Salesforce is one of the most powerful systems out there for managing customer and constituent data. That can make it a pretty big lift for a small team. 

Salesforce is a CRM, which stands for “customer relationship management” (“constituent relationship management” for nonprofits). It was built for sales, but it can be adapted to nearly any situation. The question is: is it worth it? 

Pros

Cloud Native

If you use Salesforce, all your data is in the cloud. That means you can access it from anywhere. It also means you can build in lots of scheduled and event-triggered automations to improve efficiency. 

Online Training

Salesforce has one of the best online training programs around. Anyone can use it and attain a high degree of competence with the system. 

Sales Simplicity

If you are in sales, or has a process that mimics Sales, then Salesforce will work great for you right out of the box. For nonprofits, this can make it an ideal donor management platform.

Customization

If Salesforce does not have what you need out of the box, then you can probably build it. Some of its no-code tools can drastically increase productivity and data quality.

Cons

Cost

Salesforce is expensive to license and expensive to maintain. There are companies who hire people whose only job is to maintain Salesforce. While nonprofits get free licenses, they need to plan for development expenses in most cases. 

Training

One of the things that makes Salesforce’s training program so good is that the trainings are not easy. They involve a lot of real world simulations. Salesforce estimates that its Admin Beginner trail takes about 9 hours (but it’s really longer). If you plan to teach yourself Salesforce, block off a lot of time. 

Rigidity

While Salesforce is highly customizable, there are also parts of it you cannot change, and sometimes these things can be pretty dumb. For example, one of the most commonly used layouts has a required “Company” field, even though many nonprofits don’t need it. Accounting for these things requires building workarounds. 

Verdict

Salesforce can be very tempting for nonprofits because of the 10 free licenses, but it will need to be customized if you intend to use it for anything more than donor and volunteer management. Those can be added expenses, but may be well worth the investment if you get good efficiency gains.