Salesforce is a robust cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) and lead-tracking platform for business, used in almost every industry worldwide. As one of the world’s largest and most popular CRM platforms, it is the tool of choice for any organization marketing to or capturing leads from highly segmented audiences.
Because of its cloud-based architecture, Salesforce connects teams to a common source of data, simplifying operations and enabling powerful automation features that reduce manual input, streamline workflows, foster collaboration, and accelerate results.
Nonprofit organizations benefit immensely from Salesforce implementation as it gives them complete control and visibility of every aspect of their initiative. From fundraising to marketing, grants, managing donations, donor relationships and history, communication, volunteers, events, and more, Salesforce connects every stakeholder to the common cause simply and intuitively.
However, though the benefits are clear, the cost of a Salesforce implementation and ongoing maintenance can be a barrier for nonprofits. When economy and efficiency are essential, outsourcing can be a viable solution.
Why Outsource Salesforce?
Managing a Salesforce implementation in-house can be costly and time-consuming for nonprofits, diverting scarce resources from core functions like program management and fundraising.
Choosing to outsource Salesforce yields superior ROI in several key areas. Here are a few points to consider.
Cost Reduction
Outsourcing Salesforce reduces costs by eliminating the need to hire and train dedicated staff. No matter where you are in your implementation journey, your outsourced team of experts will dedicate themselves to the task and help you achieve your goals much quicker. Accelerating the race to the finish line means you’ll be able to do more in less time with reduced risk and, consequentially, less cost.
Increased Efficiency
Outsourcing Salesforce streamlines the implementation process, ensuring workflows, integrations, and automation are configured to organizational needs. Staff can focus on what they do best while the outsourced team does the heavy lifting.
Access to Expertise
Partnering with a qualified Salesforce implementation partner provides access to advanced, specialized expertise you may not have in-house. You’ll have a team of experts at your fingertips and the flexibility to tailor solutions to the organization’s unique needs.
Flexibility and Scalability
Outsourcing Salesforce implementation ensures scalability, enabling nonprofits to quickly and easily adjust to changes in demand or programming. In doing so, nonprofits can free up resources to focus on their mission while tapping into Salesforce’s capabilities.
Benefits of Outsourcing Salesforce for Nonprofit Organizations
For nonprofit organizations to thrive, they must have a way to manage their donor base effectively, connect with donors, manage incredible volumes of data, and leverage every opportunity to encourage donor engagement.
Accomplishing these goals can be challenging without a modern CRM. Salesforce is the top choice for nonprofits as it offers dedicated configurations tailored to the needs of the nonprofit sector.
However, as ideal as it sounds, managing a Salesforce implementation in-house can be time-consuming and complicated. The platform is deep and offers incredible capabilities, but as with any advanced tool, it’s vital to ensure you’re using it to your best advantage. Mistakes can be costly and may set you back significantly in time, progress, and resources.
Outsourcing is a simple solution with many benefits.
Customization and Personalization
Salesforce is nuanced and many-layered. When outsourcing to an expert team, you can design automation around existing workflows or transform them to reflect changing needs and goals. Your outsourced team will walk you through all processes to ensure they meet your expectations, then customize and adjust as needed.
Better Data Management
Every business uses a stack of third-party software to help them accomplish daily tasks. When third-party data is not integrated, you’re not seeing the big picture, and opportunities are missed. Salesforce can connect to thousands of third-party apps and incorporate that data into a customizable dashboard so you can visualize what you need to see. Whether you’re presenting to the board, getting buy-in from donors, or writing grant applications, all the data you need is immediately available.
Increased Donor Engagement
Salesforce enables unified, omnichannel communications, connecting your online properties, social pages, website, and content to fundraising efforts, marketing, events, content, and other aspects of your work. Your outsourced team will design and customize your Salesforce implementation to enable seamless communication and engage your donors in the common cause.
Enhanced Reporting and Analytics
Successful nonprofit operations require accurate tracking and advanced reporting to maintain forward movement. Stakeholders need to visualize campaign progress so they can course-correct when needed. With the ability to tweak methodologies on the fly, nonprofits can build value and ensure their strategies are always on track. Real-time reporting provides actionable insights, ensuring no opportunities are missed.
