Salesforce is, without a doubt, one of the world’s most advanced CRM solutions. The Salesforce software helps organizations track all of their customer information and interactions in one place. The software features lead management, marketing automation, sales data, partner management, and more.

Salesforce created the Nonprofit Success Pack specifically for nonprofits, with the intention of allowing nonprofits to focus on their impact instead of spending a lot of their time collecting and crunching data. Over 30,000 nonprofits around the world use Salesforce – from small human services organizations working in a single community to large multinational NGOs and foundations.

The Nonprofit Success Pack features a flexible, open data architecture and pre-built constituent and donor management components.

These are the average benefits reported by their customers in their annual “Voice of the Customer” Survey:

89% of Salesforce.org customers say Salesforce has helped improve their ability to achieve their mission

+49% faster response to constituents

+24% donor retention

-32% service and support costs

-17% cost per dollar raised

Why Should Your Nonprofit Use Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack?

1. To cultivate donor relationships: NPSP empowers your nonprofit to cultivate donor relationships by observing and analyzing every donor or volunteer interaction.

2. Managing the donation cycle: Having a lot of information, organized in a systematic way, not only helps you establish and grow donor relationships but also helps you manage your donation cycle.

3. For reporting and evaluating: Having a CRM system allows you to quickly export all the necessary data needed for project purposes. Additionally, that data can be used for evaluating the quality of your services. Last but not least, you can use it as a basis for analysis when drafting new projects.

4. It is cost-effective: 10 user licenses/logins to the NPSP are free for eligible nonprofits. You can sign up for the 30 Day free trial of the Lightning Enterprise Edition + NPSP. Additional licenses for the NPSP are $36/month.

5. It is flexible: Salesforce is a platform, not an application – therefore, each user can customize the interface features and the followed metrics to fit their needs. One of the appealing features of NPSP is its ability to be configured for the needs, goals, and day-to-day processes of any organization with minimal custom programming. As a result, Salesforce is a tool that grows with your nonprofit.

Salesforce also allows for multiple integrations – which can consequently take your operations to the next level.

Top Picks of the 18 Best Salesforce Apps

1. Donorbox – Donation Software

Donorbox is one of the very few donation platforms out there that support NPSP3, the latest Nonprofit Success Pack by Salesforce.

When using Donorbox, you can collect a lot of donor information. As you process your supporters’ donations, it guarantees that all their valuable data- donors, campaigns, and donations data, flows into your Salesforce CRM.

Finally, Donorbox Salesforce integration is easy to set up. All you need to do is go to your Donorbox account, click on “Salesforce Integration” and “Connect with Salesforce”. Here is the detailed guide.

Donor management is incredibly important if you wish to maintain good relationships with your donors. It also helps raise more funds, maintain donor loyalty, and brings focus on donor experience to build a positive brand image of your nonprofit.

2. MailChimp – Email Marketing

Email marketing has long been chastised for being a thing of the past. However, study after study shows email marketing is the most effective way for nonprofits to build awareness, acquire leads, convert supporters, and retain current donors.

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools out there. It lets you easily customize and brand your emails, send them out to lists, and track the success of your campaigns.

You can connect Salesforce with MailChimp to easily share data and streamline communications. This helps you better engage your customer base. MailChimp offers two tools to connect your Salesforce and MailChimp accounts: the built-in integration and the MailChimp for Salesforce app. Here is a detailed guide.

3. Fonteva – Event Management

Most nonprofits will, at some point, organize events. Whether you’re organizing a small fundraising event or a Christmas gala, event management can be stressful and take up a lot of resources.

Fonteva Events is native to Salesforce, and it offers a great set of features built to streamline and enhance the organization of any event. Fonteva lets you can access real-time events data without ever leaving your CRM.

Additionally, it features configurable registration type; speaker, sponsor, vendor, and venue management, agenda builder; attendee and event lifecycle management; drag and drop dashboards; easy reporting; one-time implementation cost, and more.

Therefore, if you’d like to have a one-stop event management solution: from event registration, setting up tracks, selling tickets, and marketing your event to generating custom reports – Fonteva is the right tool for you.

