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.
$36
per month per user
Submittable
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Submittable offers tools to launch, measure, and grow social impact programs, locally and globally. From grants and scholarships to awards and CSR programs, Submittable partners with users to make a difference. The vendor states Submittable has supported over 95,000 social impact programs, receiving nearly 20 million applications, and that teams save an average of 12 hours per week and launch in an average of 14 days.
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.
We love using Submittable for our grant applications. Sometimes, we've run into issues with filters inside the system not clearing -- and we lose access to some of our information. Submittable Customer Service is quick to respond and assist us in solving our problems quickly to get back up and running. We find their training videos to help us learn new ways to use the system.
Advanced reporting is far from advanced. There are SO many limitations and the need to manually do so many things in order to get the report structure you want, and it is not intuitive. The reporting is by far the most frustrating thing about Submittable and actually adds on staff time instead of cutting it down.
PDFs of submissions should include all supplemental files uploaded in the submission. You should not have to do massive exports with zip files and then merge everything manually to get one PDF of submitted content for simplified records or sharing.
We should be able to see the account emails and names of individuals who have started a draft submission. In our former system (GIFTS online via Blackbaud), we could see that information and could reach out personally to applicants to ensure they didn't miss deadlines and could remove emails from our reminder communications from those we knew already submitted and simply opened up an accidental additional draft. When we send reminders in Submittable to draft submissions, without fail, we get 5-10 people who reach out and are upset because they already submitted but think this means they didn't, regardless of how we word the email and tell them they may have an extra draft if they think they already submitted.
You should be able to simply build one report in whatever format you need and be able to switch between different projects that use the same exact form fields. My team has the same exact form used for nine different grant programs because they are the same programs, just for different local communities, but we have to build out the same report manually each cycle for each community.
We use this software annually to help with our grant processes. Without it, I'd be so lost! Our team relies on the data from our past years to sift applications and we try to prioritize those who have applied and been a finalist but perhaps didn't win in years prior
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
Submittable is very user friendly. Even our less tech-savvy team members were able to navigate Submittable and achieve what was necessary. The single limitation is that it is not easy to move information/documents/applications from the Submittable platform into other platforms, or even to download documents from Submittable into a separate storage system
We have thankfully never experienced an outage nor been affected by a technology issue on Submittable's side that has delayed our grant process. We have instead been able to distribute over $6M in donated dollars to AAPI small business owners because Submittable is trustworthy and available
We've had a quick and efficient submittable experience that has always been easy to use. When we need a report it downloads within seconds, even the larger reports are 30 seconds or less to download. Pages are quick to load and reports complete in a more than reasonable time frame
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 think that they are good at answering our questions and solving our problems. We occasionally get reports from applicants about problems the Submittable team has not solved, but I do not know what the applicant has done to get the problem solved.
We did not receive in-person training technically, it was virtual but it was one on one with a specialist. They were very patient and skilled - she knew everything about the program and honed in on features that would help make our jobs easier. We are so grateful for the training!
10/10 because we were able to meet virtually and still get all of our questions answered! Online was effective too because we could easily record the sessions and review them later. Since we had to onboard our reviewers virtually, it was actually convenient that this was the same method we learned how to use the entire program virtually too.
I would say, provide Submittable as much detailed information on your planned use of the platform and your desires with the platform as possible, and the implementation will be tailored to accommodate your organization with minimal lag time and issues/problems.
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.
When it comes to collecting applications, no one beats Submittable in terms of features and functionality. With other software we used, there were far too many limitations, including having to manually download data, inability to use logic for fields, and no analytics. The other products we used for application collection could not compare to Submittable.
Pricing is fair for the product and support received, and we are content with the billing being annual in order to save overall. Contract terms are fair, and don't seem inflated for any reason. Pricing per application is also fair, and you can actually have the applicant absorb the cost if necessary
We were happy to use this for many projects, but sometimes it can be hard to filter for a specific applicant and see how many of our projects and grants they have applied to without filtering by project. We're also hoping to have the feature added where reviewers can only see one project at a time if they don't have clearance to view all of the projects
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.
