Comments on: Salesforce and CiviCRM

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:26:06 +0000

I head a 501c3 non-profit with a Drupal Site. We want to integrate a new CRM and internal staff operations solutions (such as online collaboration, group calendars, central file repository, project management – basically most stuff to run our internal operations).
We’ve started off looking at CiviCRM, but have heard it is very difficult to customize, so might not be great long-term solution.
My bro is longtime Salesforce employee and strongly suggests we use Salesforce as our CRM and internal ops solution. His biggest question is the Drupal-Salesforce integration. You seem the guy who knows more than anyone about this. My question is if you think it remains a big hurdle or not. I want to have as seamless a connection between my site and CRM (and other apps) as possible.

Also whether your Salesforce module for Drupal will be supported/maintained going forward. I’m not clear on the level of demand for it.

So big picture, my question is whether to go with easy, seamless integration of CiviCRM, but not get as robust and extensible of functionality. Or to go with Salesforce, and risk integration headaches forevermore. Or do you even agree Salesforce is superior?
I’d be grateful for any insight.

By: Confluence: Sales and Marketing

Confluence: Sales and Marketing — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:10:18 +0000

How do we compare with CiviCRM?…

is an opensource project vs product \\ consequently, the first differentiator is support. The second key differentiator is reporting \\ civicrm has talked about doing a reporting solution, but they currently do not have one. They,……

By: chris holt

chris holt — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 03:15:27 +0000

I have to agree. Salesforce.com is great but it is also complicated and intimidating to less than the geeks. I have assisted one non-profit to use salesforce after they found Kintera to be too difficult and they love salesforce. I’ve tried to get another non-profit to use salesforce and am having difficulty with buy in. CivivCRM, which I haven’t used, but which I have looked at seems much more intuitive.

By: Kevin Pierce

Kevin Pierce — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:47:51 +0000

Has anyone looked at Moves Management? I don’t know much about it, but someone I know with a lot of non-profit and fundraising work has mentioned it several times…

By: Zachary Krebs

Zachary Krebs — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:55:33 +0000

I worked as a GoldmineCRM consultant for 4 years but have recently switched to using CRM tools like CiviCRM, SugarCRM, Info@Hand, RedHorseCRM. CiviCRM’s main advantage over other CRM tools for non-profits is its workflow and the terminology it uses to describe things. A donor is not an account, and a donation/contribution is not a sale. The other obvious thing that CiviCRM does that other CRM tools don’t do a very good job at is integrate with the website. For example, CiviCRM running on Drupal is able to make contact information public and private on the site, and utilizes powerful extensions like CCK and Views to accomplish great things. The value of CiviCRM is how it integrates to the Web/CMS/Social Network, which “traditional CRM tools” are only starting to figure out about.

By: Ehren

Ehren — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:36:22 +0000

This is a much needed comparison. I’m more in the SalesForce universe at the moment, but came to it through SugarCRM and like the semi-open source approach. I also know there are certain things you can do when you host yourself that you can’t do with SalesForce (cue an argument about The Cloud…)

In my experience, SalesForce is probably the best tool if your organization’s model doesn’t quite fit a common paradigm. E.g. if you have members but are more akin go a professional association. Or if you get your funding through the sale of products rather than donations. Or if you’re really a lender like Kiva… SF is a general purpose organizational software engine more than it is CRM.

I’d love to see a report on how much it costs various orgs to use SalesForce – how many users, what their discounts are, what training they pay for, etc.

By: JuliaKM

JuliaKM — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:46:46 +0000

I believe that I was in the same CiviCRM bof session as you at Drupalcon. :) At the nonprofit where I work, we’re struggling with the same question. I would really like to go with CiviCRM to help foster the community but the level of customization we need may be out of our budget (we previously got burned by another CRM vendor).

It would be great if you could add your thoughts to the thread I started on the CiviCRM forum and Salesforce vs. CiviCRM:
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=7004.0

By: Michael McAndrew

Michael McAndrew — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:25:32 +0000

Hi there,

I think sessions like this are a great breeding ground for ideas that can improve complex systems like CiviCRM and salesforce. You get the kind of insights that are much harder to come by when your head tends to think within a single CRM paradigm.

Comparing how these systems faciliate a particular simple non profit task like sending a mailing, administering an event, or writing a report sounds like it would be fun and very useful.

I’m a CiviCRM implementor/developer so am particularly receptive to ideas for improving the Civi approach.