Why You Should Be Using Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud (And How To Get Started for FREE)

Chances are that you have heard of Salesforce.com.  Did you know that 501c(3) organizations and higher education institutions can receive 10 free licenses of the core application and deep nonprofit discounts for additional users and products? In this session, we talk about how you can leverage Salesforce to manage donors, grants, and programs at your nonprofit.

Interested in taking advantage of Salesforce for your nonprofit?

Lauren Hogan: Hello everyone, thank you all for joining us for today's why you should be using salesforce is nonprofit cloud and how to get started for free, my name is lauren hogan and i'm a regional marketing coordinator here at GMT we're very excited to have founder and managing partner from Finn technology Scott hall are joining us today.

Just a couple of housekeeping notes, before I turn it over to Scott, if you have any questions during the webinar today, please go ahead and submit them into the Q amp a section, as you think.

we'll save all of them until the end of the presentation, but don't hesitate to submit them as they come.

Also, just a reminder that will send us some handouts, and the recording of today's webinar within 24 hours after it has concluded and with that i'll go ahead and turn it over to you Scott, to get started.

Scott Hollrah: Fantastic Thank you so much, while I pull up the agenda slide.

We do want to get just a quick feel for the audience and we've got two super easy poll questions we're not going to train your brain too much, can we go ahead and put those out there.

Once you see those on your screen, if you would just check the boxes.

mother's know who you are and.

Go waller question just to find out who's familiar with are using salesforce.

Lauren Hogan: Okay, just put the first poll out there and then the second one after that.

Scott Hollrah: Alright, we have responses.

Lauren Hogan: yeah looks like we have.

Two more people, for the first poll and we'll share the results from that one.

As well as.

Scott Hollrah: A good mix.

Lauren Hogan: yeah.

Scott Hollrah: All right, let's find out if anybody is currently using salesforce.

Lauren Hogan: Okay, just launched thoughtful.

Scott Hollrah: responses.

Lauren Hogan: waiting on two people or one person now.

Okay well in that Paul and then here's the results.

Scott Hollrah: Right, we got one fantastic.

Well, it just kind of helps me as I walk through this just to know, maybe what exposure, if you have and kind of the lens that you might do this through.

So real quick here's our agenda we're going to talk a little bit about my firm then technology.

And then from there we'll really get into the meat of it, the reason that you're here, and that is to learn a little bit more about salesforce why you might choose salesforce and then just to kind of help.

wrap your head around some of the concepts we'll do a little DEMO and close out with q&a.

So.

My name again is Scott Hall, I am the founder and managing partner event technology we're headquartered just outside of Dallas Texas, and last year we opened our Washington DC office to.

Have a little bit more of a local footprint for nonprofit clients there and DC Maryland and Virginia, as an aside, I will tell you that signing a lease on an office building march 11 of 2020 was not the real estate to do that.

No less our team up there is rocking and rolling and providing great great care for for our clients up in that area.

So, then, we have something we call our brand promise, and that is, we create systems that free people to focus on what their best.

And my guess is particularly for those of you that are in finances you spend a lot of time exporting data out of here and massaging it here and then importing it here and praying and crossing your fingers and hoping that it all works and that's really not what you were.

You were hired for skill sets to bring greater value than that and in our firm that's what we want to help you get back to is doing those things that you're best at.

And we, as an organization are so passionate about about this sort of thing that we actually wrote a song and recorded a music video.

If you go out to YouTube after this search for Ben technology find our channel, and we think you'll get a laugh out of out of our hit song integrate automate be free, be sure to check that out later.

On so, then we have to two practices or to focus areas within our firm, the first is our systems integration practice.

And really that centers normally around salesforce but also sage intact and for those of you that have had.

A long standing relationships with jm T you're probably thinking hey wait a second I have GMT that impact, why is why is this Ben company talking about attack.

Let me clarify really quick we actually have a very different role in the intact ecosystem, then jm T does.

jm T is there to help you set up your intact system from the ground up their help you there to help you get your data from your legacy accounting system train you how to use it and help you with that ongoing support.

We don't do any of that our role in this ecosystem is to provide additional products and services to help you get more value out of impact.

And oftentimes that happens in the form of building integrations across systems like salesforce to intact, but but really we get calls every day from people saying hey we have this APP Can you help us integrate this Can you help us automate that and the answer is almost always yes.

The other part of our business is what we're here to talk about today, and that is our salesforce.com consulting practice and so.

