Not For Profit CRM
January 9, 2018
The Not For Profit or Charity arena has a very different infrastructure and relationship management when compared to For Profit organisations.
With the explosion of the population wanting to get involved and support, it is very much the time for Not for Profit organisations to be able to get organised to become scalable. They too deserve the right tools at affordable prices with practical implementation.
Historically, the sales-focused approach to customer relationship management (CRM) systems meant that they were not fit for purpose for non-profit organisations. This was true for a long time and non-profits found it challenging to adapt to the account-based model of most CRMs.
In non-profit CRM or Constituent Relationship Management, it is important to be able to manage constituent data and optimizing fundraising and program activities. A different set of entities and their relationships – namely individual donors, their household affiliations and donations are tracked.
As a qualifying non-profit or higher education institution, you’re eligible for up to 10 no-cost subscriptions to Salesforce, through the Salesforce.org and GunnerCooke partnership. A subscription provides a single user with access (a login) to Salesforce.
Salesforce has developed and adopted, grateful to those intrepid non-profits who adopted Salesforce in the early stages and gave feedback. This involvement has ensured that Salesforce has developed a fit for purpose non-profit CRM that is tailored and relevant. This product has grown and developed, and it is called the Non-profit Success Pack.
Accounts, contacts and opportunities are still the major building blocks. However, each NPSP account represents a household. Each household can be associated with multiple donors (contacts) and donations (opportunities). As non-profits may need to track more than donors, they can use contacts to manage all kinds of people data – members, volunteers, clients, board members. They can use opportunities to manage grants, in-kind gifts and memberships – not just donations.
The world of non-profits is complex and different to for-profits. We have adapted to provide the solution to enable complex charities to stay linked, communicate, grow, become more efficient and scalable to ultimately succeed for the good of the cause in an area dominated by the larger charities with seemingly endless budgets for marketing.
To make this product event more appealing the model is also move-in ready, which is something that non-profits have advised during development. Reducing impact on day to day, making implementation achievable with limited resource for development. Ensuring that this is a viable option.
Is it a Fully Powered Version of Salesforce
We need to make it clear that while NPSP is designed to make Salesforce easier for non-profits, it’s not a “watered down” version of Salesforce. With NPSP, you not only get the functionality that has been built specifically for non-profits, you also get a fully functioning Salesforce organization. NPSP works in conjunction with Salesforce to offer you all the wonder, power, and functionality that Salesforce also offers to Fortune 500 companies.
If your organization knows it wants to manage individual donors and donations and households, the Non-profit Success Pack gives you all that non-profit functionality right out-of-the-box. Other critical functions have been considered, like payment processing, auction management, or email marketing automation. The “Salesforce Plus NPSP” model doesn’t do any of those things out-of-the-box.
This is usually where we pause to consider what Salesforce really is (besides a cloud-based, subscription-based, database system). You often hear us described as a platform. What does that mean, exactly?
What Is the Platform?
Think of a platform as a “suite” of technologies that provides a core set of features right out-of-the-box, along with the flexibility to customize and add other apps and processes on top of that suite.
NPSP is itself an example of an app on top of the Salesforce platform. Most non-profits use Salesforce Plus NPSP as the foundation for their implementation and then customize further to meet their individual needs. While some non-profits do prefer to use Salesforce without NPSP (usually because they want to do extensive customizations, or don’t need to manage donors, donations, or grants), most non-profits want Salesforce pre-configured for donor management.
A customizable platform explains how Salesforce can serve non-profits with vastly different sectors, budgets, missions, and structures. Salesforce is used by one of the largest foundations in the world to manage grant making and AIDS prevention programs across Africa . . . and it’s also used by local community-based charities to manage volunteer events and in-kind donation processing. That’s flexibility in action.
With the flexibility to customize comes the responsibility of complex decisions:
- Which Salesforce products do I use?
- Which external systems or apps should I integrate with?
- What should my implementation approach be? (Implement on my own or get help from a consulting partner?)
- What’s my longer-term maintenance strategy?
- . . . and the list goes on . . .
