What is Salesforce for Nonprofits

If you’re working for a nonprofit, you may be looking at ways to help your organisation scale, increase income, or try new ways of doing things with a new CRM. You and your colleagues might be asking each other “What are the best tools for nonprofits?” , “How do we know which path to take?” or “What is Salesforce?” Here at VRP we work with many nonprofit organisations, guiding them on what Salesforce^® can do for them and how it can be used best. 

In this article, I’ll be answering those questions and more, and tell you all about Salesforce for nonprofits.

What is Salesforce and how can nonprofits benefit from it?

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM system. The acronym “CRM” stands for “customer relationship management”. “But wait”, I hear you say. “That sounds like something for businesses. What is Salesforce for nonprofits?  Is Salesforce good for nonprofits, too?” Don’t let the word ‘customer’ put you off – it’s not just for commercial enterprises. 

Salesforce is used by all kinds of charities and other nonprofit organisations to keep track of donor information; automate a huge amount of their workloads; automate amazing, inspiring donor journeys; manage Gift Aid, send out thank-you messages and more. What’s more, Salesforce can also alert you to things you need reminders about, such as foundation application deadlines, and assist you with things like managing event registrations. The platform also generates reports that can be used to help fundraisers understand how best to allocate their resources.

Salesforce has specific functionality ready-made just for you. Nonprofit Cloud, created by Salesforce for nonprofits features pre-made tools to help you across a wide scope of areas, including fundraising, program management, outcome management, case management and more.

Some of the world’s foremost nonprofits and biggest businesses use Salesforce – but so do some of the smallest! The technology is very accessible for all kinds of organisations, and I’ll tell you one of the reasons why next.

Donated licences thanks to The Power of Us

You may be wondering: how much does Salesforce cost for nonprofits? Nonprofits often face challenging budgets, and even if not, cost-efficiency is always a major concern. With that in mind, Salesforce has created a special program called The Power of Us, which donates 10 free licences to any registered nonprofit. This gives eligible nonprofits access to its software, and the great benefits it offers, for free. 

If you’re interested in learning more, check out their website or fill in an application form here. VRP’s nonprofit specialists will also be glad to explore the possibilities with you, so don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

How can you use Salesforce as a tool to help your nonprofit grow?

Salesforce is a great tool for nonprofits to use to scale their fundraising efforts, and it can be used across many aspects of the organisation. One of the key uses of Salesforce for nonprofits is as a cloud-based relationship management tool, accessible to all your team members wherever they are, giving them all the information they need.

The big benefit of this is that nonprofits using Salesforce are able to make data-driven decisions. When you have easy visibility over all the information you hold, and you can sort and analyse it in new ways, it can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your work – including making the most of your donation pipeline.

Making donation data-driven decisions

A nonprofit could use Salesforce to manage their donation pipeline and help them see where they have opportunities for growth. This could be done by segmenting the donations based on who made them, when they were made, how much was donated and even what type of donation it was.

Salesforce will allow your organisation to better understand where its donors are coming from and if there are any areas that need improvement with marketing or other functions within the organisation. This also provides data about which types of campaigns are more effective at driving donations than others so that future campaigns can be created with those insights in mind.

Focusing your efforts on the right people

Let’s look at an example. If you’re planning on running a black-tie ball or a charity auction it would be wise to use Salesforce to run a simple report to work out who would be the best people to invite based on different demographics that are meaningful to your nonprofit. 

With just a few clicks, you can identify which corporations and other organisations have donated, lapsed or expressed interest. You can also find out the donors who have donated over a certain amount, or people who have influence in certain areas of your nonprofit’s work. All of this can be invaluable when it comes to deciding where to dedicate your focus.

Salesforce can help you with every type of fundraising, but for now let’s look at a few areas:

Streamlined, automated grant management

Easily track all of the applications you have in your pipeline in one easy-to-use system, set notifications for what you need to do, by when, and allow others to collaborate in one place with you easily. 

Set up alerts for when deadlines are approaching for impact reports back to funders, or simply tag members of your team to cross-team collaborate on these, allowing programme leaders and staff to share insights to build out amazing ways of working across the organisation – getting better, more impactful stories as you go.

Major donor and corporate fundraising

Salesforce empowers Major Gift and Corporate Fundraisers by providing comprehensive donor profiles, data analytics, and task management tools, allowing personalised engagement and efficient task tracking. It streamlines workflows, integrates with external tools, and allows you to build a deeper picture and understanding of your donors. 

You can link members of the same organisation, or family so that you can see who is connected to one another. This is very useful if you’re trying to ensure that you keep multiple people who are connected up to date at the same time.

Simpler, centralised volunteer management

Another example would be using Salesforce for volunteer signup management. Volunteer signups often happen through different channels like email newsletters or direct mailings from volunteers themselves but once someone has agreed to volunteer with your nonprofit they shouldn’t have multiple ways of signing up (i.e., by email vs “snail mail”).

With Salesforce this information can easily be tracked through one central database so all volunteer information is stored in one place instead of scattered around different databases/apps across various team members’ computers/phones/etc., making it easier for everyone involved!

Learn with other nonprofits using Salesforce

More than 55,000 nonprofits use Salesforce. Apart from being the leading CRM, Salesforce also offers amazing free tools such as Trailhead where you can learn about Salesforce but also, how to use it to help you scale. 

Trailhead is an online learning platform that provides very useful, easy-to-understand learning content – including for nonprofit organisations. There are so many free learning modules within Trailhead which are 100% dedicated and focused on nonprofits, making it a valuable resource for beginners and experienced Salesforce users alike.

We’re here to unlock all the benefits of Salesforce for nonprofits

Last year we helped the Ukrainian Red Cross scale their fundraising massively, by building them a quick solution when the war broke out, enabling them to raise $22m. 

We know that scaling your mission is important to you, so please don’t worry that a question is too big or small – get in contact with VRP’s nonprofit team today. 

Get in Touch

About the Author

Laura Croudace

Global Nonprofit Practice Director, VRP Consulting

Laura has worked in the nonprofit sector for over 12 years, including as a Head of Fundraising and Salesforce Partner Advisory Board Member. As our global Nonprofit Practice Director, she is passionate about enabling nonprofits everywhere to harness the power of Salesforce technology.