Salesforce.com as Nonprofit CRM Donor Management Database

One of my first orders of business when I arrived at CERF was to transition out of the organization’s ancient proprietary Access database. I had been talking with the former office manager over the last year about assessing data needs and possible solutions. They looked at everything from Raiser’s Edge to Lifeline and Exceed Basic; even contemplated having a dB developer create another Access dB from the ground up. As with many nonprofits, open source solutions were never a consideration.

As I was slated to come on board and got a better understanding of the organization’s data needs, organizational capacity and overall strategic goals all signs were pointing in the direction ofmany more web-based activities in their future. So, I began to take closer looks at ASPs (application service providers), such as Etapestry, Convio, Get Active and Kintera, to provide a launching point for future e-endevors.

After assessing and demoing many different solutions and comparing my findings to our data managment system requirments, I remained unconvinced that these solutions would ultimately meet either our short or long term data management needs.  The common theme among limiting factors were (informed by Jon Stahl):

• Absurd pricing and hidden Total Cost of Ownership
• Lack of a simple and Intuitive User Interface (and reporting utility)
• Inability to easily customize (interface, user-defined fields, format)
• Concern over the company's financial sustainability
• Inaccessible or cost prohibitive ability to integrate with other applications (open API)
• Slugglish online performance
• Questionable customer help, support and training (and the associated costs)

Through Jon Stahl's blog and listserv postings, I began taking a closer look at nontraditional nonprofit dB solutions, in particular sales CRM tools.  At some point in one of these listserv conversations, someone mentioned that Salesforce.com provide their hosted CRM dB to nonprofits for FREE.  

After some investigation, I verified that not only does Salesforce in fact give their Professional Edition CRM service away free to nonprofits, but they have a solid reputation for philanthropy and giving back to the community; providing nonprofits free use of Salesforce is central to their philanthropic mission:

http://www.salesforce.com/foundation/

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2004/Apr/1

In addition, several nonprofits are using Salesforce, including the United Way. 

(Note: Salesforce Professional Ed. is free only up to ten users.)

So the question remained: would Salesforce, a sales-oriented CRM, work for nonprofit processes? If so, would it address the issues that I was confronting with other ASP solutions (sluggishness, customizing etc.)?

Literally, within minutes of signing up for a free thirty day trail, I was phoned by an account manager to help me get started (not to  make a sell since it was obvious I was a nonprofit). In seeing that I was a nonprofit, she got me connected with their nonprofit CRM manager who in turn got me connected with Clearport.org.

Clearport.org is working with Salesforce to develop a template for nonprofits to help configure  Salesforce for nonprofit data management processes (to be released sometime in the Spring).  John Mayerhofer, Clearport's director, has been incredibly open and helpful as I've assessed if Salesforce would work for CERF.  He shared with me invaluable beta documentation of how to configure Salesforce for nonprofit needs.  Because of his willingness to share his knowledge, I have no qualms about giving him a shameless plug here, and a link to his donation page.

In short, I have recommended that CERF deploy Salesforce as its data management system.  The rational for my recommendation is that Salesforce meets our basic and priority requirements:

Basic Contact/Relationship Management

Relationships: Between orgs/businesses and staff, individuals and family/friends, individuals and employer

Loan Processing: with Payment schedule

Donation Processing: with Pledge, Matching Gift and complicated GIK donations

Gift-in-Kind Brokering: creating a reciprocal connection between GIK donor and GIK beneficiary

Query and Reports: Intuitive report writer

Integration with other applications: Outlook (can access directly from Outlook), Excel, QuickBooks, any application.

I have no illusions that there are some kluggy things about the application when customizing it for nonprofit processes; it definitely would not work for all organizations. Additionally, edge CRM functions like email blasts, online donation processing, event management and e-commerce functions are not part of it's functionality (unlike Kintera).  However with an open API, integration of third party applications are possible to gain that functionality.  I'm looking at Democracy in Action, which also has an open API, as a possible low cost edge CRM provider (In Jon Stahl's words: "Pieces loosely joined.")

Nonetheless, I think it's worth a look for any small to mid-size organization to consider when looking at a data management system.

I look forward to comments...

Comments

[Matthew Scholtz]

A couple of requests and a question:

First, I'd be very curious to hear how good of a fit you find Salesforce to be once your client has been using it for a while. Please report back on that.

I'd also be very curious to see Clearport's documentation, if they're willing for you to post it. And if you do end up customizing, I'd love to see screenshots or other documentation from that.

Second, I'm curious if you've gotten any sense from Salesforce themselves about how committed they are to keeping the free-to-NPO's thing going. Do they make any sort of pledge to you to provide free service for a specific length of time? If not, I'd be a little nervous. An org. could get stuck, not wanting (or able) to pay the monthly fee, but not being able to easily migrate away quickly enough.

[Eric Magnuson]

While I agree with Matthew that nonprofits should be wary of "free" with no guarantee of term, I place a lot of trust in a company who has made such a public declaration of support to nonprofits. I just sent into my request for a nonprofit account and there is nothing about the experience (or contract) that a red flag.

What is missing is the temaplte for nonprofits. At this point, I am facing a fairly involved process to modify the terminology and structure to fit my org's needs. Much of my needs are stock, others not so much. My org is a graduate school and we do recruiting, a function heavily dependent on CRM. I'd am going to contact Clearport and see if I can't help tailor a version of the nonprofit template for educational institutions.

Ever forward.

[Suzannah]

I am SO interested to hear how you integrate Democracy in action with Salesforce. I am applying for the Salesforce donation licenses for my org, and I use DIA. Please let us know how that goes, or email me directly!

Thanks!

[Judi Sohn]

I know this entry has been around for a while, but I'm knee-deep in this right now myself.

After careful analysis, we moved our advocacy, online donations and messaging from Kintera to GetActive earlier this year. I have absolutely no regrets. GetActive has been great. But the CRM is not nearly as powerful.

After considering Raiser's Edge, eTapestry, eBase, hiring a developer and more open source/smaller database solutions than I can count we went with Salesforce. Our donation just went through and now I'm working to get it set up for our work process, talking to 4 different partners.

It looks like we'll be able to export transactions from GetActive on a weekly basis to keep Salesforce up-to-date. I'm very impressed by how powerful SFDC is.

Oh, I should say that we're a small nonprofit organization working a mission against colorectal cancer through advocacy in research, policy and awareness.