Nonprofit Reporting and Program Management: Get off Paper and Deliver Impact Faster

Every nonprofit is unique — your innovative model, your highly specialized programs, the particular way your executive director and board like things done. All this uniqueness makes you a unicorn. That’s right, I said it. You’re a unicorn. Your uniqueness in the way you deliver impact makes you a majestic trailblazer that is working incredible magic to make our world and communities a better place.

With Salesforce.org, if you’re a unicorn, you’ll find technology solutions designed with the flexibility unicorns need. It’s built into our product DNA.

But how can a technology platform possibly capture your unicorn uniqueness? Let’s say you are a nonprofit that builds playgrounds so that children across the United States have access to safe places to play. The way you deliver your programs is totally different from a human services organization that has hundreds of case managers going out into the field to connect families with critical services.

But isn’t that the beauty of the nonprofit sector? Organizations doing incredible work in incredible ways.

And the Salesforce platform was designed to provide tools for the most common use cases with built in customization and extension points to meet your specific needs. It is a completely customizable technology platform where you can literally manage anything. And I mean anything. Whether that is the number of feral cats in colonies (did you know feral cats live in colonies?!), the inventory of beds in a shelter, clients in need of a case manager, or calls into a hotline. If you need to track it, Salesforce can manage it.

But how you ask? Well, it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4.

1. Goodbye paper: Imagine the program information you’ve got stored in spreadsheets made accessible, findable, shareable and reportable. The ability to track and manage anything in Salesforce is brought to you by something we call custom objects. Think of them as containers for your program information, fully customizable to fit your mission.

2. Make it your own: So whether it’s playgrounds, beds, surveys or those colonies of feral cats, you can name these objects whatever best describes your world, and structure records to hold the program data you need with fields, tabs, color schemes and more. Not a coder? Not a problem. All this can be done with mouse clicks, not code.

3. Automate your operations: Salesforce has incredible tools to help you automate the processes that make your programs go. Because our automation tools are designed to be flexible, you can maintain and even enhance that individual touch that makes your services so meaningful to your clients and communities. Let’s say a client fills out a form on your website. This can automatically trigger a task to a staff member in the organization to follow-up and set a first appointment with that client. And that data can be automatically captured in your program information fields so that your program staff can see the status in real-time.

4. Get easy access to reporting: Once you capture this data in Salesforce, you can report on it. Reports and Dashboards come out of the box, with any Salesforce product, with little to no customization required. That means no more running calculations in Excel, cross-checking multiple spreadsheets and seeing the overlap, taking out your paper intake form and calculator, spending days (weeks?) pulling together reports for that board meeting.

Those days could be O-V-E-R.

Did a magical rainbow just appear over your head as you read that? Oh just me? Ok, cool.

No one works for a mission-driven organization to do data entry.
Imagine the impact you could make if you got rid of spreadsheets, paper forms, calculators, and manual processes. Imagine you and your staff spending that time in the field or with clients instead of doing manual data entry.

Say it with me: “Save staff time and redirect it to delivering more impact.”

So go out there, choose your own adventure – you’ve got the Salesforce toolbox to help you make your way.