Salesforce Strengths, Costs, and Limitations

Along with Eric Leland of Leland Design and Matthew Scholtz, an independent consultant who is also on staff at ONE/Northwest, Laura participated in a discussion of the current database options sponsored by the Fund for the City of New York. We created a transcript of the conversation, and the participants were kind enough to let us publish some excerpts – this is the third of four excerpts.

Matthew: When it comes to Salesforce, the data model is very customizable, but right now there are some limits to what you can do to customize the interface without getting into custom coding, what you can do with the report engine that they have, and what data you can get out and in what format for things like sending communications. If you'd like to target a mass communication to a pretty complex set of people, those who've done this and that but not this other thing, it can get to a point where it's tricky or impossible to do.

Fund for the City of New York: Have you run into any sort of problem with quantity of records in the online tools?

Matthew: Oh, no. Salesforce is extremely scalable. There's no problem there.

Laura: Salesforce is used in the corporate world by clients with hundreds of thousands if not millions of records. Though its use in the corporate world is a limitation as well - by default, the language used in the interface is distractingly 'salesy,' so you need to plan to customize it.

Fund for the City of New York: What’s a typical cost for Salesforce?

Laura: It's free to license for up to 10 licenses, so for most small non-profits that means it's free for the software. And beyond 10 licenses, the license cost is significantly discounted. But that doesn’t include the consulting fees to get it up in running.

Matthew: Yeah. You know, in general, that's an impossible question to answer in a general sense. There's no one price for anything, right? It really depends on what each client needs and each client needs something different. So the consulting fees are going to depend.

Eric: I haven’t been on as many Salesforce projects as Matthew, but the ones I've worked on have not typically been with really small nonprofits – in my case, they’ve had a minimum of six staff, up to about 25 or 30 staff members. With these organizations, the Salesforce projects tended to be anywhere from $6,000 to $15,000 by the time they're done doing customizations. Most of that is in configuring various add-on functionality that they knew they wanted, but they didn't necessarily have a great estimate for how much it would cost up front. Some of that cost is also in integrating outside providers - an online event registration system or something like that.

So, Salesforce is often a bit more involved than folks expect, and like Matthew said, it's hard to actually estimate that without a fairly significant planning process, and tech process.

Matthew: But one of the nice things about Salesforce is that once you get it set up, many updates can be done in-house. If what you need to do is possible, it’s often not that difficult.