Which Edition of salesforce.com is Right for Me?

Your organization has taken the important step of signing up for salesforce.com, but to make sure you get the most out of your license, it’s important to determine which edition of salesforce.com is right for you.

Salesforce.com offers two basic choices for Nonprofit organizations, – standard Salesforce CRM (commonly used for the commercial sector), and the Salesforce CRM + Nonprofit Starter Pack. Both enterprise-level editions offer free 30-day trials and include Salesforce.com’s award-winning customer relationship management tools as a base from which to configure salesforce.com to fit your organization’s intrinsic needs.

The first choice, the “generic” salesforce.com template is seen as salesforce.com “out of the box”. This edition is generally oriented toward the business world but can be extended to fit any required non profit business process. In some cases the standard Salesforce CRM might be the right fit for your organization. The standard commercial Salesforce CRM doesn’t provide the same default functionality that a nonprofit may need (for example the ability to manage households), but it is still full-featured and can be a great starting point for your organization.

However, it’s been the experience of MK Partners that the addition of the Nonprofit Starter Pack takes away much of the initial trepidation of signing up for salesforce.com because it was built with the common core needs of the nonprofit sector in mind. By choosing this edition, nonprofit organizations can realize significant savings in customizing the application to meet their needs than they would if starting from a standard commercial version of Salesforce. This edition provides tools to help manage your organizations campaigns, leads, donations and contacts. Here, some of the names have been changed (An Opportunity is called a Donation, and a an Account is called an Organization, for example). This edition easily allows you to:

• Manage donors and fundraising programs
• Track affiliations
• Manage a wide range of constituents in one place including donors, volunteers, board members, and more

The Salesforce CRM + Nonprofit Starter Pack

Imagine the complete power of Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) used everyday by thousands of for-profits, but with added functionality specifically for nonprofits to better track donors, donations, and fundraising programs. The Salesforce CRM + Nonprofit Starter Pack uses all of the power of standard Salesforce CRM and adds a base set of functionality unique to the nonprofit sector.

All the Benefits of Salesforce CRM

Because the Nonprofit Starter Pack is built on the salesforce.com platform (Force.com), nonprofits can also take advantage of all the powerful Salesforce CRM features.

• Software as a service means no hardware or software to install or maintain
• Award-winning ease of use that drives end-user adoption and compliance
• Apply work-flow triggers to automatically generate tasks for volunteers or board members
• Create standardized templates for consistent, professional responses to queries that can still be personalized by the sender
• Control access to sensitive data by creating user hierarchies to protect confidential information
• Get instant insight and analysis with powerful dashboards and reports to quickly analyze and
  understand your constituent behaviors
• Point-and-click customization to meet your organization’s specific needs
• The flexible Force.com platform to meet even the most extensive customization and integration

The Nonprofit Edition was recently re-developed by the Salesforce Foundation and MK Partners to further meet the specific needs of non profits, and the roughly 400 organizations who sign up forsalesforce.com every week. While not all nonprofits operate in the same way, the template tries to address common core functionality that is traditionally found in the nonprofit rather than commercial sector.

Since its first release in 2006, the nonprofit edition has received important and exciting improvements. At the core, the application remains simple, by providing a rudimentary set of contact management and fundraising type functionality. However, it’s still defined in such a way that it can have multiple other nonprofit solutions added on to it via the AppExchange, including many solutions offered by MK Partners.

Features and Enhancements of the Nonprofit Edition

In addition to providing essential, built-in salesforce.com functionality, major features of the nonprofit edition include:

• Sophisticated APEX code for automation, enabling customers to decide how they want to relate contacts and accounts.
• New functionality such as Organization Affiliations and Contact Relationships.
• Donation automation – built native to salesforce.com!
• Single donation tracking capabilities
• A converter to migrate existing users of the original nonprofit template over to the new one

Major enhancements:

• Contact-to-Contact relationship tracking
• Affiliation tracking
• Fully automated capabilities for tracking individual people (constituents), the B-to-C model
• Reduces the amount of clicks it takes to enter a new individual and maintain that data.

Benefits:

• Bring higher levels of professionalism and shared communication to your organization.
• Improve interactions with donors, volunteers, and supporters and encourage repeat donations.
• Analyze your organizations initiatives from fundraising campaigns to program impact.

You can’t go wrong

With either template that you choose as starting point, there may be be a number of things to undo and change. For everything you like, there may be some things you don’t. One of the many benefits of salesforce.com is that it is configurable and extend-able to specifically fit any business process for any given organization; this is one of the hallmarks of salesforce.com technology. Whichever edition you choose, you have the powerful force.com AppExchange at your fingertips and customizable database with complete functionality.

Have further questions? The experts at MK Partners offer complimentary salesforce.com support for non profit organizations. Visit us online at mkpartners.com, or email us at support@mkpartners.com

Sign up for a free trial for either edition here:

Read the Product Donation FAQ

Watch MK Partners CEO and Nonprofit Starter Pack lead, Matt Kaufman’s webinar here for an exciting demonstration

 

Choose a Trial	Salesforce CRM	Salesforce CRM plus Nonprofit Starter Pack
1. Why should I choose this one?	Salesforce.com’s award winning commercial CRM (customer relationship management).	Manage donors and fundraising programs Track affiliations Manage a wide range of constituents in one place including donors, volunteers, board members, and more.
2. Get more details	Salesforce Standard Edition Data Sheet	Salesforce CRM plus Nonprofit Starter Pack Data Sheet
3. Make a choice	Sign me up for a trial of Salesforce CRM	Sign me up for a trial of Salesforce CRM plus Nonprofit Starter Pack

reference: salesforce.com Foundation