Salesforce for Nonprofits
Over the years, a lot of people have been very skeptical when I suggested that they use Salesforce at their nonprofit. Typically these people have some experience with Salesforce in the for-profit world, and they know Salesforce to be expensive and complex. That sounds like a bad fit for their small to medium nonprofit.
What I tell them is that for a small nonprofit, Salesforce is typically a great deal. The first 10 licenses are free, so if you have 10 or fewer staff people who need access to the system, you’ll pay nothing to Salesforce. I usually have to tell people that several times. This is a program Salesforce has been running for a long time, and they’re serious about it. So again, if you need 10 or fewer licenses, you’ll pay nothing to Salesforce. Period.
Once they wrap their heads around the free part, they’re still concerned about the complexity. Salesforce is a platform rather than a product, and so it gets used in millions of different ways. Salesforce can be incredibly complicated if you need it to be. That’s a strength, especially if you plan to grow. It is the reason there is a huge ecosystem around Salesforce — thousands of consultants and applications. Over ten thousand nonprofits use Salesforce, from tiny one person organizations to huge global organizations like the Red Cross.
Most nonprofit software solutions are designed to do one thing, like donor management, or maybe two, like donor management and volunteer management. With most of them, you eventually reach a point where you’ve maxed out the system and can’t add something to it that you’d like to. Frequently this is managing the program itself. Programs can be such different things that there’s no off-the-shelf product to manage nonprofit programs, but that data usually overlaps with donor and volunteer data, not to mention outcomes. Because Salesforce has open APIs, you don’t outgrow it. If there’s something you want to add to it, you can.
But Salesforce can also be pretty simple. The Nonprofit Starter Pack released in fall of 2014 is a huge improvement over previous versions, and makes things familiar for nonprofits. If even that seems like overkill, you can hide anything you’re not using and keep it very simple. The trick is setting it up the right way the first time.
Which brings us to how Salesforce is free the way a puppy is free. Unless you’ve got someone in-house who has some experience, you’ll need to pay someone to talk you through how you plan to use it and do some initial setup. The complexity of these steps are determined by the organization, and typically they overcomplicate it. I encourage people to start with some small set of what they want to do, and use it. As you use it, I guarantee you will change your mind about what you want to do with it. You should expect to spend some money each year on improving your Salesforce, but it doesn’t have to be a lot. With the right consultant, 20–25 hours/year can go a long way and get you a lot.
The real long-term investment, though, is that your staff has to spend time with it. If nobody uses it, it won’t be valuable, period. If the staff sees the value and wants the results (and are held accountable for those results,) it will be very, very valuable.
