We’ve been looking into a Customer Relationship Management system for our nonprofit, that will encompass more than the just the usual fundraising type of database. One option that we’re taking a hard look at is the cloud-based SalesForce nonprofit version. One of the tasks is to learn the workflow jargon such as:

• Opportunity Stages
• Opportunity Sales Processes
• Opportunity Record Types

Salesforce provides a donation for up to 10 users for any qualifying non-profit organization. The Nonprofit Starter Pack is a pre-configured set of functions and data elements that can be overlaid on to a “standard” SalesForce company installation. The donation includes significant online support, documentation,  and forums with members from nonprofits who are using the system.

As a preliminary exercise, I’m going to attempt to import our donor data from our previous Little Green Light system. This consists of two tables; a donor contact table and a transaction table which lists all of the donations made by members in the donor table. Both of these are currently living in FileMaker which can export into a variety of file formats including Excel and comma delimited (text) files.