4. Hootsuite – Social Media

If you have an active social media strategy you are likely to use a tool like Hootsuite.

Connecting Hootsuite with Salesforce enables you to leverage your Hootsuite social media data to inform new lead tracking, create new cases based on social media conversations, and more.

Furthermore, you can also view details and activity history for Leads, Opportunities, Accounts, Contacts, and other Salesforce entities and add relevant social activities and conversations to Salesforce Lead and Contact records.

Integrating your social media interactions with Salesforce is increasingly essential in the world where more and more people research, interact and donate to organizations on social media.

5. OneCause – Charity Auctions

Auctions are one of the most frequent ways nonprofits go about fundraising.

OneCause is a fundraising auction and mobile bidding software that can assist with every aspect of your auction planning and delivery.

This Salesforce app provides event management tools that are perfect for any nonprofit planning silent, live, or online fundraising auctions.

The OneCause tool really takes care of everything:

Ticketing: selling tickets and managing RSVPs online; offering coupons, special tickets, and discount codes; and even allows you to track guest dietary restrictions.

Procurement: generating auction item solicitation letters; tracking an item’s procurement status; and creating item bundles or packages.

Promotion: setting up custom event websites; sharing Facebook and Twitter feeds via your event website; live-tweeting with Twitter Scoreboard; enabling donors to share donations and bids.

These are only some of the features OneCause offers as part of its package. With all of this taken care of, your nonprofit will have more time for real human interaction and ensure all the small details are taken care of.

6. GetFeedback – Surveys

To develop meaningful donor relationships, your nonprofit needs to understand how your donors see your organization. GetFeedback makes that possible – and you don’t even have to leave Salesforce!

With GetFeedback, you can ask your donors questions that will have the most impact on your operations and then seamlessly collect and use the data within Salesforce.

All of your survey results instantly flow into Salesforce records so you can measure key metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction. Getting a complete picture of donor health using surveys consequently allows you to spot trends, address issues, and discover new opportunities for growth.

7. Dropbox – Collaboration

Individuals, teams, and organizations around the world use Dropbox to store files and collaborate.

Install Dropbox for Sales from the Salesforce App Launcher, connect Dropbox with Salesforce, and then access, store and share all of your team’s content from Salesforce.

Firstly, you won’t have to worry about having too little space for the documents you’re storing! Furthermore, you’ll enable efficient communication and collaboration between the members of your team.

Dropbox updates the files “real-time” – as they’re being worked on – and stores all the changes. This helps keep everyone informed and reduces email back and forth.

Finally, you can easily control who has access to your content since the system automatically maps permissions between Dropbox and Salesforce.

8. Mogli SMS – Text Messaging

With Mogli SMS, you can send and receive text messages to/from all of your Salesforce Contacts/Leads.

Mogli SMS lets you schedule and sends two-way, bulk messages with any individual whose phone number is stored in your database with SMS Templates and Campaigns. The system stores all the messages neatly within the Contact and Lead records for easy reporting.

You can also create and launch linear (simple) and branching (complex) SMS surveys, and your donors and supporters can interact with you via keyword queries.

Finally, Mogli also works with many different messaging gateways to ensure your messages reach your intended audience no matter where they are in the world.

Look at more Mogli features here.

9. DocuSign – Digital Signatures

In today’s day and age, you’re probably handling transactions and establishing partnerships more frequently than ever before.

DocuSign is reliable and trusted worldwide for electronic signatures, approving a purchase, closing a sale, or signing an agreement, since it’s easy and safe.

However, that’s not the only thing DocuSign offers! It lets you have multiple signers per document, create workflows for necessary signing orders, and delegate signing responsibility per document.

DocuSign increases your team’s efficiency by taking away the paper shuffling (printing, faxing, scanning, emailing), and you don’t even have to download anything.

DocuSign for Salesforce is easy to use, implement & manage, driving immediate user adoption. As a consequence, teams using DocuSign report completing over 80% of documents in a day (95% faster than usual).

10. Duplicate Check – Data Maintenance

Everyone who’s ever worked with people and data knows that data duplicates are an incredible hassle. They reduce efficiency, cause teams to overlook important information, and distort findings.

