Salesforce for Nonprofits: 2019 Year In Review

2019 was perhaps the most interesting year yet in the world of Salesforce for nonprofits. Or at least in the 11 years I've been a part of it. From acquisitions, to new product directions, to ethical questions, and a focus on impact, here are my observations on the year that was.

Acquisitions

There were two major acquisitions involving Salesforce.org (SFDO) in 2019. The first was the acquisition of RoundCorner by SFDO in January. Yes, SFDO’s corporate parent Salesforce.com (SFDC) has a long history of acquisitions. But this marked the first time that Salesforce’s non-profit arm acquired another company. In so doing, SFDO gained two new products that it could sell (but would it?) into the nonprofit sector. More on that below.

The second and more significant acquisition was in April, when SFDC announced it would acquire SFDO. As I previously wrote about, this development raised a lot of questions about whether this was good news or bad news for the nonprofit sector. However, as things played out through the rest of 2019, it indeed appeared that the claims made back in April have held true: SFDO has continued to operate largely as-is, and very little has changed about how Salesforce is marketed, sold, and serviced in the nonprofit sector. With one exception, which brings us to...

Products

If you were to have filled out the online form for proposing a session at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in 2019, you would have seen the following multiple choice question: “What Salesforce Products will be covered in your session?” Want to take a guess as to how many products there were to choose from? 12? Nope. 20? Not even close. Forty-two. Granted, there are products (like Sales Cloud) and there are “products” (like Nonprofit Cloud), but still that’s a lot of products! Just for fun, see how many you can name. Go ahead, I’ll wait. 

Here are the answers. How did you do?

Increasingly, Salesforce is expanding beyond being a platform that other vendors run their products on/with into a purveyor of its own thick catalog of products. Much of this growth has been through acquisition, such as SFDC’s acquisitions in 2019 of MapAnything and Tableau and the 60 other products Salesforce has acquired over the years. 

Nowhere was this product growth more conspicuous than in Dreamforce’s Cloud Expo, rebranded this year as the Dreamforce Campground. Attendees who entered the exhibit hall at Dreamforce in previous years will recall that the first and most prominent exhibits you encountered were the giant booths of Salesforce’s biggest partners such as Accenture, Apptus, and the like, with Salesforce’s own offerings in the back of the hall. No more. In November 2019, the first and most prominent exhibits were for Salesforce’s own products and solutions, with partners occupying the wings.

The central product highlight of both the Campground and co-CEO Marc Benioff’s opening keynote was “Customer 360”. Customer 360 is not actually a product but rather a strategy that seeks to unite all of Salesforce’s product offerings into a holistic solution. To confuse matters, there are a couple of products that have Customer 360 in the name but are not in and of themselves the “Customer 360”, not unlike a few years ago when it seemed like everything new had “Lightning” in the name. So while the name is a little confusing, the strategy does underscore the fact that Salesforce now has a lot of products that customers, partners, and even Salesforce itself have to figure out how to make work together.

So 2019 saw the trend continue of SFDC having more and more products of its own to sell. This same focus on products was equally evident with SFDO this year. Which, as I alluded to above, marks the most significant shift for SFDO that I saw in 2019.

Speaking at the SFDO Keynote at Dreamforce, Nasi Jazayeri, SFDO’s Chief Technology and Product Officer announced SFDO “will provide more out of the box solutions...to lower total cost of ownership and accelerate employee productivity.” Traditionally, SFDC was the entity that created products which then SFDO would inherit and sell to nonprofits. The one exception has been the free and open source Nonprofit Success Pack, which has been maintained and enhanced by SFDO and the user community for 10 years. But that strategy is changing, with SFDO now creating and selling into the sector products of its own. It began in SFDO's higher education vertical at the end of 2017 with the Student Advisor Link product and is now expanding to the nonprofit vertical. 

There were several new nonprofit products announced in 2019, including Salesforce Payments, Giving Pages, Engagement Hub, Case Management, and Insights Platform, all of which are in development (say it with me now, “safe harbor”). No specific release dates or pricing has been shared. SFDO now has no fewer than ten of its own product managers aligned to these products and others in the portfolio.

Of these offerings, Jazayeri said “All of these products are built fully integrated out-of-the-box, and all self-service, so you don’t need to worry about high cost of implementation, you don’t need to worry about managing, integrating, and maintaining multiple point solutions, hence reducing the total cost of ownership and simplifying your infrastructure.”

This is a clear shift in strategy. SFDO is no longer content to play the role of the neutral field upon which a thousand flowers bloom. Instead, it is going head-to-head against its own nonprofit product (ISV) partners as well as its consulting (SI) partners who have built businesses around developing and/or integrating solutions in these areas. It is also potentially competing with the passionate open source community it has cultivated over many years, by looking for ways to own — and monetize — things which in the past would have been free and open source.

An extensive ecosystem of technology and services providers, as well as citizen developers, has long been a differentiator for Salesforce in the nonprofit sector. As SFDO moves toward owning more of the technology and, in some cases, the services as well, how will the ecosystem react and adjust? Will the nonprofit market see this as a net positive? Will Salesforce be able to innovate and keep pace to the same degree as its partner network has? And, as Jazayeri claims, will this truly reduce complexity and the total cost of ownership for nonprofits? This remains to be seen. 

One final note about products in 2019. As mentioned above, the acquisition of RoundCorner also provided SFDO with two other products it could sell: foundationConnect and NGO Connect (NGOC). Of the two, SFDO has continued to actively sell and enhance foundationConnect. However, NGOC is not actively being sold and there are no future releases planned for NGOC other than bug fixes. SFDO is working with individual NGOC clients to plan their path forward on Salesforce.

