Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

We’ve been implementing Salesforce for nonprofits for a year now - and the free licenses they offer to nonprofits continues to be compelling. The Salesforce Foundation is active, is helping spur adoption in the nonprofit community, and is also working with their 3rd party vendors to reduce their pricing for nonprofits or provide their tools for free.

I wanted to take a moment to list some of the reasons why Salesforce makes sense to some of our customers:

• It’s a great tool for keeping track of your constituents - web based, easy to use, and at a great price - freely available.
• It’s exceptionally well tested. Our database experts really are good at their work - but they don’t have the luxury of testing every feature and line of code the way Salesforce, Adobe or Microsoft do. So - if we have to start from scratch using Access, SQL, or any of those other terrific tools - well - ours won’t be as rock solid.
• The user interface is very well done. And while our database and website experts create good looking and easy to use user interfaces - we don’t generally have an unlimited design budget! A frugal design budget means that we rely heavily on input from our nonprofit customers, rather than conducting a lot of usability testing, focus groups and so on. Salesforce has a large investment in their user interface that a modest development budget can’t match.
• It works great for tracking donors, volunteers, and roles.
• You can integrate easily with your Plone website -so website visitors can RSVP for events, can sign up for classes, or can indicate interest in knowing more about your agency.
• When Salesforce updates their tools, you get those updates without having to install any software!
• You can use Salesforce as the data source for your enewsletter communications - and can keep track of your subscribe/unsubscribe information in Salesforce.
• It is fast for us to customize - so once you have your requirements thoroughly documented - we can get Salesforce ready for you quickly.

Salesforce isn’t a one size fits all solution. The parallel between selling a widget and securing a donation make it a terrific choice as a donor management tool. And we’ve created some customizations that also make Salesforce great for volunteer tracking. We haven’t yet created other customizations, but here’s a short list of things we’re hoping to develop:

1. Flexible outcomes based tracking
2. Grants management for granting agencies