Salesforce for Nonprofits rises above other nonprofit CRMs overall.
October 28, 2019

Salesforce for Nonprofits rises above other nonprofit CRMs overall.

Tierra Bishop | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce for Nonprofits

My organization uses Salesforce for Nonprofits as our only client record management system to track donor/supporter information. We are also in the process of utilizing it as a student CRM. Currently, it is being utilized by the fundraising/marketing team, but will eventually be utilized by the student admin side as well.

Pros

  • Salesforce makes it simple to enter and track client data across time.
  • Salesforce for Nonprofits allows organizations to enter and track donation information with customizable options that make it easy to reconcile with internal financial data.
  • Salesforce for Nonprofits provides free resources to connect with other nonprofit/organizational professionals and learn from them; they also provide learning resources on their Trailblazer platform.

Cons

  • The main issue I have with Salesforce for Nonprofits is the reports functionality. Salesforce forces you to create "canned" reports to some extent each time and doesn't let you build a report entirely from scratch. For example, when you create a report you have to first determine what "type" of report it is, such as contact or donation report, and then it pre-selects a list of report indicators/data points that you can choose from. I have very often found myself wanting to pull in information from areas/data points that are not available to me based on the report type. This may have been in an effort to make reporting more simple, but it actually creates a lot of frustrations and inability to find the data I need.
  • Salesforce for Nonprofits seems to be contact-based in a lot of ways instead of household-based, but I think users should have the option to choose between the two in various settings within the CRM. For example, in campaigns, the users have to add campaign participants as individual contacts, and you cannot add an entire household or org to the campaign together. You would have to separately look up each person within that household, and add each one manually.
  • 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.
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 would say the support for Salesforce for Nonprofits is overall pretty great, as they offer many avenues to find the information you need and offer nonprofits the ability to work with Salesforce-trained volunteers or professional for free, which is useful especially during the customization process. I will say that I have often encountered situations where I needed to figure out certain information that I could not find even amongst the vast network of knowledge they provide.

Do you think Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud's feature set?

Yes

Did Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud go as expected?

No

Would you buy Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud again?

Yes

Salesforce for Nonprofits is a decent comprehensive CRM system, better than three others I have used (DonorPerfect, eTapestry/Blackbaud, and Aegis). For the most part, it is user-friendly (once you get past the setup/customization phase, which is actually rather difficult and involved and often requires working with a Salesforce professional) and allows you to visualize your client data in a streamlined way. However, I do think it needs work in its reporting functionality. If reporting was more customizable, I would really love this CRM.

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