Is Salesforce CRM Best For Your Nonprofit?
Selecting the right donor management platform can have a profound impact on how your nonprofit manages donations, communicates with current and potential donors, analyzes donation data, and makes decisions about future projects pertaining to the organization.
We know that you have choices when it comes to choosing donation software, which is why we’ve put together a helpful guide to help you decide if Salesforce is right for you.
Salesforce: The lowdown
Here we will give you an overview of Salesforce so that you can make the best decision based on your organization’s needs.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a complex cloud-based CRM program that allows users from various departments within a company to interact with each other and work “as one” within the system, essentially bringing a global business together under one virtual roof. It is a software that integrates with many apps to track every transaction, customer communication, and workflow project, analyzing each process along the way and producing a slew of graphs and charts along the way.
The goal of Salesforce is to automate as much of your business as possible with the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Salesforce is used by some of the top for-profit brands in the country and currently has a user base of over 100,000 customers. This software is designed to track numbers, figures, data, sales, marketing trends, and send out advertisement emails and text messages to the masses. For a nonprofit setting, Salesforce offers packages which can be used specifically for tracking donations and other financial and marketing activity of a nonprofit that are ideal for large-scale businesses.
Salesforce is designed with big businesses in mind. This CRM system manages data, not customer experiences. It’s all about collecting data and information and providing outputs in the form of statistics, automated communications, and trending data.
Upon purchasing the Salesforce software, users receive a basic CRM package that must be customized to suit the needs of each individual company. This means that a company incurs extra costs purchasing additional plugins and integration software to realize the software’s fullest potential.
Additionally, if you don’t have an IT department, there are additional costs to have the Salesforce system properly installed within the company’s computer system so that it can integrate with all of the other software systems used by the business.
On average, the process of fully integrating Salesforce into your business takes about 6 months to complete and approximately 19 months to begin seeing a return on your investment (ROI), according to the G2 Nonprofit CRM Results Index. This is a standard timeline for integrating comprehensive software into a large business setting.
Why it is important for every nonprofit to add a personal touch
In a nonprofit world, donations are the backbone of your business and people donate money when they feel good about your cause and feel like they are part of your nonprofit’s community base. In order to inspire them to invest in your cause, your nonprofit should strive to add a friendly personal touch to every transaction.
Salesforce offers businesses a way to manage all financial transactions and interactions with customers. The most successful nonprofit organizations are the ones who inspire donors to jump on board and give back to others.
For large national or international nonprofits, Salesforce could be a good solution for your business. This cloud-based software system allows for multiple administrative users and provides a comprehensive tool for communicating with other employees and donors across different states and countries. This CRM database is capable of managing complex databases and providing graphic and analytical data in both a historical and live format.
Small and midsize nonprofits should choose a nonprofit CRM that is easy to use and provides the results you actually need. Some nonprofit CRM systems take months to fully integrate and require you to have an IT department to maintain the database or spend a lot of money to have an outside technology firm do the work for you. To see if Kindful is a good fit for your organization, you can schedule a demo now.
Schedule a live demo with our partner Bloomerang, and we’ll show you how easy it is to create and automate reports, utilize online and offline fundraising tools, quickly integrate and access all your data, and ultimately create more time to engage your donors.