Duplicate Check remedies this problem by preventing, finding, and merging data duplicates.

Their system alerts you in real-time when someone’s creating a duplicate. Besides that, it locates misspelled duplicates.

Data management is essential for any nonprofit’s success. Clean, complete data is the backbone of any CRM. And manually finding, removing, and merging duplicate data is a long and exhausting process. By extension, a tool like Duplicate Check can save a lot of time and effort.

These were our top 10 picks, but we’ve got you covered with 8 other notable mentions:

11. Cirrus Insight – Email Management

With Cirrus Insight, you can add new data into Salesforce so you can track prospects and opportunities from within your inbox. When you open a donor’s email, you’ll instantly be able to view their giving history, relationships, and other important information without ever leaving your email host. Finally, you’ll also have access to customizable reports that tell you who’s opened your emails, who’s clicked on the links you sent, and much more.

12. Geopointe – Mapping

Geopointe is a native Salesforce AppExchange application that location-enabled Salesforce and brings actionable insights to your nonprofit. The system aims to help all the different functions in your nonprofit: sales, marketing, operations, executives. Some of its features include filtering by industry, size, titles, location to easily create messaging for a group you want to target; visualizing geographical data; optimizing travel plans; choosing conference venues based on population density, and more.

13. Congregation Connect – Faith Organizations

Congregation Connect helps churches, synagogues, ministries, and other faith-based nonprofits manage their congregants. Connecting Congregation Connect with Salesforce lets faith-based organizations have a complete view of their constituents, access their data anytime and anywhere, have a holistic overview of what’s happening in their institutions. In other words, Congregation Connect lets faith-based nonprofits have centralized access to their constituents’ activity history, giving history, and other necessary data.

14. Invoca – Call Management

Nonprofits increasingly use social media, email marketing, and even text messaging. However, calls are still an effective way of fundraising and relationship building, especially at conversion points. Invoca features email-to-call integration to measure email success through call traffic, custom journeys based on inbound calls, and full visibility into call outcomes within customer profiles.

15. 15. Resource Hero – Time Management

Resource Hero helps you manage your resources and track time. More exactly, you can assign people to your projects or opportunities, forecast hours per week, and see your staff availability in real-time. Furthermore, the app allows you to track time using a spreadsheet-like interface, add notes to time entries quickly and effortlessly, track project health and produce powerful reports. Thus, Resource Hero simplifies workload management across all departments of your nonprofit.

16. FedEx Shipping

FedEx’s native Salesforce app allows you to handle every aspect of the shipping process, from calculating rates for FedEx shipments, sending mail or packages to any contact stored in Salesforce, to tracking shipments directly in your CRM. As a result, this app is particularly useful for those nonprofits who send out a lot of fundraising letters, thank-you letters, invites to events, and annual reports.

17. Campaign Calendar – Marketing Management

If your nonprofit manage your marketing efforts on Salesforce, consider Campaign Calendar. Campaign Calendar basically generates an interactive marketing calendar inside your Salesforce dashboard. As a result, your nonprofit gains a single place to schedule, review and execute your marketing efforts.

18. Breadwinner – Accounting

Breadwinner integrates Salesforce CRM with Xero Cloud accounting. It syncs all Xero invoices, bills, purchase orders, and payments with Salesforce in real-time, so your accounting details are always up-to-date. Furthermore, everyone has access to this information. For example, your sales team can view the financial status without talking to the finance department. It also lets your team raise invoices directly in Salesforce, reduces double data entry between Salesforce and Xero, and improves cash flow by accelerating payment time.

Conclusion

To sum up, Salesforce is a powerful CRM system. Using it regularly, and in a smart way, can help your nonprofit grow and work in a more efficient and effective way.

Using Salesforce apps and integrations prepares your nonprofit for any challenges and problems – from fundraising to time management. And adopting Salesforce apps and integrations is a powerful step towards achieving your nonprofit mission.

In conclusion, with the appropriate and consistent adoption and implementation of these tools, your nonprofit will perform better. It will serve your beneficiaries better and maintain good relationships with your donors, the Board, volunteers, and other stakeholders.