Free For Non-Profits

I had no more than published the post on Zoho CRM and the non-profit world that I received an email about Salesforce.com and their foundation. Turns out that the founder of the company is passionate about giving back to the world. Salesforce.com is the premier CRM software as a service company. Many, if not most, of the Fortune 500 companies use Salesforce.com to track their sales pipeline, customers, contacts, etc. The bottom line is this is an amazing piece of software. And expensive. The average cost is about $65 per user, per month.

However, Salesforce.com seems dedicated to the non profit world and donates 10 licenses for their Enterprise Level Solution to qualified non-profits. This is a $11, 000 dollar value. They automatically renew the licenses every year, provided the accounts are active and in use.

It gets even better. They have created a specialized template for non-profits that includes many useful features. What makes Salesforce.com so useful is their software is completely customizable.

Once again, as soon as I have an opportunity to work with Salesforce.com, I will pass along any reviews.

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that I am going to finish testing Zoho in a few days(weeks) and hope to have a few reviews up soon.  Zoho is a web-based software suite that has many more features than Google Apps for Your Domain.  Google offers email, calendars, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, online notebook and user-customizable sites.  Zoho offers all these things and adds a Wiki, a project management program, a customer relationship manager, invoicing, web conferencing, an online database and a personnel recruitment program.  With the exception of the web conferencing, all of these products feature some sort of free version.

I am currently using Zoho CRM and it allows three users with storage up to 100MB for free.  You can add extra storage space to the free users or you can upgrade to the monthly paid version.  I am currently testing CRM as a contact manager for some fundraising that I do.  While it is not designed for this exact job, I think it can be adapted for this function.  Many of the fields are business related, but if you are running a small non-profit or business, it may be worth dealing with the strange fields in exchange for getting the service for free.  A word of caution: While you are able to export individual pieces of information for free, Zoho charges $10 per instance if you want to export all your data.  For example, if you want to export your contacts, you can do this for free.  But if you want to export all the information you have stored, you will have to pay Zoho.