Best Practices for Outsourcing Salesforce
Deciding to outsource Salesforce is the journey’s first step, but it’s critical. Much like entering into a strategic partnership, selecting the right team, establishing clear communication, defining goals and expectations, and monitoring and measuring success is vital.
Here are some best practices to follow when outsourcing Salesforce.
Selecting the Right Outsourcing Partner
Salesforce implementation is more than just technical. Ultimately, the value of Salesforce is in connecting people to the processes and tech that helps them achieve more—simpler, faster, and more efficiently than they could otherwise.
Keep in mind that Salesforce will become a pivotal aspect of your business operations. It touches everything you do and will be used by all personnel, so it must be configured for how you work. With that in mind, choosing a Salesforce outsourcing partner with experience in your niche is critical. Ideally, you’ll want to choose an agency that understands the needs of a nonprofit organization and can guide you in ways others might not be capable of doing.
Choosing wisely at the outset will improve buy-in and uptake from your internal teams. When your people are heard and seen by people that understand who they are and what they are trying to accomplish, you’ll reduce time-to-value and engage Salesforce’s benefits much faster.
Research the outsourcing company’s past clients or contact other nonprofits using Salesforce to find out if they have any recommendations. Look at the agency’s past successes, testimonials, and case studies to understand how they define success.
Additionally, checking the outsourcing company’s Salesforce partner status is wise. Salesforce partnerships are a way for companies to know they are working with a certified expert that has access to the latest information and technology to ensure your implementation is successful. A valid partnership indicates that the outsourcing agency will be able to rise to any challenges that present themselves while minimizing costs.
Salesforce partners have extensive experience in the education and nonprofit sectors. They may challenge you with tough questions, but it’s only to enhance the relationship and better understand your organization and its needs.
Establishing Clear Communication Channels
Communication is the basis for all strong, healthy relationships. Your ideal partner will prioritize transparency and ensure organizational stakeholders have all the information they need to understand and feel confident that the project is progressing as it should.
Many Salesforce projects have multiple layers and can be exceedingly complex, with many milestones along the way. It is essential to understand each step and its implications on business operations, including cost. When communication is clear, consistent, and well-defined, misunderstandings are minimized, and teams won’t be distracted from the work at hand.
Your company culture is also a consideration. An engagement with a Salesforce consultant may last months, so ensuring a good fit for all concerned is critical. Choosing a partner with similar values and goals helps ease the way, and not all this information can be gleaned from a website or phone conversation.
Meet in person if you can, but if that’s impossible, try to ensure your team and the incoming Salesforce consultants have synergy. Observe how they communicate and how their methodologies and approaches mesh with the internal team’s. Soliciting your teams’ opinions in this phase helps to improve buy-in and gives internal teams ownership in the process.
Defining Goals and Expectations
The success of any endeavor hinges on all parties having a clear understanding of the project’s objectives. Whether it is a new deployment, configuration, and everything involved with that, or a project-based engagement to upgrade systems and scale operations, it’s vital to be able to visualize a successful result.
You must also be able to measure progress to ensure the project is on track. Before the work begins, outline roles and responsibilities and develop tasks and timelines to add structure. Measure frequently, know how to define success, and course-correct when necessary.
When defining goals, think both short-term and long-term. When articulating long-term objectives, you’ll want to ensure your Salesforce partner can get you there, even if the near-term project has a more limited scope.
In the short term, think about immediate migrations and integrations you need, not just to accomplish the larger goal but also to keep working and stay productive. Partner with an agile team that can align with your needs and execute your objectives efficiently. When these factors are in synch, processes and contingencies can be quickly defined and deployed with less risk.
Monitoring Progress and Measuring Success
Success is represented and assessed in myriad ways. Numbers and data can immediately quantify most progress.
For example, expanding the donor pool, increasing donor engagement, and revenue growth are all tangible metrics with data attached.
On the other hand, employee adoption should be a goal but might be challenging to measure in the early stages of implementation. Frequent check-ins or in-context surveys to gauge happiness will help you quantify progress in this area. Ultimately, these are the people who will determine the projects’ success, so it’s essential to know how they feel about it.
You might measure employee adoption based on the volume of data entry, number of logins, and general employee satisfaction. Your implementation team will support you in ensuring your people have everything they need to succeed. If some struggle with learning new processes or using the system, additional training can be offered.
When users are comfortable with the platform and its features, other benefits follow. Work is accomplished more quickly and efficiently, progress can be tracked more accurately, and leaders can start to think about expansion and growth.
