular feature set (but none of them can cover the breadth and flexibility of SF)

Incentivized

There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!

Incentivized

I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out

Incentivized

Any support I've ever had to get from them was quick and professional. Their online guides/help docs are also easy to read.

Incentivized

I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.

Incentivized

I have always used Guidestar as my go-to not only when I was a non-profit executive and wanted to ensure we remained worthy of their rating but also now as a non-profit consultant where I need to understand my current and potential partners across financials, key contacts, board members, etc.

Incentivized

As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.

Incentivized

• More informed grant proposals.
• Able to easily and efficiently complete grant research.

Incentivized

• New email platform (integrated with Salesforce and based on Salesforce segmentation) increased open rate by 7%
• Using Salesforce Flows to design a custom batch process for approving small grants reduced days of work to one or two clicks.
• We replaced a paper system (walking around with a clipboard) to a virtual system (you can do it from anywhere!) for approving payments.

Incentivized