CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is an incredibly important tool for nonprofit organizations. And when it comes to CRM software, Salesforce is an excellent option. It is without a doubt one of the most widely utilized business software platforms. However, many who are using Salesforce don’t fully know how to utilize it. They’re missing out on capabilities and therefore not functioning as well as they could be.

If you’re wanting to implement Salesforce to its highest capacity, you should consider hiring a Salesforce consultant. Keep reading to discover what a consultant can do for you.

When you consider all the donors, staff members, volunteers, potential donors, event attendees, and other people to maintain relationships with, it can get downright overwhelming. Early on, it was probably manageable to use an Excel spreadsheet or even an old-fashioned Rolodex to manage your donor data and contact lists. But now, you need something that does more than just keep your data organized.

Whether you're a small organization with just a few dozen contacts or you've got thousands of donors, it's essential to be able to keep updated contact information, monitor your interactions, track donations, and grow your relationship with individuals and groups. That's where a CRM system comes in!

Imagine a world in which all your apps and services worked seamlessly with all the data from your organization. A world in which you could quickly move from one app to another, and still see the same data, sitting gently in the proverbial cloud without time-sucking and soul-crushing imports and exports.

That’s just one of the many data dreams many have had in our sector for decades, and one that could be moving closer (though not completely) into reality.

Microsoft, in collaboration with non-profit organizations and other companies, have been leading an effort to develop the Nonprofit Common Data Model (CDM), with a goal of providing non-profit organizations, technology vendors, and technology consultants one common language to represent key data points and data entities within every non-profit organization.

Considering the huge array of nonprofit organizations, Is this something that could even be built? Even if this is technically feasible, how is it being built, and where can you better understand the benefits this could have for your organization?

We’re going to dive into some of the most common questions we’ve heard about Microsoft’s efforts around the Nonprofit CDM, share our own insights (though, we’re not Microsoft, so this is just our best interpretations), and provide some links to more details.

Nonprofit organizations are a hard-working bunch. Whether it's maintaining a strong network of contacts with donors and members, or writing up requests for the sake of winning grants from government and philanthropic organizations, there's so much to do. It takes a lot of effort to keep things rolling, but if you work for a nonprofit, you probably persevere because you believe in your group's mission and goals. Being more organized may greatly help you perform better at and handle outreach in a way that comforts your organization's supporters. Sometimes it helps to take a few pages from big companies in how they handle their customers, in other words: through customer relationship management software.

Salesforce is well-known for its cloud database model and architecture, making it one of the most popular platforms for building the next generation of apps for non-profit organizations. With the forth-coming Spring 13 release, developers will receive a late holiday present:  the new Salesforce Tooling API.

One of the challenges that developers have had during the past few years is easily sharing their code and best practices with other organizations to help create an open source ecosystem around Salesforce. This is often due to barriers to entry that make it a bit difficult to easily export/import code into your Salesforce instance, especially for those of us supporting the Nonprofit Starter Pack.

In short, it's not easy to collaborate within the Salesforce developer community as it is in other software communities.

With the new Salesforce Tooling API, however, developers in the community can start to build tools for other developers that might make it a lot easier to share code and ideas.  The Tooling API allows for access to key building blocks of Force.com development, including Apex classes, triggers, and VisualForce pages.  This means that our developer community could effectively create tools that makes it easier to share their code, thereby increasing the flow of best practices within our community.

It's enough to make this open source supporter giddy with ideas for the future.