Frequent meetings and check-ins with developers and team members are recommended and should be built into your project plan. Agile processes require consistent reiteration to fix problems and make improvements.
Challenges of Outsourcing Salesforce for Nonprofit Organizations
While there are many benefits to outsourcing Salesforce for nonprofit organizations, some concerns remain and should be considered. When establishing any strategic partnership, there is always a measure of risk. Understanding those risks and how they might affect you in a worst-case scenario isn’t pessimistic—it’s smart business. When you know what could happen, even if the possibility is remote, you’ll be better prepared to meet any challenges that arise.
With that being said, there are some common concerns to consider.
Security and Confidentiality Concerns
Security is built into Salesforce, but it falls upon all stakeholders to maintain the integrity of all people and systems that work on or attach to it.
For nonprofits, security and privacy are crucial to protect donor and customer data, financial data, and any confidential information that may be held within the system or by a third-party solution integrated with Salesforce. Keeping systems secure and compliant with data privacy laws is of utmost importance, as a breach would result in a loss of reputation and could cause the organization to fail.
To ensure compliance, the development team must ascertain that each integration does not compromise other systems or data attached to it. Regular backups and a robust disaster recovery plan much be established to support the organization’s security policies.
Staff and all contractors must be well-educated on internal policies to ensure consistency and minimize risk.
Risk of Losing Control
A poorly defined project is at risk of going off the rails. Lack of communication and failure to check in and track progress are all potential barriers to success. In best practice, prioritize meticulous planning and ensure your in-house and outsourced teams each understand the steps, the process, and the intended outcome.
Rushing the project increases the risk that you’ll lose control. Salesforce implementations are many-layered and often quite complex, so no steps can be skipped. Similarly, you don’t want to over-complicate the process. Being clear about your goals from the outset gives the development team a basis to work from and allows them to focus on clear goals and objectives. Adding too many customizations could make the system more challenging to maintain and might work against you in the long run.
Integration with Other Systems
Seamless third-party integrations are part of Salesforce’s DNA. Salesforce offers integrations with thousands of apps that can be used to customize and extend the value of your implementation.
However, the more “moving parts” you attach to Salesforce, the more you need to consider in terms of compatibility, updates, patches, and generally maintaining a sound, secure, and reliable system.
Choosing the right apps from Salesforce’s AppExchange will save you and your development team much time and effort. You can also build custom integrations to satisfy unique needs; however, doing so increases risk. Custom integrations require additional maintenance, adding cost to your implementation and exposing you to potential threats if there is a breach or vulnerability. Salesforce also requires extensive documentation for apps not in their AppExchange, which your developer will need to prepare.
Ideally, you’ll want to start with a clear picture of what you wish your integrations to accomplish and choose based on what will provide the most value with the least complications. To maximize simplicity and security, selecting apps from the AppExchange might be the way to go.
Conclusion
In conclusion, outsourcing Salesforce is an excellent option for nonprofits. Choosing a certified Salesforce Partner ensures an engagement based on trust and reliability. You’ll be working with dedicated experts who understand what you are trying to achieve and will enhance your vision with a tailored approach leveraging the power of Salesforce.org.
Recapping the benefits of outsourcing, nonprofits can look forward to much-reduced costs, increased efficiency, powerful process automation, and the flexibility to grow beyond what you dream possible.
The result will be a highly efficient, modern CRM that not only helps you connect with your donors and stakeholders in more meaningful ways but also extends your capacity to market to a broader audience, streamline and customize your messaging based on highly detailed audience segments, submit more grants, raise more funds, and much more.
Outsourcing Salesforce is a smart decision for nonprofits, who may lack the time or in-house expertise to ensure a successful implementation. Additionally, outsourcing costs represent massive savings vs. working directly with Salesforce or other agencies. Fees are always a factor when considering solutions for nonprofits, and outsourcing provides a way to gain the full power of Salesforce at a greatly reduced cost.
Lastly, you’ll gain access to a team of dedicated Salesforce experts who will work tirelessly to ensure a successful result from every possible standpoint.
The future is a technologically-rich landscape. Organizations must plan well and approach technology adoption and deployment with the goal of making the world a better place. In that regard, and most others, Salesforce is the power you need to fuel your trajectory.
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