Data organization and reporting were fantastic tools for our organization. Strategic planning and decision making that previously occurred according to essentially gut feelings were now backed with substantial amounts of hard data and a real, concrete understanding of our business operations. We really remade our organization thanks to the information that Salesforce allowed us to collect, organize, and manipulate.

The robust package of features was entirely unmatched in our experience with a number of other less expensive packages. Reporting tools in particular were incredibly useful for our organization, and really allowed us to dig into our data and glean valuable insights that, in some cases, reformed our understanding of our organization, clients, and industry. We used the many tools in Salesforce to implement an array of positive changes that would not have been possible otherwise.

Costs are always a concern for small nonprofits, and that's probably the only part of Salesforce that we struggled with. Of course, we'd had experience with free/cheap software in this space, and all of it had major technical problems. Saelsforce just worked, and gave us everything we needed. In that regard, the cost was much easier to swallow.

It does everything you need it to. It's very capable of using the most up-to-date technology available.

It is difficult to manage. Requires a lot of staff time to keep up to date with the latest updates and ensure everything is working smoothly. There's also a lot of add ons which can making initial pricing difficult

We use Salesforce as our main CRM at my non-profit, mostly so that we can keep track of clients, donors, and volunteers all in one place. I mostly use it to track volunteer participation and hours and pull reports on donor and volunteer activity to include in grants and marketing materials.

Salesforce for Nonprofits does add some additional features that nonprofits are likely to need for donor and volunteer management, and it allows everything to be in one CRM (versus having volunteers, donors, and clients in separate databases)

Salesforce for Nonprofits feels like it was a stretch for Salesforce. The way that Salesforce was built doesn't work well for many of the needs non-profits have, and Salesforce for Nonprofits is basically the same platform with just a few added features. It's clunky, and doing things like program management and pulling reports is not as easy as you'd expect given how it's described. Overall, it's clear that Salesforce kept it's sales mindset when building this software, rather than starting from the non-profit perspective.

We manage all of our donors, event attendees, volunteers and any other human that's connected with our organization through Salesforce. We spend a lot of time cleaning up the database, and we devote a lot of staff time to Salesforce management in general, but we consider it essential.

The biggest advantage is that it can do ANYTHING related to donor management, and you can tailor it pretty much endlessly. We also like that there is a huge user base so we have lots of places to go for support and to hire data entry staff.

The learning curve is as endless as the potential. There's no plug and play here—you have to be prepared to spend a LOT of time wrapping your brain around this software. Intuitive is not a word I would use for Salesforce.

It helped me to get an introduction to what I could do with a membership database/CRM without investing a lot of money into programs that may or may not do what I wanted them to (because I didn't know what I wanted them to do). It allowed me to get my database set up and organized and begin to understand our donor profiles, locations, amounts, and more.

It certainly is powerful and has many customizations and features and things to build. It has lots of integrations across the web and there is something to be said for being the biggest. Also, it's free for non-profits, so especially if you don't know what you are trying to do with a CRM, it's nice to be able to play around with Salesforce and get an idea of what types of data are useful to you before moving to some other program that requires higher costs up front.

If you don't care to become a developer or aren't one already, this software can run away with you real fast. While it's great that Salesforce is so powerful, in many ways it is too powerful and complex. Even with the nonprofit customizations, it's very difficult to navigate and customize, understand what all the different programs within it are, keep up with all the updates and integrations and who even knows. Basically, I get it - this is designed for large groups that can afford to have a dedicated Salesforce employee(s). It's for large databases with many moving parts. If you are small and your employees or board are juggling many jobs and not just database management, this is difficult to use. Plus, the interface looks like it never got past 1992.

The software allows for us to have one platform that scales across the organization. This allows us to build a real view of the student across all departments. This improves communication and allows us to also shorten staff training time when employees move from one area of the organization to another. So far, our biggest limitation is our own creativity. We have soo much we want to keep implementing that we haven´t completed it all yet. We already have full recruitment, marketing, admissions online and now are adding in Financial Aid Requests, and internal processes.

It is so flexible, sometimes we do things that are good "in the moment" but later have to be fixed because we weren´t forced to think about them too much.

Connecting with customers better. Making better business decisions

Giving back is at the heart of salesforce. Salesforce provides 10 free licenses for non profit orgs, while this probably isn't enough to run an entire organization this is probably a great start. Cutting edge technology that gets better every day

None! Salesforce is probably one of the top software platforms I have every used.

This has really helped us optimize our organization.

this software is very flexible and has grown with our organization. I have appreciated the help and support of the salesforce team.

Setup can be confusing, but Trailblaser/consultants have been helpful. Sometimes though the Nonprofit packages does not differentiate itself them the general salesforce.com product.

Salesforce is very customizable. The Power of Us Grant and Hub make Salesforce NPSP very affordable for any size nonprofit.

Salesforce is very customizable so there is not much preset features for nonprofits. To really setup well an outside consultant is needed which is very expensive.

This is essentially Salesforce's usual products and capabilities catered to the nonprofit sector. I've had a lot of success deploying this for several different kinds of nonprofits, and all have been able to garner value that greatly exceeds the cost of the product with effort efficiency. Where I've deployed it, organizations have grown via new sources of funding, donations, and other forms of support and awareness via Salesfore for Nonprofit's toolset. It also charges your organization based on usage, so you don't have to pre-purchase a large commitment and then struggle to get your limited money's worth.

While they did make some sensible accommodations, Salesforce is ultimately designed for the for-profit sector, so there are some lasting relics that aren't designed perfectly for cause-based, non-corporate organizations.

