Salesforce.org is Putting Profit Over Nonprofits
Due to the difficulty in meeting excessive growth targets year after year, Salesforce.org has been forced to adopt sales and product strategies that harm their customers and partners. Account executives have a long history of trying to convince nonprofits to buy products they don’t need, or worse, products that don’t work.
Salesforce.org has always invested many times more resources in marketing and selling their products than they do in creating them; product teams have traditionally been chronically underfunded. They rely on the endless generosity of members of the open source community not only to generate and refine product ideas, but also to build and document features and fix bugs in their products.
I was a lead developer at Salesforce.org. I spent five years working on the open source products Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S). I resigned from that position earlier this year, when it was clear that the ethos that put our nonprofit customers first and foremost was not shared with the organization’s decision makers.
Salesforce’s Marc Benioff recently expounded on our need for a new capitalism, saying “we need businesses and executives to value purpose alongside profit.” What better cause than enabling the schools and nonprofit stakeholders of Salesforce could there be to put this lofty goal into practice?
In this essay, I will fill in some history and context, then explain what I think Salesforce should do to value the missions of nonprofits alongside their own profit.
We’ve Seen It Before
NGO Connect was a product announced not long after the first product scrum team was created at Salesforce.org, on my first day working there back in 2014. Remember NGO Connect? If not, count yourself lucky.
Dozens of nonprofits doing crucial work wasted tens of millions of dollars implementing a dead-end product sold to them by Salesforce.org and built by a third party. That product, a direct competitor to NPSP, checked off many features in marketing materials. Unfortunately, many of those features were barely usable. The product was rigid and impossible to customize, obviously built for a single use case as consultant-ware.
Salesforce.org oversold it as an enterprise solution, and heavily incentivized partners to learn and implement it, ignoring the glaring issues with the product. Due to bad sales incentives, they were successful, for a time.
It took our community rising up and telling Salesforce.org that the product wasn’t working for them to cease selling it; they still refuse to announce an end of life date for that product, despite acquiring the company that built it earlier this year.
It’s Happening Again
I recently attended the Salesforce.org Open Source Community Sprint in Philadelphia, where over a hundred humans came together and donated their time and energy to the open source Salesforce community. I’ve been a part of this community for eight years, and these remarkable events are what makes it so special.
The Salesforce Nonprofit Template, the predecessor to today’s open source Nonprofit Success Pack, was born out of sprints much like this one in the mid 2000s. A community of volunteers came together to make Salesforce work better for nonprofits at a time when Salesforce wasn’t yet thinking about how ten free Salesforce licenses would even be used by nonprofits.
On the morning of the first day in Philadelphia, Salesforce.org product managers announced a slew of new (ostensibly paid, closed source) products that are under development: CRM payments, case management, and a new volunteers product. Of the dozen or so of these sprints that I’ve participated in, that announcement made this the first one that left a bitter taste in my mouth.
A Case Study: Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S)
Salesforce.org already has a successful volunteers product, Volunteers for Salesforce. That product is free and open source, and has been pre-installed for nonprofits for years. V4S wasn’t paid for or developed by Salesforce.org; it was donated to them by its developer, my friend and mentor David Habib. It’s installed by over ten thousand nonprofits and in active use by thousands.
Unfortunately, Salesforce hasn’t actively improved that product since it was donated, beyond cosmetic improvements and bug fixes. Technology evolves quickly, and software that isn’t under active development languishes rapidly.
Creating a new closed source volunteers product has many downsides over putting some much needed love into the current product:
- A new product with a new data model creates fragmentation, which means nonprofits using the different products will not be able to use the same extensions or share customizations.
- It will take years of development for the new product to reach feature parity with V4S. The new product’s expected feature list is laughable compared to what V4S already does, as are their stated reasons for creating it.
- It’s entirely possible to fix the only glaring issue with V4S by removing the Campaign Master-Detail relationship from the data model, allowing current users to implement Communities with the cheaper Customer Communities licenses. But instead of fixing it, they’re using this limitation as a selling point for the new product they’re creating.
- Salesforce will likely put the vast majority of their development effort into building new features and integrations for the new product, leaving current users behind on a product that’s not being improved.
- A paid product means nonprofits that adopt it will spend more of their limited resources on technology, which leaves them with less to accomplish their mission.
- Thousands of nonprofits using V4S won’t be able to take advantage of the new product without a costly migration, plus ongoing new licensing costs.
- Consultants that already know V4S will have to learn a new product and maintain knowledge for both products.
