Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud vs. Spark by Benevity

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.

Incentivized

Benevity Spark delivers particularly well for companies with a modern volunteer rewards plus donation matching program. The platform is designed to maximize employee-directed rewards and matching for community impact. Companies without volunteer rewards or donation matching may find limited employee engagement benefits from the Spark experience.

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

• Benevity Spark offers a clean and intuitive user experience designed to promote employee engagement in the community. Employees experience a modern user interface and easy access to the programs and tools behind the application.
• Benevity Spark empowers program administrators with detailed customization options to fit every company program. From smart user entitlements/permissions to robust customizable management reports, Spark allows global program administrators to efficiently manage large programs.
• The Benevity Spark user interface uses responsive web design, rendering a beautiful user experience on mobile, tablet, or laptop screens. Benevity Spark allows for ample opportunity for alignment to company branding and visual elements.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Benevity Spark is in the process of building a global network for nonprofit organization vetting. While that process has made significant progress, the global landscape made up of millions of nonprofit orgs across scores of countries remains a great challenge. The Benevity cause vetting and onboarding teams are making progress, but there is a lot of ground yet to cover.

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

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

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Benevity Spark helped complete the employee-community engagement experience at the company. Together with careful program design, internal marketing, and a robust employee training program; Benevity Spark helps to drive employee engagement in the community.

Incentivized