Salesforce CRM for Nonprofits: Is It the Right Fit For You?

Selecting a customer relationship management (CRM) platform is one of the most consequential technology decisions that a nonprofit will make.

When it comes to flexibility, reliability, and extendability, Salesforce CRM sets the gold standard. As one of the most popular CRMs in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, Salesforce can help your team manage donor, member, marketing, volunteer, and program information in one place, with seemingly limitless options when it comes to development, applications, and third-party integrations.

However! That limitless scale is both its biggest strength and its biggest liability. For the right organization, it can be a great fit—but it can also be way too much for an organization with simpler needs better suited by a different platform. As one of our clients memorably put it, “I got a Lamborghini when I needed a Toyota Corolla.”

Whether you are just starting to evaluate Salesforce, are already planning a migration to Salesforce, or have an existing Salesforce instance you’re hoping you can salvage, we’re here to give you a clear-eyed look at what to expect and what common mistakes to avoid when you’re a nonprofit working with Salesforce CRM. We’ll cover:

• Salesforce CRM for Nonprofits: Overview & FAQs
• Benefits and Challenges of Using Salesforce as a Nonprofit
• Salesforce Nonprofit Cost Considerations
• Implementing Salesforce CRM for Nonprofits: Best Practices (and Common Gotchas)
• Final Salesforce CRM Takeaways

Benefits and Challenges of Using Salesforce as a Nonprofit

Salesforce Nonprofit Cost Considerations

As we mentioned, Salesforce will grant ten free licenses to qualifying organizations via their Power of Us program and assign additional licenses at a significant discount. You can apply these license sets to either the NPSP or Agentforce Nonprofit.

Free licenses are a wonderful start, but there are a number of other cost considerations that should factor into your organization’s consideration of Salesforce CRM:

• Consulting and implementation teams. Most organizations will want to hire an outside Salesforce consulting and implementation team to set up their instance and import their data.
• Data imports. Data import costs can range widely. Make sure you know exactly what you’re signing up for: a cheaper import might sound great on paper, but might mean the burden of cleaning and consolidating your data falls to your staff – and that carries its own cost.
• App pricing. Almost all apps that connect Salesforce to third-party platforms have costs. Be on the lookout for the occasional gotcha with apps that have tiered pricing beyond just a free and pro version: make sure that the feature you need is available at the price point you’re expecting.
• Training. You’ll want to make sure you budget generously for training your team – not just for general Salesforce 101 training, but workflow-specific training tailored to their specific roles. Also, training shouldn’t stop at launch; the months that follow are critical for folks to refine their own workflows and gain confidence in their new system.
• Ongoing support. Select a vendor who will stick around and help your Salesforce instance grow alongside your organization so that it remains relevant for your staff and continues to support your organization’s strategic priorities.

Implementing Salesforce CRM for Nonprofits: Best Practices (and Common Gotchas)

We have more than a few hard-won lessons we’ve learned over our decade-plus of helping nonprofits implement (and rehabilitate) Salesforce CRM:

Identify your organization’s Salesforce power user.

Salesforce implementations work best when you have a designated internal leader who can be the go-between for your staff and your implementation team. This person will become your in-house expert: someone who is capable of answering the normal questions that arise, and knows when to escalate a question to the implementation team for help. Make sure their other job expectations leave time for them to experiment, learn, and support other people on your team.

Listen to your staff, and invest in training them.

A system that’s perfect on paper can fail in practice if folks feel ignored or steamrolled, or if they don’t have hands-on training in their new day-to-day workflows. CRM migrations are more than data migrations: they’re workflow migrations, and you need to take as much care mapping tasks and processes as you took importing first name, last name, and email. Emotionally intelligent change management is critical for the success of any new platform, be it Salesforce or something completely different.

Change is always a challenge, but you can help it be a positive challenge by enlisting the support of an implementation team that will listen to concerns, helpfully direct your team’s energies, translate their needs into smart structural decisions, and give them real answers.

Identify the minimum viable version of your CRM.

