In September, Salesforce launched their latest tool for nonprofits, an all-encompassing cloud system called NGO Connect. Now, after a month of researching this latest offering, we want to give you a look into why NGO Connect might work for your organization. Salesforce broadcasts NGO Connect as a way to manage constituents via a comprehensive, 360-degree view, and to create lasting relationships with these constituents, volunteers, donors and all of the other folks who are essential to your organization’s success. The idea is that NGO Connect is a CRM for the social media era and that constituents expect NPOs to deliver whenever and wherever. Optimized for mobile devices and accessible from any place with internet access, NGO Connect takes the best parts of Salesforce for nonprofits and gives you easy access to each of them, allowing you to spend less time searching for data and information and more time fulfilling your mission.
At its heart, NGO Connect is an optimization of the Nonprofit Starter Pack. Inherent in its features are donor management, events management, volunteer management, nonprofit relationship management, program management, reporting, and mobile/social/cloud integration. NGO Connect also allows for mobile app, AppExchange and partner ecosystem integration. Each one of these things is essential to our clients.
Nonprofits face daily challenges surrounding resources and budgets, and often need to show hard evidence of tangible results achieved with the resources that they are given. With NGO Connect, and Salesforce as a whole, nonprofit leaders are able to know exactly what is coming into their organization – donations, volunteer hours and efforts – and to connect these assessments with real-time information about how these resources are used to further their mission.
In our client engagements, we’ve found that data reporting holds especially significant to nonprofits. It is important to NPOs to be able to measure their impact in numbers and to be able to report them to the community. As part of NGO Connect, your organization can leverage over 250 different reports – all able to be customized and edited – and many dashboards that will provide both real-time reports and broad overviews for all of the data you enter into Salesforce.
Finally, nonprofits are always trying to make sense of multiple different databases for all of their moving parts. No longer does your organization need five different systems to manage different genres of events, nor will you need to rely on Excel spreadsheets to house loads of internal data. If it isn’t abundantly clear already – even simply in the name – NGO Connect houses everything. That means no more silos. Every type of interaction with an individual can be measured and connected, the Nonprofit AppExchange will integrate all of your NPO’s tools, and the device-wide compatibility ensures that you’ll always have the information you need at your fingertips.
All in all, NGO Connect takes the most important parts of Salesforce for nonprofits and puts them in one, easily accessible place. Whether Salesforce’s latest offering is necessary for your organization is completely subjective, but 501Partners is prepared to help your nonprofit implement and integrate your information into NGO Connect if you decide that the need is there. Chances are, the (free) Nonprofit Starter Pack is sufficient. However, if there is a demand for a more sophisticated toolbox within your NPO, NGO Connect is worth considering. If you’re unsure, we can help – as can Salesforce, who has prepared a page that will aid you in your decision-making process.
