Comparing Apples to Oranges

Platform vs Product

Something to keep in mind if you’re considering CRM solutions from Salesforce or Microsoft is that you’re not looking at an apples-to-apples comparison with your current system. Raiser’s Edge is a fundraising-specific product, while Salesforce and Microsoft offer platforms on which fundraising (and many other) solutions are built. Blackbaud is bridging the gap with its BB CRM solution, which is marketed to enterprise-level orgs with large fundraising volume. It includes membership and volunteer management, financial accounting, and analytics.

A product is a single application that solves a specific need, like fundraising. It is already built out by a provider based on typical functional requirements and is usually easy to deploy. But keep in mind that a product will not be able to support a multitude of operations, and it will lack the flexibility you could gain with a platform. It also doesn’t necessarily integrate with other tools, meaning that the bidirectional information sharing required from modern fundraising best practices like responsive suggested gift amounts may not be easy, or possible.

On the other hand, when executed well, an ecosystem of tools connected to or built on a platform can support even the most complex nonprofit operations. This requires a change in thinking about the nature of your fundraising software, but it can pay off in the long run—especially if you want to do more with your fundraising program than Raiser’s Edge can support. Even though moving to Salesforce or Microsoft will take time and effort, in the end, it’s possible to not only reach parity with traditional fundraising functionality in Raiser’s Edge, but also be able to do much more.

Know Your Functionality Needs

There are several core areas of fundraising-related functionality that you would be replacing if you were to move away from Raiser’s Edge:

  • Biographical and demographical data management
  • Gift processing
  • Prospect management
  • Donor portal
  • Event management
  • Marketing automation

Raiser’s Edge provides this functionality in one solution but you’re locked into using each of the tools provided. For example, if you find the email or marketing automation tool doesn’t meet your needs, you don’t have much choice except to continue using it.

With platforms, you can choose from a host of products and select the one in each area that best meets your needs.

Platform Benefits and Tradeoffs

Salesforce, Microsoft, and BB CRM are all platforms that allow you to customize your system to your unique organizational and fundraising needs.

At the same time, the idea of moving to a platform versus an individual product might seem intimidating. It requires a shift in thought for your development team and your organization. And it will require an investment in time and dollars for the implementation and migration.

Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRMs have a lot to offer organizations, including:

FLEXIBILITY

They offer app marketplaces and integration options that allow you to customize and extend the solutions with best-of-breed products to meet your specific needs.

INTEGRATED DATA

A solution built on Salesforce or Microsoft is centered around CRM, which can help you grow donor relationships more effectively. It gives you a holistic view of constituents and donors, allowing you to collect more data and use data from other departments in your organization so you have more insights into donor behaviors and preferences, and helps you send targeted messages at the right time to the right constituents and donors.

EFFICIENCY

Tools available in the platforms give you the ability to automate processes, such as sending a targeted email series, to help you do more with less manual work.

Evaluating Platforms

If you’re thinking about moving to a platform, here are the top eight things to keep in mind.

  1. Your requirements. Start by listing your organization’s must-haves, such as ease of use, features and functionality, and integration needs. Then, refer to that list as you review the following considerations.
  2. Solutions available. Consider what other solutions are available within the platform ecosystem, such as productivity and marketing automation tools, portals or community engagement tools.
  3. Data model. Microsoft and Salesforce each use different nonprofit data models that specify how information, such as account and contact records, are treated within the system; and both differ from Raiser’s Edge. Be sure to understand these models, as they determine how your data will be mapped from your current system to the new system and might require changes to your processes to function optimally.
  4. App marketplace and integration options. Understand the third-party applications that integrate with each system. For example, Salesforce has a large and mature AppExchange marketplace, which might be important if you anticipate needing to expand and enhance your solution extensively. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s AppSource is smaller and less mature, but might have the solutions you need. Microsoft also offers integration options using Power Automate, with hundreds of pre-built connectors. Both solutions also support API integrations.
  5. User experience. Depending on your staff’s technology experience, you might find that one system is more intuitive for your organization than another. Be sure to review the look and feel of each system, as well as how they organize navigation, to better understand which user experience will work best for your team.
  6. Adoption and enablement. Consider how long it will take your organization to learn and begin using each system. This will depend not only on specific technology learning, but also on the degree to which you will need to update or change business processes to use the new system and how your organization handles change.
  7. Portal functionality. Both Microsoft and Salesforce offer portal, or community, solutions, allowing a nonprofit to expose data in several standard and custom objects to constituents. Microsoft offers Power Portals, which also allow you to display data to constituents. Both solutions come with templates for the most common types of portals, plus tools to manage the web content and the data you want to expose, and two user types.
  8. System maintenance and administration. Make sure you understand what it will take to maintain each system and handle user profiles, roles, permissions, data access, and overall security. Depending on the size and experience of the staff that will be maintaining and administering your system, you might find that one system is a better fit for your organization. For example, if you are already using Microsoft tools, your IT team might have less of a learning curve to incorporate Dynamics 365 into the mix. Alternately, if your team has already been exposed to the Salesforce security model, Nonprofit Cloud or a Salesforce managed package might be a better fit.

The Bottom Line

If your goals are mostly to improve the user experience because you find Raiser's Edge to be outdated, then you might be a good candidate for other product offerings, including those from Blackbaud. But if you have new strategies you want to try and are looking to improve collaboration across your organization, or you have useful data you want to leverage from other departments (such as programs), then you are a good candidate to move to a flexible platform like Salesforce or Microsoft. Forward-thinking organizations who want to unlock new potential for fundraising typically find that moving to a platform is worth the investment.