A Brief Guide to Salesforce for Nonprofits
Moving to the cloud has been a big help for many nonprofits, both financially and functionally. Nonprofits don’t differ from for-profit companies when it comes to having an influx of information that they need to store, organize, and make easily accessible to their employees, so part of this move to the cloud also involves shopping around for a CRM system.
image via salesforce.org
In the interest of supporting nonprofits, which by their very definition do not have a lot of capital for internal technology, Salesforce offers a nice chunk of software and services for free. We’ve put together a short guide to what you get from Salesforce for free or at a discount, and how far that can take you.
Salesforce has created an entire program geared toward getting nonprofits the CRM setups that they need without sacrificing money that they can put towards their charitable efforts. In addition to ten donated subscriptions, there is a specific Power of Us hub for nonprofits to utilize for training and support.
What you get
We’ve spent a lot of time writing blogs about the fact that while Salesforce is great, it’s not an “out-of-the-box” solution and requires customizations in order to truly fit your nonprofit or company. The ten donated subscriptions from Salesforce come with the Lightning Enterprise Edition or the Lightning Enterprise Edition + Nonprofit Starter Pack. Need more subscriptions than that? Any additional subscriptions that you need aren’t free, but you can purchase them for less than 24% of the retail price.
The editions aren’t bare bones; you receive a lot of features right off the bat. There are too many to list all of them here, but to give you an idea, the Enterprise Edition includes: task & event tracking, email integration, mobile access, content library, customizable reports, opportunity tracking, email templates & tracking, web-to-lead capture, and more.
Support
It’s great that you get software and features from Salesforce at such a discount, but that won’t mean much if you’re at a complete loss when it comes to implementing your new Enterprise Edition. In order to ensure that you’re on the right path, Salesforce offers tiered “Success Plans,” which include levels of support and training. The “Standard Success Plan” which comes with the Enterprise Edition at no extra cost, doesn’t provide too much hand holding, you’re only really getting self service resources and online case submission for problems, and you have to wait up to 2 business days to get a response. Plans that offer more are no longer free, but they are still offered at a lower price for nonprofits.
What if that’s not enough?
If the success plans aren’t enough to help you get on your feet, or if you have a long term project that you’re going to need more support with, the Salesforce community can be a really great resource. Consulting partners who specialize in work with nonprofits, such as Xceli Global, often offer pro bono services or discounts and can provide more comprehensive support than the success plans as you continue to refine and customize your Salesforce instance.
Xceli Global offers pro bono services to nonprofits as part of our commitment to the Pledge 1% movement.Contact us today to learn more.
