What Is The Cost To Implement Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud?

The Salesforce for Nonprofits cloud solution is a powerful suite of tools created specifically for nonprofit organizations. It includes several out-of-the-box features, including donor and donation management tools, pre-built fundraising reports, and more.

The Nonprofit Success Pack is an add-on to Nonprofit Cloud, which is free when you purchase a discounted license through their Power of Us program. Once you work through the application process and get your discounted Salesforce licenses, you will likely then need to work with a Salesforce consulting firm to help implement and customize Nonprofit Cloud to work for your organization. Even with free licenses to Nonprofit cloud, there are still likely to be some upfront implementation and deployment costs for your nonprofit or Non-Government Organization (NGO), so keep reading to find out if it’s worth investing in Salesforce for your organization.

What You Get with Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

To get set up with Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, you’ll need to license Salesforce through their Power of Us program first. The Nonprofit Cloud you license through the program is the standard enterprise version of the Salesforce platform which includes the same CRM (customer relationship management) suite that large corporations license every day that will help your team track your business individual contacts, leads, opportunities, outreach campaigns, cases, activities, and much more.

For Nonprofits, Salesforce also offers a free add-on to the platform called Nonprofit Success Pack and often abbreviated as “NPSP”. The add-on brings in additional functionality specific to nonprofits, including built-in tools to manage households, donors, donations, volunteers, and supporters all in one place. It’ll help you streamline your fundraising processes, track donor engagement, track donations and allocate to accounting categories, and support your outreach programs. NPSP is tightly integrated with the core Salesforce platform so all data tracked in Nonprofit Cloud is available to the Salesforce reports and dashboard builders.

The typical cost range to implement Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is $7,000 to $30,000, depending on the size of your organization and the level of customization you’ll need. For smaller, basic NGOs who’ll use the standard set-up, it’ll be on the lower end. Larger or more complex NGOs with higher customization, data importing, and development needs may land higher in the range.

Considerations for Your Version of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

Let’s take a closer look at the factors that will impact the costs to implement Nonprofit Cloud for your NGO.

What You’re Looking to Track With It

Before you start, it’s important to ask yourself what you’re looking to track in Salesforce. If you’re just going to track contact information and use the basic contact workflows in Salesforce CRM, your costs will be on the lower end of the cost range. However, when you have extensive spreadsheets of business and operational data you’d like to track, then it may be important to utilize Salesforce’s ability to model any type of business data but that does require additional customization and implementation work.

How Much Customization You’ll Need

The other factor that will increase your implementation costs is whether you want customized reporting and dashboards, use more complex automation workflows, and import data from external software systems like accounting or HR. This level of customization will push your costs into the high range right from the start, tens of thousands of dollars, so your organization will need to be prepared for that cost.

Customization Scenarios

To give you a better idea of your costs, here are a couple of scenarios for you.

• Donor information tracking (Low): If you’re using the default fields in Salesforce to track your donors and their information, your costs are on the lower end of the range.
• Combinations of funding models (Medium): While Nonprofit Success Pack includes basic funding model functionality, if your NGO uses a combination of funding models, including public funding, member funding, and beneficiary benefactors, your costs will be in the mid-to-high end of the range due to the complexity of the customization.
• Employee data tracking (Medium): You can use Salesforce to track your internal employee data as well. Since Salesforce is usually set up to only track customers, it requires customization to track internal resources as well, which can push up your costs into the mid-to-high end of the range. But, since you’re using one tool to track everything for your NGO, you’ll save in costs in the long run because you don’t have to purchase another software application to track internal resources.
• Complex automated workflows (High): Including customized automations in Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is something we recommend to larger NGOs because it’ll increase their overall efficiency and reduce costs. Salesforce found their nonprofit customers reduced their administrative costs 32 percent and reduced their costs to raise individual dollars by 17 percent.

Managing basic information about companies, people, household and donors can be handled by a relatively standard implementation, which means you’d be at the low range of implementation costs (in the $7,000-$10,000 range).  The addition of donation tracking, 3^rd party modules, integrations and significant history data importing are likely to require additional funds beyond the low range.  Every implementation is unique so you should have an individual evaluation is done before making final decisions regarding budgets.

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is an affordable way for any nonprofit to put the power of Salesforce to work for them. It includes numerous out-of-the-box features that’ll help you manage donors and their donations, keep tabs on your fundraising reports, and optimize your admin activities. Your nonprofit will save time, effort, and money with it, so you can spend more time on the cause you believe in.

Do you want to learn more about how to get started with customizing Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud? One of the first steps in the success of any software project is to find the right partner to work with. Download our eBook to find out the most important questions you should ask your software partner to determine if they will be the best fit for your organization’s needs.

Thayer Tate

Thayer is the Chief Technology Officer at SOLTECH, bringing over 20 years of experience in technology and consulting to his role. Throughout his career, Thayer has focused on successfully implementing and delivering projects of all sizes. He began his journey in the technology industry with renowned consulting firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, where he gained valuable insights into handling complex challenges faced by large enterprises and developed detailed implementation methodologies.

Thayer’s expertise expanded as he obtained his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and joined SOLTECH, an Atlanta-based technology firm specializing in custom software development, Technology Consulting and IT staffing. During his tenure at SOLTECH, Thayer honed his skills by managing the design and development of numerous projects, eventually assuming executive responsibility for leading the technical direction of SOLTECH’s software solutions.

As a thought leader and industry expert, Thayer writes articles on technology strategy and planning, software development, project implementation, and technology integration. Thayer’s aim is to empower readers with practical insights and actionable advice based on his extensive experience.