Salesforce as Nonprofit CRM: Part II

Preface: I may imply here that Salesforce is a one-size fits all data management solution for any nonprofit. Please, please, please don’t take my review that way; any data management decision needs to be preceded by a data needs assessment process.

Last November, I wrote here that I was recommending Salesforce.com to my current employer, the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, as a data management solutions. By the end of January, after several months of data mapping, Salesforce configurations, User Interface configurations, documentation writing, testing and training (not to mention December holidays, a January vacation and other facets of my job), I completed the migration of our data from MS Access to Salesforce.

Now some three months later, I’m finally reporting back on my/our experience.

Overall Evaluation

All in all, Salesforce is a great fit for CERF’s data management needs.  We did a full assessment of our current and emerging data management needs and Salesforce has met and exceeded most of our expectations (one ambivalent employee has been completely won over by it). We have 100% staff buy-in, as well as a committee using Salesforce, rather than pricey paper mailings, to review and approve grant and loan applications.

Quick Review

Advantages:

-Intuitive user-end: With minimal training, the CERF staff is fully using and is more productive/effective from using Salesforce.

-Free (for up to ten users; more user logins can be negotiated)

-Low TCO (Total cost of ownership): No need for infrastructure improvements (although we bumped up to an SDSL 650 broadband connection for better performance, but it actually does pretty well on my dialup at home) and no application/database developer needed.

-Enterprise Edition is now offered to all nonprofits, which allows full access to all of the Salesforce customization utilities.

-On the fly customizations without coding (creating new objects and tables that integrate seamlessly into the existing framework).

-Ability to fully configure user interface based on user’s position in the organization.

-An open source Excel plug-in that allows for easy importing, mass changes and more complicated reporting (the import and ongoing maintenance of our data would have been impossible without this tool…kudos to Ron Hess).

-Integration of MS Office products (posting emails directly to a constituents account) and other web apps (we use Editme Wiki for our documentation and Basecamp to manage administrative projects, both of which have a tab in the Salesforce user interface).

Drawbacks:

-Reporting Utility: This has been our biggest frustration. There are some severe limitations in the reporting utility to query data from multiple tables. Also, it doesn’t query on records without values, which is particularly problematic for donor/non-donor comparison reports like SYBUNTS and LYBUNTS. We have had to export tables and recreate them MS Access to build the reports we need. (Note: many of the issues I layout here will be addressed by the new Salesforce release due out in June)

-Not much support for nonprofits: Up until now there has been very little support for nonprofits (forums, knowledgeable support person(s), consistent contact person). The Salesforce Foundation is bringing on a full time person to address this issue (see conversation with Steve Wright below).

Addressing some questions

Commitment to Nonprofits: Several comments, both on this blog and in emails, have questioned my choice to go with Salesforce, primarily because they have no documentation that explicitly states their commitment to indefinitely offer their services free to nonprofits. My faith in Salesforce’s commitment to nonprofits is based on a company founded on and routinely proving its committment to its philanthropic mission. However, I did some digging and in fact they have nothing written that fully articulates their commitment to offering Salesforce services to nonprofits; nothing in their mission, nothing in their annual report (PDF), and nothing on their website. Their mission simply states a commitment to promoting, “the model of giving: 1% Time, 1% Equity and 1% Profit.”

So I called and spoke with the Foundation’s Program Director Steve Wright to get some things straight (admittedly, I’m not very hard-ass in these situations). Steve affirmed that they do not have anything written that fully articulates their commitment to offer Salesforce for free to nonprofits in perpetuity. He admitted that they actually have very little documented being a young and emerging foundation. But in five years of the program they have never not renewed service to an organization that has continued to qualify (i.e. continues to operate as a nonprofit). The program is growing precipitously; growing beyond their 1% commitment of sharing corporate equity through the program and now serving almost 600 nonprofits with free use of Salesforce.com.

With that said, each organization needs to gauge their comfort level with any for-profit company’s gift-in-kind offerings. I believe there are far too many organizations that commit to pricey data management solutions that don’t ever come close to meeting their needs. In the case of our experince with Saleforce,  the risk of investing in a free solution that can be customized without coding, extended without addtional costs and all while meeting 95% of our basic data management needs is a no brainer for me.

Nonprofit Template: Some folks asked me about the lack of a nonprofit configuration template when one signs up for Salesforce. Their next release, due out mid-June, will have a nonprofit template. At the same time, with all nonprofits now able to use the Enterprise edition of Salesforce, I think many organizations will need to take advantage of creating custom objects (more on that to come).

Backups: Many organizations are uncomfortable with the idea of their data being hosted offsite on some unknown server in the universe (although for some reason, its ok to depend and trust one to handle mission critical email communication…hmmmm). Salesforce has a very easy utility that allows an organization to export out all data into a compressed file of csv documents; each a table in Salesforce. We do a weekly export and keep an archive file. If need be, it would be easy to recreate an Access or FM Pro dB on the fly.

Is it as good as Raiser’s Edge?: This wasn’t exactly a question, but some folks are comparing its functionality (or lack there of) to RE and other high end donor databases. Salesforce probably has the ability to do some of the more complicated donor tracking functions, such as gifts through donor advised funds, gift annuities, soft credits, etc, that these programs do, but it will take some development and time investment. (BTW: I’ve created matching gift and memorial/honor functions in our system.) I have to admit though, I pine away for RE’s query and reporting utility.