- Product developers that want to build on top of or integrate with Salesforce Volunteers products have to either pick which product to support, or accommodate both data models, hugely increasing development costs. For example, V4S Mobile is an independently built product that extends V4S, and available on the AppExchange, as well as for iOS, and Android. It won’t support the new product.
On top of all that, a closed source product means:
- Developers in our ecosystem can’t benefit by learning from or reusing the code in the new product.
- Developers outside Salesforce can’t fix bugs in the product and must wait for Salesforce to fix them. Since resigning from Salesforce.org, I’ve personally added functionality and fixed bugs in both NPSP and V4S as an external contributor, in order to better enable my consulting customers. NPSP has over 300 open issues. V4S has nearly 100 open issues.
So, What’s the Deal?
Now that they are finally investing in many new products and product team members, why would Salesforce.org abandon its legacy of a free and open source products, when every logical reason would have them simply extend and improve V4S?
The answer is simple. Profit over purpose*. They can’t charge more money beyond the cost of Salesforce licenses and data storage for the current product, so they’re abandoning it.
This insidious move leaves nonprofits who have contributed to and relied on a beloved open source project in the lurch. A free, open-source, and industry-standard product, which has served Salesforce so well in its marketing, and was so strategically important that it was the subject of the first-ever nonprofit focused Trailhead module. A product which had cost them nothing to develop.
Unfortunately, this decision to build a new volunteers product proves that the leadership at Salesforce.org hasn’t yet learned their lesson from NGO Connect. Shame on them.
This move will starve V4S of resources and sanctioned support. Meanwhile Salesforce.org throws their extraordinary development resources into an inferior replacement, that also happens to be a cash-grab.
Salesforce.org will describe this as an additive new option, providing a scalable solution in a turnkey way that can integrate volunteers with Communities. But again, it’s entirely possible to update V4S to work with Customer Communities licenses, and V4S already scales well for large organizations with lots of data. Why not focus development effort on a Communities solution for V4S, and profit from the Communities licenses that could be sold to everyone currently using the product?
They’ve relied on the goodwill and generosity of our community that made these products what they are today. The community has selflessly donated time, talent, and expertise with the understanding that they are building on a platform that’s accessible to all kinds of nonprofits, big and small. Now that they’ve got nonprofits hooked, here comes the bait and switch, and the bill.
As competitors such as Microsoft embrace the open source community and a unified data model, Salesforce.org is moving in the opposite direction.
I have poured too much of my life into this ecosystem, and I care too deeply about nonprofits and schools worldwide, to let this decision move forward without speaking up.
A Call To Action
Marc, if you’re listening, as a former lead developer in your organization who has been endlessly frustrated and disillusioned with the direction Salesforce.org has been going, you’re headed squarely in the wrong direction.
Salesforce has acquired Salesforce.org and the 1% of your 1–1–1 model just isn’t cutting it anymore. You should:
- Lower the incessant sales growth pressure and stop incentivizing sales staff to upsell nonprofits and schools with products or licenses they don’t need. Customers notice how poorly they are treated under the current incentive structure. Put your new capitalism into practice by measuring the long-term success of your customers and incentivizing sales staff to be shepherds of that success. Reward them for the impact they create by solving challenges for nonprofits and schools, not just for making you and your shareholders more money.
- Commit to free and open source products for nonprofits and schools. Make sure that the smaller nonprofits and partners in our ecosystem don’t get left behind by the endless drive to chase more dollars from enterprise nonprofits. The goodwill you will reap is more effective than marketing money. Your successful products have been built in partnership with this community. Your failures have been closed-source, built in the dark, focused on capturing markets over solving real problems.
- Make sure Salesforce.org leadership shares the values of the community they serve. Choose people whose words and actions prove that they “value purpose alongside profit.”
Thank You!
Accidental admins, activists, consultants, developers, dinosaurs, goat farmers, knitters, nonprofit nerds, people of color, queer folk, white hats, witches and wizards, beloved members of this wonderful community that has given us all so much, thank you for all that you have done and continue to do. I am eternally grateful to each one of you.
Click the clapper or add your name to the responses below. Share your story about how this open source community has impacted your life and an organization you care about. This community will no longer stand by silently while Salesforce.org keeps putting profit over nonprofits.
Let’s put the dream back in Dreamforce, and let’s make it open source. It’s time for a revolution. Will it be on Salesforce?
*Thanks to community feedback and review, I modified a word here to better reflect my hopes for this post, which is that it becomes a call to action that sparks thoughtful, strategic change at Salesforce.org.
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