Likelihood to Recommend Fluxx is well-suited for use by both small and large non-profits. Fluxx provides an intuitive interface and accurately houses grant proposal application data. Fluxx may be less useful at organizations where multiple funding layers exist, such as at community foundations which house multiple philanthropic funds. Fluxx has been an excellent product over the 10 years I have worked with it
Read full review If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.
Read full review Pros It's easy to find grant records and related information. Excellent tool for managing and displaying processes. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Autofill of past information Recommendations of other grants Better word count amounts Read full review Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system Read full review Likelihood to Renew There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Support Rating I have an assigned rep who is very responsive and is able to answer any questions. Other than that, the technical support has been terrible. I often don't waste time documenting bugs because I know they likely won't get fixed or even followed-up on. Instead, I search for workarounds.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Not included above because it is not in the system is Salesforce Foundation Connect. Again, I am always hesitant with this type of question. We selected grant maker because it offered the best fit for our organization's working style and culture. There is also a personal level of service that Fluxx offers that differed from other vendors (Smart Simple is similar in this way too). At the time we made the selection, one of the main influencers was the number of large foundations adopting the platform. As they invested in features, those features rolled out to the rest of the clients. This offered us access to functionality we would not have been able to afford otherwise. We moved from another vendor whose platform allowed for customization as well, but if they built it for one client, you still had to pay for it and pay ongoing yearly fees. So, the SAAS model adopted by Fluxx appealed to us. This has paid dividends as features have been developed. For example, one large foundation added the capability to track program-related investments alongside normal grantmaking activities within Fluxx. This is not functionality we could have paid to develop, but we have program-related investments that we wanted to track alongside grants and that feature was available to us because the development was paid for by that funder. That said, most of the above vendors have compelling products (as well as others), so be sure you look at your options and talk to users (other than the ones they provide you in the reference list) and check the Idealware guides
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment The time it takes me to pull a grant proposal together is less now because many of my talking points are organized within Grantmaker. I feel more connected to my team even though I am a remote freelancer. Read full review Salesforce has allowed us to easily track donor communications in one area, which I believe has improved our donor communication overall. Salesforce for Nonprofits has made it easier on my org to track and pull donation-related information and has reduced the amount of time we need to do these regular tasks. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud Screenshots