A suite of organizing, fundraising, and digital tools used by labor unions, nonprofits, political parties, presidential campaigns, and state and local campaigns. NGP VAN is a Bonterra business unit.
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Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Salesforce for Nonprofits, the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, is a nonprofit constituent relationship management platform from Salesforce, which supports constituent engagement, fundraising, and grants. Nonprofit editions contain Salesforce Lightning Edition along with the former Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) combined.
Well suited when we have to run lists of those already canvassed or need to be canvassed. Not Well suited when the phone bank and MiniVAN does not work together. As it could cause someone to canvass someone who has just been phone banked or vice versa. Also, need to better provide emailing options.
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.
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)
As long as I’m an active Democratic volunteer I will use it, unless the Dems quit using it. I enjoy using NGP VAN and discovering more capabilities as I spend more time with it.
I think you have to have understanding of computer basics to master NGP VAN. I doubt a non-computer person, or someone who is hesitant about technology could do much with NGP VAN. It helps if you’re sort of a computer nerd (as I am, despite my old age) because then you don’t worry about experimenting.
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
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.
I can hardly remember since it was years ago. Various individuals have also coached me since then. If I can actually play around with it myself that’s the best way to increase my proficiency.
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.