With with salesforce we provide a pretty wide range of services here, starting with helping organizations implement salesforce for the first time.

Maybe you're on razor's edge and you're frustrated with it and you want to get into something more modern.

Or maybe you're operating on spreadsheets and sticky notes and you need something more robust, we can actually make that move into salesforce for first time.

I think there was one group that was already using salesforce and one of the things that you've ever been around the CRM environment.

That you probably know all too well, is that these are kind of living breathing systems that that need that need to be kept up with, and as processes change, we need to adapt the system to do that for us, so we can come in and out optimize that existing salesforce environment as well.

For some organizations it doesn't make sense for them to hire a full time system admin, and so we actually can fill that role.

And then obviously I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of integration, or there are many, many, many facets of the salesforce technology stack.

And, and that is a long and exhausting list we can't can't fit it all into one slide you'll see there on the right, a little bit more about what we do within the salesforce.

The other thing I want to call them slide is that kind of why you shape them there with all these different icons.

salesforce is very big on certification and we, as a salesforce partner.

Carry many, many certifications within the organization, so our people at i've done lots and lots of work for many years on the salesforce platform.

And everybody on the team has one or more sets for certifications and you'll see that little red line going toward one them, and this is one that i'm particularly proud of.

A few years ago salesforce rolled out their very first nonprofit cloud certification and one of our TEAM members was actually one of the very first people in the world to to to achieve that and so again very, very proud of that.

couple more things about Ben and then we'll get into what you came here to hear more about on that salesforce.

So, then, we just part of our ethos kind of our core tenants that we operate around.

Or that we really look at Code as a last resort, wherever possible, we want to configure systems not code systems and one of the reasons that I got really drawn into the salesforce ecosystem many, many years ago, is that.

i'm a pretty technical guy but I can't write a line of code to save my life.

And for somebody who thinks very logically and, as a general understanding and appreciation for technology, I was able to get in and build some really cool stuff without having to actually be a developer.

And so we again we look at Code as a last resort, and the other thing is, we look at the big picture, so oftentimes organizations come to us and they say hey Scott can convey help us solve this problem.

And as we dig into it, we asked a lot more questions.

And what we usually find is yes, the problem of their that they're talking about certainly needs to be solved, but there are things that happen before and there are things that happen after that need to be taken into account as well.

Very common scenario and very applicable to our audience today is we are contacted all the time by nonprofits to meet to.

integrate their donations from the system like salesforce into sage in that.

And so the conversation that goes Scott, can you help us integrate salesforce and intact for donor management system or to get our donations into the accounts, the answer is yes, absolutely we can do that happens all the time, but we need to take a step back.

Most likely your organization uses some sort of online fundraising.

Or maybe in a pre coated world maybe you put on a five K and an annual Gala and the golf tournament.

And you have event registrations that also have a financial time, that means to make it into the CRM and the accounts.

Well, you know when you come to us and say hey can you integrate our our donor management and our county We absolutely can but we've also got to factor in those upstream systems and processes as well.

So again, we like to get all the puzzle pieces out and look at the look at the big picture before we start.

Alright enough about us let's talk about salesforce.com.

So salesforce was founded in the late 90s, they were one of the the few that escaped the.com bubble in the early 2000s.

And it is today one of the most widely recognized and one of the largest cloud platforms in the entire world.

And in my opinion salesforce is largely responsible for getting the cloud concept into the mainstream and making making cloud, a concept that people were very comfortable with.

I don't think that we will be where we are today with a lot of these cloud technologies have at salesforce not been one of those pioneers very early on.

While salesforce is a for profit company, and if you go out and look at their stock price will go oh yeah they definitely are.

While they are for profit company salesforce is also very philanthropic and they've really have that, as part of their ethos, since the very beginning.

And years and years and years ago, founder of salesforce came up with something that he calls the 111 model.

Where they get 1% of their product talk more about that minute 1% of their people and 1% of their resources and over the last 20 some odd years.

They have given over $1.3 billion in the form of technology grants the other cool thing that they do is they actually allow their employees to take a week a year.

Of paid company time to go out into the world and do volunteer projects and then, finally, in some cases they do provide cash grants for different things so again salesforce is a for profit, but they have a very philanthropic aspect to to their overall mission.

let's talk about that 1% of technology and in 501 C three or higher ED institution is eligible to get a license grant from salesforce where they will give you 10 free licenses of the core CRM application.