I love the platform, it has transformed my life in my professional career and in real life. Now I try to understand the back end use cases of almost everything I do so I can understand what I am dealing with and to arrive at the best solution based on that understanding of systems. Life changing.

The most important features of Salesforce NonProfit is visually seeing the link from the donor, to the dollar, to the fun, to the program it is impacting to the number of beneficiary we are serving. This is vital!

I wish that the Setup Page can be customized where you are able to remove or hide certain settings. It can get overwhelming especially if you are a new admin.

Timing consuming at first.

Reporting capabilities and the fact that if you have a techie person on staff, you can develop more robust AMS features. These features do not come out of the box though.

You really need to have a very technically oriented person on staff to get this set up to meet your nonprofit's needs. It took us a year to get it really set up and functioning the way we'd envisioned.

Overall, I would choose another program for nonprofits.

- It really does have an incredible amount of functionality. You can create any kind of automation or workflow that you can dream up. This can save you an incredible amount of time in the long run. - The Nonprofit Salespack is a great template for starting a donor management system. - You get 10 free licenses as a nonprofit, so if someone on your team is a nonprofit whiz, go for it!

- As an admin, Salesforce not intuitive AT ALL. I've used 5 other donation management software programs, and this is the hardest to learn and be admin for on your own. You can figure other programs out just by using them and knowing the basics. Salesforce requires an incredible amount of time and dedication to learn, so much so that you really need to hire someone to build it for you and also to make any changes for you later on. - All of our staff had a hard time transitioning to using it, especially our older staff. - The pull is that it's free for nonprofits, but I promise you, it's NOT free. You will definitely end up spending more on Salesforce than any other software if there isn't someone on your team that is a salesforce expert.

We are ecstatic to have this program in order to grow and enhance our organization. It has been the best thing we have purchased. You have to try it!

This program is great for non-profits and convenient for organizing, tracking and reporting. We compiled everything into one system now from multiple sources. This program has helped transform our organization by being to build reports for donations, donors, residents, etc. We have been able to customize our features, communicate with this tool and build grant reports.

Sometimes there are features that cannot be customized particularly in the way would like.

With ease, we can keep track of our Affiliate organizations, their staff and our communications with them. Understanding your constituent base and their various relationships to your organization is invaluable and SF makes it easy.

It is user friendly even for those who are not as tech savvy. We are able to easily track complex relationships for our organization while ensuring that we can report on the information in a way that is effective for us.

I wish that mass email was a bit easier to use or more aesthetically pleasing, adding images to a mass email can be difficult at times.

Fast, easy to scale, handles multi language, multi currency, free

It's free, it's easy to customize, and is quick to set up for nonprofits. Additional objects can be added and up to 10 users can be set up.

Most nonprofits do not have the technical capabilities to utilize SFDC to its fullest potential. That being said - SFDC does offer trailhead for free - and it is a great way for new Admins to learn.

Excellent tool - lots of features that make it easier and more effective for NPO's to manage their data, including donor management, grant management, volunteers, campaigns, etc.

Non-profits get 10 free licenses of this highly-vetted software, and are able to buy more at a discount. Salesforce.org is constantly growing and adding new features, with the help of their very talented team.

It's part of Salesforce, which is both a pro and a con - however, you aren't going to get this kind of price, support, experience, without being backed by a huge corporation.

I love how this software helps automate our broad reaching. We have increased our reach ability by double because of running automated campaigns on a regular basis. I fully recommend Salesforce for handling your data management.

I don't like that the query time out is thirty minutes. This makes me have to divide the work that needs to be processed into multiple steps, which can be really frustrating and confusing to others that take over pre-established processes.

Salesforce helps organize many aspects of the business

It can be a little difficult to navigate and learn some functions

Overall great to use easy to learn and I like all the Salesforce badges to gain

Very easily integrated with other programs ability to share with colleagues

No features are least like as I feel Salesforce is the most complete CRM on the market

The surprising thing about Salesforce as a solution for nonprofits is the limitless ways that you can customize the software. With someone who is skilled enough it is possible to accomplish pretty much anything you can imagine.

It requires hiring or finding someone who is uniquely gifted in building your unique platform, this is both it's strength and it's limiting factor.

Easy to log gifts, save contact information and organize contacts by relationship.

I like that SalesForce for Nonprofits is free, and that it can be used to track a lot of information, including relationships.

There are a lot of help articles in the knowledge base, but sometimes I just want someone to chat with. I don't like that emails can only be uploaded in a Contact role, and not an Account role. I find the reports and dashboards difficult to create. Sometimes I think there is almost too much functionality, and that while its great to have this product for free, many nonprofits don't have the budget for a SalesForce administrator to set up the database for full functionality.

The pros to this software is the low cost.

The cons would be the difficulty and time it takes to set up.

I'm so happy that our org switched from our old software to Salesforce. It has really made our donor management processes so much easier and less time consuming.

Coming from Raiser's Edge, this software is significantly easier to use, much better for GDPR compliance, and doesn't look like something out of the 1990s. It is much easier to manage our donor profiles, grants, preferences, etc. on Salesforce

The transition period from our old software to Salesforce was difficult and there's certainly a learning curve (not Salesforce's fault).

Still learning about the other available tools available on Salesforce. Our reports are well articulated and very easy to understand

Great reporting capabilities, as we were able to reach more farmers with SalesForce. Our IT manager was able to automate the workflow, and now its easy and less time consuming

While the reports were great, it was quite tricky for us to configure. It took us some time to configure but we eventually succeeded. Training new employees on Salesforce is time-consuming, as its one of our main systems