Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 9 out of 10

Score

9 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Adaptability Across Personas: Users appreciate the platform's adaptability to different personas, allowing for a wide range of functionalities and configurations. This versatility enhances user experience by catering to diverse needs and preferences, making it a valuable tool for organizations with varied requirements.

Beneficial Out-of-the-Box Solutions: Customers find the out-of-the-box solutions for nonprofit fundraising beneficial in streamlining their efforts. These ready-to-use tools save time and effort, providing a convenient starting point for fundraising campaigns and helping nonprofits kickstart their initiatives efficiently.

API Connections for Outreach Tools: Reviewers value the API connections with various outreach tools as they effectively expand their audience reach. The seamless integration with external platforms enhances communication strategies and improves overall outreach effectiveness, empowering organizations to connect with stakeholders more effectively.

Reviews

29 Reviews

Drive professional donor and community management

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 22, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud to drive our supporter engagement, donor pipeline, and program participants. We do some direct service, lobbying, and community organizing, and Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud helps drive all of this. We work in eight states and have six programs, all geographically distributed in a matrix fashion. Salesforce's app structure and Lightning Web Components have helped us address the myriad needs of our nonprofit.

Pros

Adaptability across personas
OOTB solutions for nonprofit fundraising
API connections with many outreach tools

Cons

MFA options - increase choices, allow to keep signed in
Improved functionality for multiple select fields

Likelihood to Recommend

Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud is well suited for medium to large nonprofits, especially those with multiple needs across business units -- e.g., community organizing, fundraising, etc. I would not recommend it for a small nonprofit or individual since it's likely to just be too much for their specific use case.

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Salesforce.org delivers excellent value and customizability

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a higher education user we have used the Salesforce.org platform for several years to address our CRM needs for the admissions and enrollment side of our institution. It's helped us reach a bigger audience and helps us try to grow enrollment for the university. This has been invaluable over the years we've had the product.

Pros

Ability to reach a bigger audience with limited staff
Increase productivity of existing staff and resources
Engage with more prospective students in real time

Cons

The cost of the overall product is expensive for the support provided
Could stand to be more user friendly for those non-tech staff members
Backend systems can be confusing

Likelihood to Recommend

Salesforce.org Nonprofit cloud does really well to help all of our staff and faculty get more involved with our undergraduate and graduate admissions teams. They are able to collaborate very well and see all of the robust data that is collected in the CRM. This can be challenging for some less tech-savvy staff members but for the most part is a great platform that our admissions team really enjoys use.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Salesforce Review!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 10, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Review and approve grant applications. Collect data about applicants/organizations. Set up a letter of inquiry deadlines and applicant communications. Mainly used as a hub for all things grant applications. Send approval and denials. Internally communicate between multiple stakeholders at organizations. We use the platform as a means of personal organization for the different orgs internally and externally.

Pros

Support tickets.
Client training.

Cons

User interface.
Pricing packages.

Likelihood to Recommend

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud has been an overall positive experience. It's helped and supported many small and large non-profit organizations with consistency, transparency, and organization between external organizations and internal organizations.

Verified User

Consultant in Corporate (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Great product that can be hard to implement and still has some gaps

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 10, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the Non-Profit Success Pack (NPSP) component of nonprofit cloud with Sales Cloud as our core database and CRM to manage all of our donations income, regular giving, customer services, and relationship management for high-value supporters. It is our core business system and we are 100% dependent on it. We don't use any of the premium products such as Elevate or the Accounting Subledger. We have never evaluated them as they are not available in Australia. NPSP is not a complete solution for us. We use Fundraising Accelerator (AKA Pronto) from Alphasys to bridge many of the gaps in NPSP. In addition to Sales Cloud, we also have Marketing Cloud and Tableau CRM in our solution.

Pros

The data model is robust and well matched to the needs of a fundraising organisation.
The regular giving automation works well and meets our requirements.
It is very well architected to be extended for other functions.

Cons

There is no receipting within the NPSP.
There is no connection to our payment gateway to manage donations.
There are no tools for banking reconciliation (Accounting Subledger is new, but not available in Australia).
There is no integrations to fundraising platforms, and only basic data importing tools.
The localisation for Australia is not great. It is natively USA centric.

Likelihood to Recommend

Nonprofit cloud is well suited for larger charities that can have an adequate budget for implementation and building out the gaps. It is a great platform for innovation and configuration to specific business requirements. Smaller charities may be better off with a more complete solution that's easier to implement.

Verified User

Manager (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

No concerns about reliability and scale ever again

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 4, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We first obtained NPSP for our development tracking when spreadsheets were no longer working well. We quickly expanded it to our outbound marketing for newsletter tracking and our volunteer program management. That was in the first year. We then expanded it a year later to track our client program delivery. A year later we were tracking client outcomes as well. Now it's simply an integral part of how we operate.

Pros

Adaptable
Scales up
Reliable
Broad
Customizable

Cons

Not an easy lift right out of the box unless you completely rule out customization
Not "free to own" even if the grant is free because you'll need about 0.25 FTE to maintain it
Constantly being updated which is cool but many items are "forced" and you must respond
Lots and lots of customization are required to equal many canned solutions available for any one particular feature set (but none of them can cover the breadth and flexibility of SF)

Likelihood to Recommend

If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.

