Salesforce and how to avoid failSource
March 18, 2021

Salesforce and how to avoid failSource

Samantha Shain | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce for Nonprofits

We use Salesforce for a variety of purposes, including managing our grantmaking (this includes applications, compliance, evaluation, approval, contracting, payments, interim and final reporting, and closeouts); contact management (this includes contact segmentation, email marketing); and event management (this includes tracking contact engagement in virtual and in person events over time); knowledge management (our file repository application is integrated with Salesforce). Salesforce if our organization's Source of Truth for grants, compliance, and constituent engagement.

Pros

  • Fundraising
  • CRM
  • Custom notifications and automation

Cons

  • Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn
  • Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch
  • Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system
  • New email platform (integrated with Salesforce and based on Salesforce segmentation) increased open rate by 7%
  • Using Salesforce Flows to design a custom batch process for approving small grants reduced days of work to one or two clicks.
  • We replaced a paper system (walking around with a clipboard) to a virtual system (you can do it from anywhere!) for approving payments.
I have managed CRM technology on a variety of different products in my career, including Salesforce (NPSP), Salesforce (Sales Cloud), NationBuilder, CiviCRM, Breeze, Hubspot. They all have strengths and weaknesses that I find compelling. Overall, they've all done the job! Many organizations have switched to a different platform only to find that their problems followed them. It's really a question of strategy and stewardship more than technology in my opinion. That being said, Salesforce has *by far* the most customization and automation, which is perhaps both a blessing and a curse.

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?

No

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

No

Would you buy Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud again?

Yes

For an organization to achieve a successful Salesforce implementation and adoption, a specialized staff member is generally required to steward and maintain the system, including keeping up with releases, offering end user training, meeting reporting requirements, and generally enhancing the system with new functionality and automation. Very small organizations frequently face challenges meeting this recommendation because they simply do not have the capacity to keep up with the demands of a Salesforce instance. Additionally, some of the Salesforce differentiators (like profiles, security, role hierarchy, custom page design etc) are simply not relevant to nonprofits that need most users to have the same experience and do not restrict access to records and fields. Therefore, my opinion is that Salesforce is best suited for mid-to-large nonprofits that can dedicate an entire staff position to database management and are willing to embrace a growth-mindset, as Salesforce is constantly evolving.

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