This step allows you to get folks using the system sooner, rather than later. You can usually break a project down into phases, especially when you’re consolidating multiple, siloed data systems. When it comes to CRM migrations to any platform, think about the bare minimum your team needs to have available before they start using the system.

Maybe the Development team gets to be first, as soon as all their donor data is in–or maybe Programs would benefit from importing parents and students from the past few years as part of outreach for upcoming summer camps.

The sooner you can get people starting to use the system, the faster you can start building their confidence—or, the sooner you’ll know what needs to be adjusted to facilitate a smoother adoption process in future phases.

Treat launch day as the beginning, not the end.

Every building needs maintenance, and your CRM is no different! The weeks after launch are absolutely critical for your team’s ability to feel seen, supported, and confident as they start using their new tools. Partnering with an implementation team that will be your allies over the long-term is a wonderful way to make sure your systems keep pace with your organization’s needs as they organically shift over time.

Just because you can integrate it, doesn’t mean you should.

Not every system needs to be connected to your CRM. If users are logging into your website and updating their profiles, absolutely pass that data to Salesforce. If, however, you use an event registration platform exactly once a year for your annual gala and nothing else, dedicate yourself to a once-a-year manual export/import.

And just because you integrate it, doesn’t mean you have to sync everything.

Configure Salesforce to hold every aspect of your MailChimp data, and you’ve suddenly built a less-good MailChimp in Salesforce that’s both expensive and redundant (see “Challenge: You can configure Salesforce to track anything” above).

Let Salesforce hold the high-level data (this contact got this email), and leave the minute details to the other platform (this contact clicked these three links).

If you do integrate it, carefully map out the direction the information will flow.

Imagine a situation where two separate integrations push contact information independently into Salesforce. If those two systems have slightly different versions of someone’s name, whose version of the name should win, and should that information be allowed to override Salesforce’s version of the name at all?

Questions like this are vital to maintaining the integrity of your data, and are questions that your nonprofit Salesforce implementation partner should help you keep in mind.

Just because you can import all your data, doesn’t mean you should.

Take an impartial look at your data. Do you really need the legacy records that go back to 1992? If you need to identify candidates for lifetime memberships, maybe the answer is yes – but maybe importing one Original Start Date would accomplish the same thing… or maybe that information can live in a spreadsheet, peacefully, forever.

Estimate how much calendar time you think implementation will take, and then double it.

Investing in any new CRM takes time, talent, and patience. With the right platform and the right implementation team, it will have been worth the wait – but clear-eyed realism about timelines can help you start your journey on a foundation of trust and honesty.

Final Salesforce CRM takeaways

We appreciate Salesforce for its robust flexibility, and we’ve built some pretty cool things there, from a fresh NPSP instance for a regional arts council to a migration and integrations for a national reproductive rights organization–but it’s definitely not the right platform for every team.

We’ll close with our top indicators that Salesforce CRM is (or is not) a good match for your organization:

Salesforce is a good match for your organization if:

• You want to track lots of different kinds of things in one central place (memberships, donations, programs, event attendance, matching gifts, incoming grants, outgoing grants, relationships, partnerships);
• You have a number of platforms with information you’d like to sync to one central place (a mailing platform, a learning management system (LMS), a member portal);
• You have someone on your team who can be your designated Salesforce power user;
• Your team appreciates a robust system with a lot of tooling.

Salesforce is not a good match for your organization if:

• You want to focus on tracking one particular kind of thing more than anything else (you might focus on donors, or on members who occasionally donate, or on who’s logging into your website and what they’re clicking);
• Your integration needs are relatively simple (you mainly track donors, and the money mainly comes in through one form on your website);
• Your team doesn’t have the capacity to dedicate much time to training or having someone be your power user;
• Your team would benefit from a more streamlined interface where there are fewer fields to see and fewer options to click.

Switching to any CRM is both a big challenge and a big opportunity, and you don’t need to go it alone. We’re here to be your nonprofit technical ally at any point in your CRM journey, whether it’s to audit your current tech stack, lead a CRM selection process, implement the move to the new CRM, tackle a particularly tricky data transformation, or help your staff gain confidence in your new system. Drop us a line!