Salsa CRM

Salsa CRM has been essential in making sure that our organization has run smoothly since inception. The product allows us to grow into new features as we grow as an org.

Reporting and corresponding can be tedious at times but improvements to both have been made over time.

There are unlimited capabilities with the software. Salsa CRM offers everything you could possibly desire in a CRM designed for a nonprofit. In fact, there's so much functionality, that after six months of having used the software, I still feel like I'm only 25% of the way there with fully knowing it inside and out. Constituent profiles are clean and easy-to-navigate, and they help unearth stats that can ultimately help you recapture lapsed donors and sustain their commitment to the org. Additionally, customer support is always there to help you navigate the software should you ever get lost.

The training is not exactly exciting or something an audio-visual-hands-on combo type of learner with ADD is going to find very useful. I think it's unfortunate that the product vocabulary has to be all "startup-y." I'm still trying to understand the reporting systems. I've also been faced with buggy moments that typically require restarting the software which causes delays in getting work done.

This software is customizable and has endless features to help manage all levels of operations. We only use a fraction of its power for what we do, but I am thankful that as CCinc grows, our ability to use the same software will be there since there are more functions we can explore.

Report Queries are very difficult to understand. This is not an intuitive process and you need to be practiced in queries before trying to use this part of the software.

It is way more user friendly that what we were using before = ETapestry but then, it's ETap so go figure.

We are in process of conversion and here are my initial thoughts:

1) pay the extra money and have someone help you unless, you don't have that many constituents.

2) I was extremely disappointed. When migrating business or organizational contacts over, you will lose multiple contact names, period. They only let you migrate ONE name over which is contained in ONE text field box. This means if you ever want to do a mailing, there will be NO way to address a letter as Dear Ms FIRST NAME. This is so dumb.

3) You don't get to decide which accounts you want to split or keep intact. Once you send over your conversion template, any and all names that contain an "&" or "AND" get automatically split into two accounts. This includes organization contacts. So if you have a business IE: Brown & Smith Attorney at Law, you are SOL.

4) I could not figure out why they had Organziation TYPE and Individual TYPE on each account. In my experience, and account is either an ORG or an IND period but, here is the rub. YOU CANNOT add contact names to an existing ORG record. You have to create a seperate record and then link each IND to that ORG. So for multiple organizational contacts, they will be set up as INDIVIDUALS. The only way to sort out this mess, is to use the TYPE or ORG or IND. This is where you will list your indivuduals as say, BUSINESS CONTACT, CHURCH CONTACT, etc. This is a huge cluster &^#. Now I get why they don't let you sample the database before buying.