And one of the one of the questions that I almost always get asked is hey Scott, we only have eight people today 10 three licenses sounds great.

But what happens when we grow and we add a couple more people, or we bring in some volunteers and we need them to do work in the system, what what do we do that.

Well salesforce provides extremely deep discounts to nonprofits when you need additional CRM licenses or when you start looking at other products, maybe their marketing automation tools might might.

be important for you, at some point or their their communities product, we would call that a portal years ago.

That they offer these deep discounts, and just as kind of a point of reference, as a for profit, the list price for my salesforce license advanced technology is $150 per user per month.

nonprofits paid $36 per user per month, for that very same thing so again very, very generous and deep discounts when you get past that first 10.

And then, if you decided to go down this path, they also offer something called the nonprofit success pack at no additional cost.

This nonprofit success Pack is a free tool that is installed in your salesforce environment that gives you a lot more nonprofit specific functionality and we'll get a look at some of that here, in just a few minutes.

All right, Scott three sounds great, but you know what there are so many tools out there.

If we were to make a an exhaustive list of all of the nonprofit tools out there, we couldn't fit in on you know, on hundred slots, there are tons of them there's new ones popping up every day, so, so why salesforce and it's very crowded field.

I like to talk about something I call the smartphone analogy, so this is a little bit less applicable today but.

Not too long ago if you went into the at amp T or verizon store and you were looking for a new phone.

And back in the day when we have windows phone and Blackberry and, of course, we have the stalwarts that are still with us today of of our iphones and our android devices.

If you were sending in the store and you're comparing between these two My guess is you probably wouldn't think much about the Blackberry or the windows phone.

You would really gravitate toward the iPhone or the android device and a big part of that draw is these ecosystems that they have built up for themselves.

So you've got the APP store for your iPhone or Google play for your android and you can go out and download.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of different Apps that extend and enhance the value of your smartphone.

And salesforce is very much the same way salesforce actually kind of pioneered this concept, they call it the APP exchange it's like the APP store, but for your CRM.

Quick little tidbit quick little trivia for him back in the early 2000s when Steve Jobs was still alive, he and Marc benioff the CEO of salesforce were good friends.

And mark and Steve were talking and mark kind of said hey I think you should come out with this APP store thing.

And years later he actually bought the domain APP store.com and get the Steve Jobs and apple.

So so salesforce kind of kind of played a role in this and you see it reflected in their product as well.

The last time I got a hard number, there were over 3400 Apps out on the APP exchange that allow you to do all kinds of things.

So really common ones we see our online giving event registration already talked about those a little bit.

But maybe you have a large volunteer team, and you need a way to better manage them, maybe need that email marketing maybe the list just goes on and on and on chances are there's something you need there there's an APP for that to borrow from that campaign.

And then, from a cost standpoint many applications out there on the APP exchange for free and of those that are paid oftentimes nonprofits are offering pretty substantial discounts on on those third party APP.

So kind of furthering this concept of why salesforce and the thing that really powers that APP exchange.

Is this underlying platform so salesforce is not just an application, and when I say application i'm talking about pre built software that does something.

salesforce has this very rich very robust underlying platform that allows us to build not just custom fields but custom objects years ago to call them custom tables in the database, so that we can track all kinds of additional information.

Their process automation tools that will allow us to do approval workflows or hey when this happens, send this person an email or when that happens update this field.

Their API or application programming interface allows for the ability for salesforce to talk to exchange data with any system out there, and the list of polycom capabilities just goes on and on and on, we won't.

exacerbate that for, but this platform is incredibly incredibly powerful, so I think the best way to demonstrate the power of the platform is talking about some use cases.

And before we go there, I think it's worth noting, in my estimation 80% or more of nonprofits that use salesforce start off with a donor management use case, but it can be expanded to do so, so much more than that.

We work with a very large church here in Dallas Fort worth area that uses salesforce, believe it or not, not to track money coming in the door.

But money going out the door, this is a church that has significant resources and one of the things I just love about working with them is that they're very generous with it, they have a massive network of partners.

Around the world, and these partners are asking them for help, and so we built a system in salesforce.

Where the the staff at this church can actually submit a funding request in salesforce and then, once a quarter the organization reviews all of those requests, they have this big meeting and they can track did they passionate Group fully approve or reject a funding request.

And for those they get approved, we give them a single place to go to to get all the information they need about that relationship, so we can see who we've been talking to are they coming to our conferences and events and trainings.

