Salesforce calls it the Sales Cloud – this is the granddaddy of all Salesforce functions. You can tell because it’s right in the name: SALESforce. This is always a quirky moment when we’re talking to nonprofits who’ve never heard of the Nonprofit Starter Pack or the Foundation – or anything about the great database that works for over 16,000 of us across the globe.
We could call it the “Donation Cloud,” or maybe the even simpler “Income Cloud.” Whatever name we put on it, though, most of us in the nonprofit community realize that enhancements on the “sales” side of Salesforce often mean goodies for us as well. The Salesforce Foundation offers not only ten free Salesforce licenses to nonprofits, it gives us the powerhouse Enterprise Edition.
So what’s in it for the nonprofit community in the Income Cloud this winter? Four good things:
- Touch. Many of the development directors in our nonprofit community are on the go, visiting board members, potential major donors, corporations that match employee donations or sponsor events. With Touch, we can see our donations and grants, along with all their related information as we’re waiting for a meeting, over a board member lunch, right on the iPad. We can log tasks for ourselves before we ever get back to the office.
- Multiple contacts added to our meetings. Last summer, we got the ability to add multiple contacts to tasks, but now we can add them to meetings. This means that when we head into a group meeting to discuss a fundraising campaign, we can log ALL the folks at the meeting on one calendar item. Never again: “Who WAS at that meeting anyway?”
- Forecasting. Well, forecasting has been around for a while, but about a year ago, Salesforce added Forecasts as a separate tab so that Sales Managers could get a clearer view of the sales deals coming up. As fundraising professionals, this is excellent news. With Winter ’13, we can now run reports, create graphs and put those graphs up on our Fundraising Progress dashboards. The executive directors are going to like this one.
- Joined reports came out during the past year as well, allowing us to see two sets in interrelated data side by side. How about major donor gifts along with the calls, emails and meetings that have taken place while we were working on that? Now we can create graphs and put those on our Fundraising Progress dashboards. Dashboards just got even more enlightening!
Winter ’13 has more surprises for us in the nonprofit community, but these are the ones aimed specifically at the development directors who help keep our nonprofits’ doors open and our missions on track to change the world!
