This document is meant to be a short starting point for nonprofits to make a decision if Salesforce.com is a good choice for their nonprofit. It will give some introduction to what Salesforce.com does, and the benefits and risks involved in using it.

What is Salesforce.com?

Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) is a San Francisco company that makes an online database available to nonprofits. The database is very flexible, and that allows a nonprofit to use Salesforce.com for tracking donor management and other activities.

The Salesforce.com Foundation, which has overseen the donation of Salesforce.com cash, staff time, and products, currently donates 10 user licenses of Salesforce.com to any qualifying charitable organization.

What can Salesforce.com do?

Salesforce.com can help nonprofits keep track of the people they work with, and all the work they do with them. Salesforce.com can be:

• A centralized contact list of all the people and organizations you work with
  
• The place for prospecting and tracking donations, grants, memberships, and volunteering
• The system for tracking just about any of your other program-related work: canvassing, phone banking, events, tabling, outcomes and evaluation, etc.

Salesforce.com allows you to easily track important communications you have with people:

• It can be a shared contact list for your organization, accessible via the web or directly within Outlook
• It makes it really easy to record communications and meetings, again directly from Outlook or via the web
• You can cross reference communications to people and also to donations, grants, or other things

Salesforce.com has powerful querying and reporting tools:

• The information you enter can easily be used to help you make organizational decisions
• With the built-in report builder that requires no coding, users can build and share reports
• Dashboards that display report information in charts and graphs can give EDs and Boards compelling summaries of your work

Salesforce.com likes to share:

• Your information can be made available to your other technology systems (as appropriate) through relatively straightforward coding
• Information from your other systems can, just as easily, be brought into Salesforce.com
• Lots of affordable services, like email blasting systems, currently integrate with Salesforce.com

What can't Salesforce.com do?

Salesforce.com, like all software, has limits:

• Salesforce.com isn't an accounting system. You can purchase connectors to products like Quickbooks, but accounting functions aren't handled by Salesforce.com.
• If you are doing very complex donor management, Salesforce.com may not have the functionality you need to be successful.

What are the benefits of using Salesforce.com?

• Low Cost: Salesforce.com is very inexpensive to use
  • No server, no one to maintain the server--all you need is a browser
  • No monthly cost for using the system--Salesforce.com donates 10 user licenses to every nonprofit. That's a $15,000 per year donation.
• Centralized Data: You can do most of your work in one system.
  • Handle people who play many roles in your organization--donor, volunteer, board member
  • Support the unique work you do that most other systems can't support
• Accessible and available: All you need to use Salesforce.com is a web browser and Internet access.
  • It's accessible from anywhere
  • It's secure
  • It can talk to other modern applications
• Deal with Change: Salesforce.com can easily change as you do
  • Create new fields with no coding in a mater of minutes
  • Add support for new ways of working at very low cost
• Modern: Salesforce.com is cutting-edge software
  • Connect your information to your website, email blasting, and other systems
  • Connect your information to published data: address enhancement, legislative district lookup, etc.
  • Updates just happen about four times a year without any work for the User
    

What are risks I should consider about using Salesforce.com?

Access to the system is donated:

• It's like they're paying your rent--donation is only given for a 12 month period and is up for renewal every year
• The company/foundation could go away, and end your donation. At this time this appears unlikely, but because they are donating a service rather than a piece of software, it's a real risk
  
• They have your information on their servers, it's not on your computers
• The USA PATRIOT Act forces them to comply with any legal government request to see your data, just like your ISP

What are the costs associated with using Salesforce.com?

Salesforce.com needs to be setup to get it to work right for you. This work is best done by a consultant familiar with Salesforce.com. Depending on complexity, the cost will range from a few thousand dollars, to tens of thousands. After that, your ongoing monthly cost to use Salesforce.com can be $0. You'll need someone to administer your Salesforce.com system after it's installed. This could be a user on your staff who is good with databases, or a dedicated IT person, depending on your needs.

Is Salesforce.com right for my organization?