And then things like you know hey do we have all our ducks in a row with our documentation we track tax documents and so forth, so so again salesforce can be used for so much more than donor management.

One more for you we've got another organization that I would, I would say very international education.

And they do you salesforce to record money coming into the organization and who's giving and so forth.

But, but this group uses it to work in their operations as well, so they put on thousands of classes around the globe each week and within salesforce we track who what geographies are they working what countries.

What languages have that converted their content into.

What content still needs to be translated into some language and then, when we actually get down to the execution level.

Who are the people that are leading these classes and, most importantly, what are the outcomes that we're seeing with with.

The classes that you're putting on, and when you can marry that financial information that getting information with that outcome that's a really powerful story to be able to go back and tell your major donors to your goal.

All right, enough slides let's hop out and take a look at the system can get a quick check just to make sure that i'm still sharing my salesforce screen, you should see a bunch of charts and graphs.

Lauren Hogan: yeah looks good.

Scott Hollrah: awesome very good.

Alright, so we are looking@salesforce.com and for the folks out there that are using it already my screen may look very different from your screen and that's okay again that just further illustrates the power and flexibility of the tool.

So when we log in were taken to this homes.

And we got all kinds of stuff on this, and one of the common things that we do is we'll put this dashboard here.

And it's a great place to start your day you first log in you get hit with this pertinent information right off the BAT and.

By the way, this is a DEMO environment so you'll see a lot of gaps and data it's really geared more just for illustrative purposes, but again we're putting this great information right in front.

As we scroll down the page we've got the ability to cook in with our calendar and, as you can see here on my calendar was this webinar presentation that we're doing with jt.

And then over here, if I had if I had some tasks meaning like I need to follow up with somebody we've got the ability to do that, we can also task other people, so if you need to have other people working on things you can keep track of who needs to do what right here in salesforce.

there's a lot of other nooks and crannies, but I think will will love to say, a time keep cruising here.

In one second.

All right back coming back up here to the top of the page, we have the search bar, and this is a Google like search tool we can put in any keyword and salesforce is going to return any record in the system that might be relevant.

As we come down here we'll see all these different tabs across the top these tabs represent different functional areas.

Within the system and we're not going to hit them all, but I do want to touch on some of the more important ones.

So the first stop on our tour is the account so a house, I like to say that they represent logical groupings of people and things.

An account might be an organization like the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but an organization might also be a household so, for example, if my wife and I were done.

You might have the whole household and, within that household unc Scott over and you lose hora and they'd be grouped together they're under that up for today we're going to drill into this bill Melinda Gates Foundation account.

And when pop to this details tab.

We get all kinds of information specific to to this organization and one of the things that I just love, and this is something that that nonprofit success pack enables for us.

Is the ability to get some donor intelligence so When did we first start receiving gifts from them.

How recently have we received what's our average what's our highest lowest and so forth really powerful information.

For those of you on the call who might be membership or positions, we can track membership levels, when people join Are they in good standing and so so lots of lots of information and then, of course, because of that that underlying platform, we can we can customize this to to our means.

over here we'll hop into this related tab and as we scroll down, we can see that we have a contact here and we might have dozens of contacts.

But here we've got Gary grant maker, and if we do over there, we can see his his phone number his email address as mailing address and so forth.

And then, as we come really on the page we see this thing that we call opportunity and so here.

This opportunity representative grants, so we apply for this grant with the bill Melinda Gates Foundation.

And, and maybe For those of you that are largely grant funded and maybe you're applying for dozens of grants in the course of a year, and you need a way to track Okay, what have we applied for what we want, what we lost for the ones that are open, where do we stand, do we owe them any information.

So, so your salesforce is tracking all of that, for us.

And then.

We have the ability, I mentioned earlier that we do a lot of work tying into accounting systems, we have the ability within the system to record the the appropriate financial coding for this, so that we hand it off to accounting they know exactly how it needs to be coded in the system.

Here, in the case of a grant we might not need to track just the fact that we have a grant but what payments, how we received for that grant or for an organization that deals with pledges, the same thing would apply here.

And then, also in the grant space, generally speaking, when you when you've got responsibilities to provide reports on a periodic basis.

Excuse me, to show how you're using the money in progress.

These are things that salesforce can deliver for you.

We can go on and on and on the other thing that did want to touch on is just an example of combat more operational type thing we talked about.

