Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud

Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud is a much more robust and powerful tool than Slate. It is user friendly and very customizable. The number of add ons is also amazing and has made our team that much more successful with powerful integration of phone systems etc that are not possible with the limited offerings of Slate.

I looked at many but they were all specific. I've looked at specific donation-only tools like Blackbaud. I've looked at volunteer-specific tools like GivePUlse. I've looked a just using spreadsheets. None scaled or could connect between programs like SF can.

Salesforce was complete and allowed for customization and has a team of experts available when we had questions. Access would have required complete creation and then finding someone to manage and revise it would have been difficult.

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.

I believe Salesforce for Nonprofits far exceeds expectations compared to these other tools. It has more free add-ons and a cleaner user experience.

We used Zoho as a database before we knew we needed a CRM. We even thought of creating our own database. We then tried Neon for a couple of years and then eTapestry. We found a few features missing with each of the packages when trying to manage our complicated family membership model. Salesforce allowed us to customize what we needed to make it work for our model.

Salesforce for Nonprofits allows for the essentials to run a full nonprofit whereas some of the other Salesforce applications are "nice to haves" vs. "need to have". An example would be that you can still email your customers without the Marketing Cloud. Another example would be that Salesforce allows (through visual force pages) the ability to build forms that can make your customers appear to connect to you (similar to Community).

I have managed CRM technology on a variety of different products in my career, including Salesforce (NPSP), Salesforce (Sales Cloud), NationBuilder, CiviCRM, Breeze, Hubspot. They all have strengths and weaknesses that I find compelling. Overall, they've all done the job! Many organizations have switched to a different platform only to find that their problems followed them. It's really a question of strategy and stewardship more than technology in my opinion. That being said, Salesforce has *by far* the most customization and automation, which is perhaps both a blessing and a curse.

Salesforce is the best option for managing sales. Other software, such as Google sheets, has been used in the past to just create a simple sharable spreadsheet - but the data entered was inconsistent and it was difficult to track work in progress. Using Salesforce in this setting helps students gain experience with the product and prepares them for the real world.

DonorPerfect appeared to be a decent enough solution, fairly robust. eTapestry and NeonCRM left much to be desired from a UX standpoint. Ultimately, Salesforce would compare with solutions like Microsoft Dynamics, etc. since it's a well-rounded CRM solution and platform that can be applied to any industry. Salesforce for Nonprofits is just a variant of their standard offering which is targeted to for-profits, Fortune 50 and Fortune 1000s alike.

Salesforce is far more robust than these other tools, but it was built to be a sales platform and not specifically for nonprofits. Keep in mind that even the NPSP is built on a sales-style platform. The others are built specifically for nonprofit fundraising. My org chose Salesforce before I joined, but I continue to use it because of its vast functionality and the improved user experience I have seen in the Lightning experience.

We use them in tandem and so they aren't really competing in my book. In my time here we have not tried out any other databases like salesforce so I cannot really speak to shopping around for a new database. I do know that Cvent, Mailchimp, and Salesforce are great partner products!

Salesforce for Nonprofits is more user-friendly and customizable than eTapestry and DonorPerfect. It also visually displays client/donation/etc. information in a more efficient and aesthetically pleasing manner.

I have used other nonprofit CRMs, however, they were created especially for that nonprofit, so are not used more widely. We liked the innovation that was possible when using Salesforce, something that is a bit more challenging with the more custom options. For example, if your organization is wanting to adapt to changes, pivot strategy, etc, Salesforce is really adept at helping you modify your CRM to accommodate those changes.

Salesforce is not as robust as Blackbaud, but the price point makes up for it in the end. When my company transitioned to Blackbaud, we had to take over a year of implementation and still have issues to this day. Salesforce was easy and worked like a charm in the first few months.

Salesforce gives you so much more than Infusionsoft, though it is the closest thing that I've worked with that I can compare it to. Customization is quite limited in Infusionsoft, but it will give you your basic needs. I suppose it depends on what you're looking for!

Salesforce for Nonprofits is much more flexible than other tools I've used in the past. You aren't limited to staying with one company's suite of products - you have the ability to build out your database / fundraising solution using best in class applications. It also has a different pricing model - it's all based on users and storage, opposed to a blanket platform fee.

We reviewed all the mid-level options before we chose Salesforce. All the other options we looked at were eater very undefined and we woud be building from scratch or they were very defined and woud require our processes to change to match the system. Salesforce was the sweet spot that had existing functionality that helped us improve but had the ability to create objects the way we work.