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Salsa Labs (discontinued)

Score7.9 out of 10

29 Reviews and Ratings

What is Salsa Labs (discontinued)?

Salsa was a donor and constituent management system. Salsa Labs was acquired by EveryAction in 2021 and joined with Bonterra. The Salsa CRM product is no longer available for sale.

Media

the development dashboard.
a donor detail report showing donation history.
donor cultivation for major gifts
mail merge and direct mail fundraising
a donor profile with unlimited custom fields

1 / 5

Salsa: Expensive but great product

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used by our Development team for fundraising and keeping track of donors as well as our field team for advocacy/action alerts.

Pros

  • List of donors- organization.
  • Can tag separate lists and send certain emails to certain groups.
  • Reaching different types of people in various platforms.

Cons

  • Affordability.
  • Social media compatibility.
  • Being able to target specific electeds.

Most Important Features

  • Affordability.
  • Easy to use.
  • List and contact information of politicians.

Return on Investment

  • Increased engagement with members.
  • Able to have easy access to donor information.
  • Able to reach out to targeted elected officials.

Other Software Used

EveryAction, Mailchimp, Outlook4Gmail

Engage Gets it Done

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Salsa Engage to email our supporters and create actions for our programming events.

Pros

  • Integration with SalesForce
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Technical support

Cons

  • SalesForce integration of new fields for synchronization
  • Supporter self-management of account (updating their own email)
  • Group management (no pictorial interface)

Return on Investment

  • Ease of use--huge time saver.
  • Elegant synchronization with SalesForce.
  • Responsive technical support.
  • Training documentation/how-to's could be vastly improved. Very slight on information.

Usability

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, Click & Pledge, Dataloader.io

Simple, for good or bad

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Salsa Engage as our email and donation management system. This was tied to our CRM system.

Pros

  • Simple to set up
  • Easy to develop donation forms
  • Easy to develop emails

Cons

  • Limited design functionality
  • Reporting is not very robust
  • Properly linking to external databases is challenging
  • Importing data to properly group audiences is challenging

Most Important Features

  • Email
  • Donation form
  • Constituent records

Return on Investment

  • It's critical to accept online donations
  • It's also important to communicate with your database
  • Being able to track constituent behavior is also helpful

Alternatives Considered

Blackbaud Luminate Online

Tough take off... glad to have it now.

Pros

  • Autoresponders and automated emails have been really cool and simple to use, that tool in itself has added a lot of value and has been a powerful way to keep supporters engaged.
  • Donor management is one thing that Salsa CRM gets really technical with. There is so much information that you can have on each donor.
  • I like the forms and how easy they are to embed on the website, like email sign up forms or donation forms. I can make them look seamless as they sit on the website and gather information and donations.

Cons

  • Starting up with the product was taxing, slow and generally not pleasant. Although the learning curve is real and tough to manage by yourself, I'm not really talking about that. It took over a month for Salsa CRM to get the thing activated and working so I could start using it. I was allocating a lot of my time to make sure they had everything they needed, and it was a lengthy process. I was also bugged by how many duplicates they put into the system from the donor information I gave them.
  • I think a few things were oversold about the product, the data conversion being one of those. And although I like the forms, they do not meet all the needs we were hoping for when it comes to signing up and retrieving data from volunteers.

Return on Investment

  • Email automation has been really positive. It has helped us properly thank donors and has helped us engage other supporters. I'm the only full time employee but this tool makes it seem like there is a small team of people sending out emails.
  • Before we just used G-suite to manage our supporters. Salsa CRM is more powerful but we have lost simplicity, so average or casual volunteers/supporters can't just create an email or collect volunteer information as easily.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp and Classy

Other Software Used

Google Drive

Have Salsa, just need chips!

Pros

  • User-Friendly. As a user, it is an intuitive product. When you are working, it is easy to navigate.
  • Fundraising Pages: Salsa Engage allows you to easily and quickly make fundraising pages that can be pushed out to your community of donors.
  • CRM: Easy to manage the constituents. When someone signs up for our fundraising pages, the software captures the demographics and either matches up to the existing donor or creates a new constituent.
  • Salsa CRM listens to their customers and works well with the user base. Most ideas are listened to and can see that requests are pushed out in updates.

Cons

  • I would LOVE an app on my phone rather than using the native browser but I do understand that there is a lot of work on creating this.

Return on Investment

  • As a small nonprofit, we have seen a 100% increase of giving as we push out to social media.

Alternatives Considered

NeonCRM and Bloomerang

Other Software Used

MailChimp, Basecamp, Trello