The the ability to use salesforce to manage funds that are leaving the organization, we talked about that story with a group that is providing education around the globe.

One more thing, just to kind of get you thinking about, we had a camp that came to us years ago and they said hey the donor stuff is great, we want to do that, but you know what we have maintenance that we have to do around our property and we, we really need a way to track these maintenance.

And so here.

we've created something that we're calling a case and in this example we got a broken window and Kevin Wong.

And we can see when this was created and how long it's been opened and what's the status so maybe there's some things that we can do internally ourselves, maybe there's some things that we need to refer out to somebody else.

And for the things that were out to somebody else, maybe we need to track a list of approved service providers.

So there's just a lot that we can do with the salesforce platform, and I really hope that this is kind of gotcha thinking about different ways, you might be able to use a tool like this.

And flip back to our presentation here, so if you saw this and you're thinking oh my gosh This is great, how do we, how do we get going, if you'll go out to salesforce dot our org slash get started, you can fill out the application and get get underway.

In terms of getting that licensed grant and if if your organization is comfortable rolling this out by yourself wonderful there are tons and tons of tools online that can help you get started.

But if you need somebody to actually kind of guide you through the process and how to get there, we would love to be a part of that journey and my contact information is there on the screen.

And with that.

I guess, should we open up for questions.

Lauren Hogan: yeah Thank you so much Scott and don't forget that you can submit your questions, through the Q amp a at the bottom, and it does look like, we have a couple here, though.

And so you say that there are 10 free licenses what's the catch what limitations, does it have.

Scott Hollrah: it's free there's got to be a catch right.

And so.

Really, there is no catch.

limitations, I mean certainly within the application there, there are limitations.

There are limitations on the overall amount of data that you can store, but that limit is huge, you can store millions upon millions of records.

there's someone that's in how many times, you can call the API in a day, but really we rarely see organizations hitting those kinds of moments good good question.

Lauren Hogan: yeah and our next one, is what happens if I need more than 10 licenses.

Scott Hollrah: So we we touched on that earlier salesforce they make it really easy make it very cost effective so when you license number 11 or 12 or whatever you need.

they're going to offer you those licenses an extreme discount we as a for profit, have a list price for those licenses of $150 per user per month.

Whereas in the nonprofit world they charge it 36 bucks for that same thing so you're not stuck when you get to that 10 that utility to keep growing growing with them.

Lauren Hogan: Okay, and then our last question that we have here is we're looking at new systems and are considering considering razor's edge in X to y a salesforce better.

Scott Hollrah: that's a great question.

So razor's edge has been around for a long time.

And you go out and do all kinds of research on the history and kind of you know their history in terms of providing updates and enhancements to the platform.

I would really kind of lean back on that that smartphone analogy that I gave earlier, and while I do think they have made some progress in terms of.

Developing a better third party ecosystem, they don't have anywhere near the breath that salesforce does.

And the other thing that I would say is that you're still really kind of locked into that tool being just a donor management system.

And so any of those operational use cases catches me again why we can do something with this you're just not going to get that same kind of functionality in a tool like razor's edge.

That they've been around a long time, and for a long time they've been where the gold standard, but I do think that salesforce really as a leg up when you look at the overall platform and not just the dark piece good question fair question, thank you for that.

Lauren Hogan: yeah we had another one come through, are there any initial fee is for the platform or is that just the monthly license fee.

Scott Hollrah: So if you have less than 10.

Users you could potentially have zero cost whatsoever.

If if you need out implementing it, then there will certainly be fees to to whoever you you work with we love to help you.

There will be fees paid to the consultant that sets it up for you and migrate your data and does the training, but in terms of what we pay a salesforce if you don't need more than 10 licenses and you don't need other products or functionality, you could actually use this calls.

Lauren Hogan: Okay, great looks like that's all the questions that we had come through.

And to thank you so much Scott and Thank you everyone for joining us and then today to learn more about how you can take advantage of your salesforce for nonprofit.

As a reminder, jm T consulting works closely with organizations like vin technology to implement integrate and support best in class financial management.

And back office productivity solutions to learn more about how we can help you create better outcomes for the communities you serve through optimized technology book a free consultation today at jm T consulting COM slash book.

And it looks like we had a we will send the recording as well as the slides out at after 24 hours after the sets concluded and with that we'll go ahead and conclude the webinar so Thank you everyone for joining, and thank you again Scott.

thanks for having me appreciate it.

Lauren Hogan: Have a nice day bye.

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