A bit on customizing Salesforce (for those hardcore database geeks)

When I first migrated data to SF in January, the company had only begun to offer its Enterprise Edition to nonprofits. I knew it came with many advanced features not available in the Professional Edition, but I didn’t fully understand how revolutionary the ability to create custom objects would be. Coming from a Raiser’s Edge background, I was far to accustomed too conforming and contorting data into a proprietary application and compromising programmatic needs for technology limitations. Needless to say, the first iteration of my SF configuration was not ideal. Somewhere along the way I got a clue and began to more fully understand the custom objects utility; like dominos, I began to think completely different about how a database could be designed and configured to TRULY meet program needs.

We defined six areas with distinct data management needs (with easily created points of integration between each):

Constituent and Relationship Management
Constituents (SF Object: Accounts): The basic for our database: all individuals, businesses and organizations.

Relations (SF Object Contacts, List on Constituent Record): Relations are all family members of an individual or employees of a company/organization that we do not have a unique relationship with. The one kludgey part of this database is that each constituent also has their own relation record (for Outlook integration and extra bio information).

Affiliations (SF program “Partners” that creates reciprocal relationships between constituents, List on Constituent Record): We use this to track Constituent to Constituent relationships (such as a board member to a business).

Beneficiary Management
Beneficiaries (SF Object Opportunities, List on Constituent record):

-Applications (Custom Object): Has additional unique custom objects for the Application Committee

-Disbursements (Custom Object): Grant and Loan awards

-Brokered Gift in Kind Received (part of Gift in Kind object)

-Loan Schedule/Receivable (Custom Object)

-Loan Payments (part of Revenue object)

Revenue Management
Revenue (Custom Object, List on Constituent record): Tracks all incoming money: Donations, Fee for service, Merchandise Loan Payments, Raffle Ticket Sales, Pledge Payments, and Membership Dues. There are also custom relationship fields for memorial/tribute and matching gift connections.

Gift in Kind Management
Gift in Kind (Donated) (Custom Object, List on Constituent Record): Tracks all GIK for services or products that we use for operations, raffle/auction at fundraising events, or broker for our beneficiaries; creates relationships between GIK donors and GIK beneficiaries as well as between GIK donors and Fundraising events.

Event Management
CERF Events (Custom Object): This is an event management module that I built with custom objects. We use this to manage and track all aspects of our fundraising events (and membership programs) and it gives us quick snapshot of the event including:

Invitations (Custom Object)

Participation (Custom Object, List on Constituent record)

GIK Donations (part of GIK object)

Event Donations, Tickets and Items Sold (part of Revenue object)

Communication Management
Communication History (SF Object Activities, List on Constituent Record): Tracks all communication (phone call notes, emails, solicitations, and newsletters) with Constituents. Integrates with Outlook and aggregates communication from all other objects/tables (i.e. if you enter a communication log on an application, it shows up on their Constituent Record).

Notes and Attachments (SF Object, List on Constituent record):  Aggregate of notes and attachments on all other objects/tables.

Wish list and future developments

-Better integration with Firefox: After using some slick Greasemonkey plug-ins in Firefox, I’m ready for some Sforce coders to start playing around

-Nonprofit user community: forums, Listservs, blogs, IRC Channel, Meetups.

-Sforce consultant developer community to extend Salesforce.

-Formulas: In the next release, Salesforce will have the ability to perform calculations and more advanced formulas, which will allow us to reconcile our loan account receivable with loan payments (as well as donor pledges).

-QuickBooks integration

-Online Applications: a web form directly integrated into Salesforce

-Integration with Network for Good and Groundspring.org online donation services (and email?): This is in the works.

-Future: data integration into future online services.

Comments

[Trey]

Good stuff. I've been wrestling with this same issue (of using crm tools for non-profits), and was wondering if you could comment on your decision to go with Salesforce rather than SugarCRM which has an open source version.

[Sonny]

Trey: Good question. SugarCRM was the first CRM product I consider (per Jon Stahl's suggestion). There are several factors that play into not going with SugarCRM.

-TCO: Hosting, upgrading, coding customizations (i'm not a coder). All not issues with Salesforce. This is a great analysis of what I'm talking about: http://www.jots.com/users/roland/sugarcrm

-Customizing: Sugar CRM, at least the version I look at last Fall, did not have the customization potential to make it a viable CRM for nonprofit processes.

-Company long-term sustainability: SugarCRM is a startup, Salesforce is established. I couldn't risk using a product (a la' Mission Maestro) that come two years down the road will no longer have support or a development community.

I hope this answers your question.

[Joyce Bertoch]

I work for a nonprofit organization and we are attempting to use Salesforce. To track events, we are considering the user of Campaigns. Did you ever evaluate Campaigns or do you have any information about this feature of Salesforce?

Thanks for any help.

[Alex Nimmo]

I have found your posts on Salesforce very valuable from a non-profit perspective - thankyou for contributing these articles.

Have the upgrades to the reporting module been as extensive as you'd wished, as I would like full relational reporting implemented. It is a great product though.