Item: Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Rating: 7
Author: Courtney Osterfelt

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce for Nonprofits

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it across our whole organization. We use it to track our youth participants, their families, our volunteers, donations, grants, and corporate partners.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It is a very large platform that is compatible with other platforms we use. For example, our online giving platform works very well with Salesforce, every time someone gives online it automatically logs it into Salesforce.
Salesforce allows us to track prospective donors and foundations, document what we are learning from them, document our involvement and track when the right time for a big ask is.
Salesforce has the ability for us to run large reports about our donors and our campaigns.

Cons

We are a small non-profit (only 3 full-time staff) with limited resources. It is very difficult to learn how to customize salesforce. It would be helpful if there was more customer service for new folks. The non-profit training program is helpful but it doesn't always address each version of salesforce that organizations have.
I could use some tutorials on running basic reports with ease.
It is difficult to understand what permissions to give my employees who also use Salesforce. I thought I gave them all the necessary permissions and lately, we are having a hard time logging donations as the title we want to give them. My staff will log a donation, give it a title, and when they hit save it changes the title back to the automated name. I am not sure why and I think it might have to do with her user permissions.

Return on Investment

We applied to the foundation and got free licenses for Salesforce so it was not a risky upfront financial investment for us. It has been a very helpful and useful CRM and donor management system for us.
Learning Salesforce is very challenging and has created a lot of frustration amongst our staff. There are not a lot of local resources in our more rural community to get assistance or training on Salesforce.
The HUB/community of users on Salesforce is very helpful and supportive. Whenever I pose a question I always get responses. Unfortunately, most of those people are much more advanced than I am so often, I don't understand their answers to my questions.

There is a lot of support if you live in a city. It is difficult to get support in rural communities. Also, we got Salesforce long before there was a Salesforce for non-profits and I think that some of the new features of the non-profit version did not migrate to our version and some of the old enterprise features have lingered around even though we tried to do the NPSP migration.

Key Insights

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?

Would you buy Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud again?

Other Software Used

Classy

Likelihood to Recommend

We are a growing non-profit and I anticipate that the size of Salesforce will be very helpful for us in the future. Right now it is challenging for us and we put a lot of energy into understanding what feels like it should take less energy to do. If someone asked me if they should get Salesforce for non-profits and they were a smaller org that does not anticipate growing past $500,000 annual budget, I would advise them to choose a different platform.

Comments

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Too big for us, but we are growing into it