One of the best Resource Management Systems out there!
January 14, 2019
One of the best Resource Management Systems out there!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce for Nonprofits
We are a grantmaking organization. We use Salesforce to track our granting relationships, and eventually, to process the application and payment of the grant. We are a smaller team of 4 and all of us are in Salesforce daily, whether it's inputting notes from a call with a potential grantee, or creating payments for a multi-year grant by our Grants Manager. A special feature we added to our Salesforce is our Trip Planner. All of our grants are international. The Trip Planner allows us to add in site visits, trip details, and the organizations we visited during the trip. Essentially, it addresses relationship tracking, grants, and other data that we need to track as we give annually.
- Customizable- we travel a lot, so we were able to add in a Trip Planner tab to track.
- Reports function- at its base, I can get reports very quickly
- Ease of use- we have a range of ages and experience on our team and it's been a simple process for everyone to be on-boarded.
- Dashboards- although I've figured them out, only 1 or 2 people on the team actually know how to build and use them. I'm sure that I could use some more help on this.
- Note taking- we are on a lot of calls with grantees. Logging a call or adding a note can be tedious. Currently, there are no functions to help organize, bullet-point or bold certain sections.
- Tasks/Notes- they've been pretty much useless to the team. I can see the benefit of them, but they're really clunky to use.
- We're able to tell accurately what granting money we have left for different categories.
- We're able to track our relationships- what was the last email correspondence like when we last touched base with an organization etc.
- Can get a quick picture of how our strategy is on or off base according to our annual goals (not just dollar amounts, but our regional allocations, strategic focus areas, etc.)
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.