SalesForce is helpful but not designed for researchers
January 19, 2019
SalesForce is helpful but not designed for researchers
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce for Nonprofits
My organization currently uses SalesForce in a variety of ways. Our program and field operations team uses it to manage their contacts and organizations that they work with. In particular, it is used to manage grants provided since we are a grant-giving entity, that is a big part of what we do. Our fundraising and development folks use it to track donors and donations from individuals, institutions, corporations, foundations, etc. Our communications folks use it to connect with Pardot to manage communications with our network. It addresses the issue of having all of our customers in one place so that everyone can access and run reports.
Pros
- Stores contact information. It's a CRM tool so it's great at keeping track of your customers.
- The reports functionality is pretty good. You can easily build reports yourself.
- It also connects seamlessly to Pardot which manages our communications with our network.
Cons
- You can only export reports into 2 types, excel is one of them and I can't remember the other. But it's crazy that such an advanced platform only has two options to export, it's archaic in that way.
- The dashboards you can develop are pretty weak. They look like they are from the 1980s.
- You aren't able to do analysis in SF, you have to have certain addons which usually cost more.
- Streamlining things in terms of communication. We use Chatter to communicate with folks in the field and because it's build-in we aren't paying for another program.
- Our support services team uses it to field data requests and problems so this allows for real-time tracking on issues.
- Making connections between folks in the database--individuals to companies (potential funders). Trying to make various entities relate to one another is advantageous for us in finding new relationships and prospective funders
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