For Small Charity Week, our Company MD Heather Black shares her early experience of working with Salesforce when starting her own social enterprise. Her insight enables her to confidently share 5 reasons why Salesforce is great for Small Charities!
“Helping small non-profits to grow is an important topic to me as I’ve been in their shoes. I understand the ambitions and the pressures to succeed and survive all at the same time.
I started my social enterprise in 2005 and believe I wouldn’t have achieved the growth and scale we did without Salesforce. It provided me with a centralised system of intelligence, helping me to track my fundraising activities, our work, and impact with young people, our communications and HR. The system was easy to use, and it could evolve and grow as we secured new work and the team expanded.
The flexibility of the Salesforce architecture supported the social enterprise’s scalability without having to reinvest in new systems. As we grew to a team of 40 employees and £1.3m turnover, I was able to coordinate everything centrally and maintain the level of data intelligence for performance management and reporting to funders. It was a lifesaver!
Salesforce comes with the added benefit that the first 10 licenses are free, so the initial investment was minimal to get started. I paid for some input from a consultant and then I trained as a Salesforce admin and I was off! 8 years on, and I’m now helping other charities get started with their Salesforce journey. The information that I was able to store and analyse in Salesforce definitely helped me become more efficient, win new work and scale efficiently. It’s why I’m so passionate about my job today!”
5 Reasons Why Salesforce CRM can be a perfect tool for a Small Charity.
1. Client Relationship Management
Every organisation whether small or large needs some simple functionality to manage stakeholders and communications effectively. For example, recording contact information, recording meeting notes, creating tasks, recording emails or logging a call. This is a core functionality of Salesforce with access via phone or tablet.
2. Team Coordination
Whether you are operating alone, or as a part of hundreds, we all need something to help us with the day to day management of our tasks and communications whether you are working independently or as team. Salesforce offers Chatter (a conversational tool) and task management out of the box but it you want something more sophisticated you can install a project management app. Free or discounted apps for charities exist like Cloud Coach and TaskRay, which offer discounted licenses.
3. Customisation
Salesforce can be fully customised to meet your data collection and reporting needs across the organisation, plus you can continue to evolve it as your needs change. You can manipulate the system and the analytic reports, making it useful and relevant to you. It comes with the benefit of some existing out of the box functionality to save time that can be tweaked, making it ideal for fundraising, volunteer management and case management.
4. Scalability
Salesforce is renowned for being one of the largest CRM systems because it’s the #1 in the World. Charities and Nonprofits can benefit from this software at a discounted price thanks to the Salesforce commitment to philanthropy.
There are thousands of apps that plug in to Salesforce, meaning you can either add functionality into your Salesforce org or benefit from integration with other software systems. You can purchase new user licenses as and when you need too, and benefit from a range of different types of user licenses with different price points and access levels.
5. Maintenance
We understand that small charities are cautious of ongoing prices. The benefit of Salesforce is that it can be customised by clicks, with code being kept to a minimum where it is really needed. We train CEO’s, volunteer managers, fundraising managers, programme delivery staff and operations staff to become Salesforce Administrators. You don’t have to be fixed into an IT contract, if you have someone in-house who can learn and understand Salesforce.
In the early stages we encourage non-profits to benefit from an our Company Salesforce support package as we can support and train an internal admin in the early stages of their journey and make sure Salesforce is set up correctly to meet your needs. This is essential for team adoption. We like to capacity build our customers and empower them to use and evolve their own Salesforce systems.
“Lay the foundations for your non-profit to grow and scale using the best technology that is available. Salesforce is affordable, scalable and accessible for any non-profit.”
Interested and would like to find out more?
Seeing how the system work in practice helps you to understand what is possible, so why not catch up on our FREE Webinar : Salesforce for Small Charities>>
We were delighted to have guest speakers, Simon de Forges and Leslie Billy from Viewpoint on the call to talk about their journey and application of Salesforce as a small charity.
Viewpoint is a service user involvement charity in Hertfordshire which works with people to ensure that their views and experiences of people with mental health or drug and alcohol problems form part of the design, delivery and monitoring of services. As with many smaller charities, their ability to record and monitor our outcomes was not as robust as they wanted it to be. Recording methods were varied and collating data would often be time consuming. They realised they needed to move to a more sophisticated data management system to collect, manage and analyse stakeholder contact and intervention information more efficiently. Find out about their journey and story one year on from getting started with Salesforce.
At our Company we offer a small charity discount package where the charity pays for a minimum of 6 days and they get 6 days for free with the support of our volunteer Supermums.
We also offer affordable support contracts for those non-profits that need a bit of extra training and support. For full details on the plans available and prices, please click here.