Terry L Cole

CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in Corporate at Street Youth Ministry of Austin (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

View profile

Salesforce for Nonprofits is a smart choice

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 7, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce is being used by our entire staff team. It serves as both a record of the work being done and the opportunities for future work! We completed the customization of the free nonprofit edition and it has made a tremendous difference in our ability to quantify the work being done. We have customized the dashboards for each employee to easily stay on top of our annual goals - as individuals and company-wide.

Pros

document actions/work being completed
manage customer information
customized dashboards help staff stay on top of their annual goals

Cons

we struggle using it to communicate with groups via e-blasts

Likelihood to Recommend

We found Salesforce to be very user-friendly. Running reports and entering information.....all were easily learned and we have very little user error!

Colleen Fedor

Executive Director in Corporate at The Mentoring Partnership of SW PA (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

Positive partnership with Salesforce.org which supports our mission.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 16, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce for Nonprofits is the information spine for our entire operating model. By using the platform we are able to manage a community of providers who deliver experiences for young people in a consistent and safe way. By having a common platform we can also extract great insights from our information and have used Einstein (Tableau CRM) and standard Salesforce reporting to put the right information in the hands of our operational and senior leadership teams. We are also piloting the use of core Tableau to create an overarching balanced scorecard for the organization that will ensure we stay aligned to our core mission.

Pros

Managing the capture of the information we need to provide safe experiences for young people.
Managing the communications with young people and their parents to ensure we have the best possible customer journey.
Enables the organization to be data led.

Cons

An interface that is more intuitive for senior executives would help with adoption.
A simpler approach to licensing and billing of the product.

Likelihood to Recommend

As per our example, the product is a great way of connecting a community of practitioners who have different infrastructures and use different technologies. I don't think it would be as impactful for smaller, less complex organizations.

Simon Sharkey Woods

Chief Digital & Information Officer in Information Technology at NCS - National Citizen Service Trust (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

A CRM that does what WE need it to do

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 29, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Forge Initiative, a nonprofit, uses Salesforce for Nonprofits (NPSP) as their CRM. We use NPSP to manage our annual family membership which includes grouping students and parents together in accounts. We also manage donations & grants, program participation and volunteers. Campaigns for events as well as donation requests are managed through Salesforce.

Pros

NPSP is designed to help with donor management.
There are free add-ons for volunteer management.
There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance.
Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials.

Cons

Understanding what can be done with the software can be overwhelming.
The beauty of Salesforce is its customizability, but it's also the biggest thing to get in the way of using it successfully.
Cost-effective ways of getting started, you really need to find someone willing to take ownership of learning how it works and to oversee the user adoption.

Likelihood to Recommend

We used several other nonprofit CRM packages before going to Salesforce. We weren't ready before then. It helps to have an understanding of databases and what it is you want to record and report on. Having data just to have data doesn't do anybody any good. Using other software, I knew what functionalities were missing for what we needed and we were able to customize Salesforce to get where we needed to go.

We used the volunteer management software for a couple of projects a few years ago but found it a bit clunky. It's been a couple of years so we will probably try it again to see if the user interface feels like a better fit for us.

Karen Mellendorf

Operations Manager at The Forge Initiative, Inc. (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Impressively powerful software with incredible functionality

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

March 26, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses Salesforce to manage all of our contact data for members of our church across groups, volunteer teams, and outreach efforts, along with keeping track of involvement with our various other activities and events. It is used across our entire organization and is mainly used to address the challenges of tracking the different areas of our organization that people are involved with.

Pros

Creating detailed reports of contacts with the ability to filter out dirty data
Integration with other programs
Creating Dashboards for easily tracking overviews

Cons

The specificity of some fields could be improved to mitigate confusion between similar pieces of information
The speed that data refreshes is often slower than expected, especially when processing a relatively small amount of data (100-500 fields of data)

Likelihood to Recommend

I am very likely to recommend Salesforce for Nonprofits to most colleagues, however I may be more hesitant to recommend it to less tech savvy colleagues. While Salesforce for Nonprofits is incredibly powerful and useful for myself and for my organization, it is not always the most intuitive thing to work with.

Verified User

Director (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Flexible + Customizable CRM Solution for Nonprofits

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 23, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Salesforce for Nonprofits for our program and fundraising work specifically to track donations, secondary and postsecondary partnerships, and program outcomes. We also use it in conjunction with other Salesforce products for our Talent Acquisition and marketing work.

Pros

Flexible
Customizable
A lot can be done declaratively

Cons

Duplicate matching across fields.
Historical and moment in time reporting.

Likelihood to Recommend

In order to roll out successfully, you need an individual or team that can manage Salesforce administration. Additionally, you need to have support from leadership to help explain the expectations around usage and be able to collaborate with stakeholders to ensure that the product meets requirements and needs.

Verified User

Director in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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A CRM that does what WE need it to do

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 29, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

NPSP is designed to help with donor management.
There are free add-ons for volunteer management.
There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance.
Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials.

Cons

Understanding what can be done with the software can be overwhelming.
The beauty of Salesforce is its customizability, but it's also the biggest thing to get in the way of using it successfully.
Cost-effective ways of getting started, you really need to find someone willing to take ownership of learning how it works and to oversee the user adoption.

Likelihood to Recommend

Karen Mellendorf

Operations Manager at The Forge Initiative, Inc. (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile