
Should your nonprofit move to Salesforce?
Making the move to Salesforce is a major strategic investment for any organization and especially for nonprofits. With an intense pressure to reduce overhead and boost fundraising revenue, making the most of their data with a robust CRM platform can be a game-changer.
What can Salesforce do for your donations?
For example, Salesforce can track how your donors engage with those thank-you emails, determining how effectively you might use them to promote surveys, matching gift requests, and more post-donation actions.
What is Salesforce nonprofit Cloud?
Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud is the only complete platform for nonprofits. It's the only platform that gives you a 360-degree view of your mission. It's the only platform built with a community of over 30,000 trailblazers. It's the only platform that brings you the power and flexibility of Salesforce, the world's #1 CRM.
What data should I include in my donor profiles in Salesforce?
There are a few key data points that should be accounted for within your donor profiles in Salesforce. Think of them as the essentials or cornerstones for your data strategy: Previous donations, including dates, amounts, and any other details

Can Salesforce track donations?
Donations are called Opportunities in Salesforce. An Opportunity is a specially-designed Salesforce record for recording revenue by the amount, date, and person or organization that revenue is from. Businesses use Opportunities to track sales deals–nonprofits use Opportunities to track donations.
What does Salesforce for nonprofits do?
Salesforce for nonprofits has a wide range of built-in reporting tools to help you make sense of your different data sets. With Salesforce, you'll be able to pose questions in order to generate custom reports. Then, you can display those reports visually using dashboards.
Is Salesforce a donor management system?
Names, emails, tasks, deadlines, gift asks. You name it, a donor management system (like Salesforce) tracks it. A DMS is one example of a CRM, or constituent relationship management system, but specifically around donors.
Does Salesforce donate to nonprofits?
The Power of Us gives eligible nonprofits and educational institutions access to 10 donated subscriptions and deep discounts on additional subscriptions, products, and/or services from Salesforce.
Is Salesforce really free for nonprofits?
The Power of Us Program includes 10 free subscriptions of Sales & Service Cloud Enterprise Edition for all eligible 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations.
What is the difference between Salesforce.org and Salesforce com?
The major difference between the two is that while Salesforce.com caters to businesses, Salesforce.org focuses on nonprofit organizations, higher education and K12 education. The products offered by Salesforce.org are also different and more focused on the specific types of organizations they serve.
What is Salesforce nonprofit Success Pack?
The Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) is an app that sits on top of Salesforce Enterprise Edition. NPSP is preconfigured for nonprofits as an-easy-to-use fundraising and constituent management application, designed to make the daily life of nonprofits a little easier.
Do churches use Salesforce?
We've combined the powerful Salesforce CRM with Community Cloud and App Cloud, revolutionizing the engagement possibilities for one of the largest nonprofit markets in the United States: churches.
What is Salesforce good for?
Salesforce is a popular CRM tool for support, sales, and marketing teams worldwide. Salesforce services allow businesses to use cloud technology to better connect with partners, customers, and potential customers.
Who does Salesforce donate to?
Marc and Lynne Benioff, Salesforce donate $300M to encourage climate action. Marc and Lynne Benioff announced a $200 million donation this morning to combat climate change and encourage others to take action. Marc Benioff's company, Salesforce, threw in $100 million more for a total donation of $300 million.
How do charities use Salesforce?
The Power of Us program gives eligible nonprofit organisations access to Salesforce products and resources to help expand their collective impact. The program includes 10 donated Salesforce subscriptions and deep discounts on additional subscriptions, products and services from Salesforce.
How much does Salesforce donate to charity?
Since our founding, we have given more than $240 million in grants, 3.5 million hours of community service, and provided product donations for more than 39,000 nonprofits and educational institutions.
Why invest in Salesforce?
Investing in and developing a strong Salesforce instance can fuel serious growth because it allows nonprofits to start truly leveraging their data in ways that many have simply never been able to before. However, many nonprofits aren’t particularly tech-savvy, so the learning curve can be fairly steep for some.
Why do organizations need donor data?
Strategically, donor data allows nonprofits to drill down into the performance of their marketing and fundraising campaigns.
Is Salesforce good for nonprofits?
Thankfully, Salesforce has become an increasingly popular solution for nonprofits, ...
Is Give Lively a nonprofit?
Give Lively is itself a philanthropic organization, funded by their founders, which means their free platform is not “too good to be true.”. Molly Trerotola from the Give Lively team explains, “Our mission is to empower nonprofits, no matter their budget, to fundraise better online.
Can you use Salesforce to manage donations?
You can use Salesforce to manage donations as well as marketing and programs. What’s different about Salesforce is that it’s not just a point solution; it’s a true platform that helps you track and understand your organization’s interactions with donors, volunteers, and constituents.
About Salesforce and Donation Processing
Salesforce is the world-leading CRM solution for a number of reasons, chief among them being the platform’s high level of customization. Organizations, nonprofit and for-profit alike, are able to customize their solutions to include the exact tools and functions that are necessary to effectively run their unique operations.
Payment Processing Overview
From the perspective of the consumer, when you shop online or make a donation to a worthy organization, you typically enter a long string of numbers from your credit card into an online page. Then, the money is magically taken from your account and you receive a confirmation email that verifies the payment was accepted.
Donation & Payment Processing for the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
When you invest in donation forms and fundraising systems, you’ll have access to the payment processors they use to translate online transactions into funds in your account.
Processing Fees
The fees associated with payment processing may be include flat rate transaction fees, percentage-based processing fees, and platform fees. You may have a blend of these types depending on if you’re offering credit, debit, or ACH payment options for your donors.
Security
When you have an integrated donation system that shares donor data with your Salesforce CRM, another concern that should be top-of-mind is how that data is kept safe, especially payment information. Before investing in a donation system, be sure to ask if credit card information is stored, how it’s secured, and who can access that information.
Information Collected During Salesforce Donation Processing
A donation system that’s completely integrated with your Salesforce CRM allows you to collect information about your supporters during the payment process. When a supporter initially fills out the donation form on your website, you should have the option to add customized questions to gather key information about that supporter.
Type of Information Collected
When a supporter donates to your organization through a Salesforce-integrated donation page, your donation management system should automatically create (or update) the profile for that donor. Some of the information stored in that profile can include (but is not limited to) the following:
Why segment donors?
Segment donors based on their employers or where they went to college to better use these networks. Donors respond better to more personalized marketing. In fact, 55% of nonprofit donors claim that they would give or volunteer more in exchange for a more personalized experience with your nonprofit.
Why invest in CRM?
The whole purpose of investing in your CRM is to achieve better management of your donor information. That's likely why you invested in Salesforce to begin with. So why wouldn't you check to make sure you're storing the right information?
Salesforce: The lowdown
Here we will give you an overview of Salesforce so that you can make the best decision based on your organization’s needs.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a complex cloud-based CRM program that allows users from various departments within a company to interact with each other and work “as one” within the system, essentially bringing a global business together under one virtual roof.
Why it is important for every nonprofit to add a personal touch
In a nonprofit world, donations are the backbone of your business and people donate money when they feel good about your cause and feel like they are part of your nonprofit’s community base. In order to inspire them to invest in your cause, your nonprofit should strive to add a friendly personal touch to every transaction.

Understanding The Essentials of Donor Data
Standardizing Your Data Processes
- Your CRM is only as useful as the data it contains. Too many nonprofits eagerly make the move to a professional-grade database platform (which is great), but then fail to follow professional-grade data management protocols (which is not so great).
Automating Small and Recurring Tasks
- Task automation can also be extremely useful to your data strategies. By automating small and recurring tasks, you reap a few benefits: 1. Save your team’s time and minimize errors 2. Ensure complete standardization of data as it enters your CRM 3. Generate more engagement data over the long-run We won’t walk through the complete process of setting up a process automation in …
Developing A Long-Term Data Strategy
- A big-picture vision of exactlyhow Salesforce will benefit your organization over the long-run goes a long way to keep your strategies focused. Does your team understand why strong data collection, management, and analysis is so important? Do your Salesforce tools and protocols reflect your larger goals? How can your data better support your mission? Questions like these a…
Summary
- Making the move to Salesforce is a major strategic investment for any organization and especially for nonprofits. With an intense pressure to reduce overhead and boost fundraising revenue, making the most of their data with a robust CRM platform can be a game-changer. This is more true today than ever before, as online and virtual fundraising has n...
What Donor Management Software Do We Need?
- For nonprofit technology to manage donors and donations, it’s key to first understand the difference between donor management software and fundraising software. Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud is a platform with the Nonprofit Success Pack – a CRM for nonprofits – at its core. You can use Salesforce to manage donations as well as marketing and progra...
So, Can We Get Nonprofit Fundraising Software For free?
- For years, the two main pricing models for fundraising apps (like Classy, Rallybound, Click and Pledge and more found on the AppExchange) have been tiered or flat rate. How much they cost depends on how much they help you raise. Both have come with associated additional fees, calculated as a percentage of funds raised, plus fees deducted when donations are made or pay…
OK, How Do We Choose The Best Donor Management Software?
- At Arkus, we make recommendations after detailed discovery and scoping sessions to help everyone understand exactly what functionality is needed. It’s a good idea to know your organizational needs before fully diving into possible options, but it can help to have an overview of choices out there before. Among the apps we’ve partnered with and helped clients implemen…
Which One Is The Best?
- One of the nice things about a free app is that it makes it safe to check out the tool before you fully link it to Salesforce so you can make the call with little to no risk. While we have preferences, a nonprofit’s choice will depend on the unique needs of their organization. The beauty of Salesforce is that it can be configured with clicks, not code, and further customized to a nonprof…