Evalato vs. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

Evalato is a great award management software, which has all of the necessary tools. One of the best features we used is that it allowed us to create our own award competition form and embed it into our website. This was a real lifesaver, as we didn't need to hire web developers to help us with that part of the process. It was all handled through Evalato's platform and it saved us time and money.

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

• Structures the categories in the awards conveniently
• Organize judging of awards
• Automates processes that are important for quality awards

• 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

• Filtering options of all registrations

• 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

Evalato’s features have made it easier for us to organize our programs and collect applications, the software has also saved us time and has increased our programs’ impact

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

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

In my work experience I have only used Evalato for Award Management

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

• Great ROI as we were able to increase the number of entries through Evalato, therefore we earned more.
• We achieved our marketing goals.
• We got great feedback for the ease of use from the judges and participants of our awards.

• 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