Ethics

At the opening keynote at Dreamforce in November, Marc Benioff was barely into his remarks when he was confronted by a protester. This individual emerged at the front of the hall, a few feet from Benioff, and began speaking towards him. Benioff stopped his remarks and allowed the protester 30 seconds to speak (un-amplified) after which he was escorted out.

This was a tense and dramatic moment to watch play out during what is normally a pleasant and predictable opening keynote.

As was later reported, the individual was protesting Salesforce’s contract with Customs and Border Protection, which the protester claimed makes Salesforce complicit in humanitarian violations against people crossing the border with Mexico into the United States.

It was over this same issue that 871 Salesforce employees signed an open letter to Benioff in the summer of 2018, calling on him to end the contract with CBP.

In his 2019 book, Trailblazer, Benioff writes about turmoil the issue created for him and Salesforce:

“‘Can we trust Salesforce?’...

“‘Are we an ethical company?’

“In my twenty years, I had never heard anybody seriously question either of those notions. Hearing this left me deeply shaken. It was one of the first times in my life that I found myself quite literally stunned into silence. It rattled me to my very core.” 

Salesforce has long prided itself on being a different kind of company when it comes to its business ethics. Practically every presentation or event led by Salesforce that I’ve ever attended included a mention of Salesforce’s 1 - 1 - 1 model of philanthropy, through which Salesforce has sought to make doing good in the world a core tenet of its business. Furthermore, Marc Benioff continues to be among the most outspoken CEOs about the role of business in improving the world. In an op-ed in the New York Times in October titled “We Need a New Capitalism," he wrote:

“To my fellow business leaders and billionaires, I say that we can no longer wash our hands of our responsibility for what people do with our products. Yes, profits are important, but so is society. And if our quest for greater profits leaves our world worse off than before, all we will have taught our children is the power of greed.”

It was this desire to do good in the world that led to Benioff to create the Salesforce Foundation, the precursor to SFDO, at the same time he founded Salesforce, with 2019 marking the 20th anniversary of both. (Fun fact: the original name of the Salesforce Foundation? Benioff’s Promise.) From the beginning, he wanted a way for his new company to serve charitable purposes even as he sought to disrupt the business software market.

This philanthropic orientation is what attracted me and so many others into the Salesforce ecosystem. I applaud Benioff for continuing to be outspoken and for being willing to hold his company up to high standards of meeting not only shareholder demands, but also those of broader stakeholders as well. 

However, because Benioff holds himself and his company up as exemplars of values-driven business practices, he opens himself and his company to higher levels of scrutiny and a higher standard of accountability, such as the protests over doing business with CBP.

The concerns about the ethics of Salesforce’s business practices were not limited to SFDC in 2019 but extended to SFDO as well. Just prior to Dreamforce, a piece by former SFDO employee Nicolas Campbell argued that SFDO’s aggressive growth targets were causing it to put “profit over purpose” in the nonprofit sector. This article sparked many conversations at Dreamforce, including an impromptu gathering in San Francisco’s Union Square of more than 50 stakeholders from nonprofits, consulting partners, product partners, and SFDO itself for constructive dialogue. Post-Dreamforce, additional concerns were expressed in a blog post by David Deal of Build Consulting. 

At the heart of many of the concerns expressed is the question of what is the right, i.e., most ethical, way for Salesforce to do business in the nonprofit sector? If Salesforce as a whole is truly committed to business as a force for good, then seeking to serve the needs and interests of the nonprofit sector is clearly one way it can do that. But what is the best way for Salesforce to develop, distribute, and support the use of its technology for nonprofits?

These are important questions, and I’m glad that they are being raised.

These questions were made more complex in 2019 by the fact that as of April SFDO now operates as a business unit inside of SFDC rather than as an independent entity. Now that it is firmly fixed within the corporation, one measure of SFDO’s success will no doubt be how it contributes to the growth of SFDC’s financial bottom line. However, given Salesforce’s larger interest in being a business that serves the greater good, to what degree will SFDO be given latitude to operate in ways that may at times mean choosing social sector benefit over shareholder returns? I believe Salesforce is positioned to chart a uniquely ethical course here, because of Benioff’s leadership. Again, to quote Benioff from Trailblazer:

“Companies, and the people who lead them, can no longer afford to separate business objectives from the social issues surrounding them. They can no longer view their mission as a set of binary choices: growing vs. giving back, making a profit vs. promoting the public good, or innovating vs. making the world a better place.”

I stand with those both inside and outside of SFDO who want to ensure Salesforce stays true to its ideals and operates with the utmost integrity towards its clients. I’m hopeful that we will start to see even greater alignment between SFDO, its partners, and the markets it serves, with a renewed commitment from SFDO and all of its partners to sell the right products and services to the right organizations at the right time and to only pursue growth that is in keeping with those principles. The nonprofit sector deserves the best technology to help it solve the massive issues that face humanity, as well as to help make the most of the massive opportunities for the flourishing of life on earth in the 21st century. And the sector deserves technology partners that operate in the best interest of their clients, respecting resource constraints and being held accountable for delivering measurable return on investments.

One final word from Benioff on this topic, from Trailblazer:

“...[Y]ou don’t need an exotic collection of values, you just need good ones. And you can’t fake them. If a culture is phony, derivative, half-hearted, or misguided, it will eventually sink you. A genuine culture built on fundamentals like trust and aimed at the goal of business for good is more than enough, but only if it genuinely outweighs the traditional business motives of driving revenue, growth, and profit.”

I'm hopeful that Marc Benioff will continue to make good on "Benioff's Promise", to help ensure that his company and ecosystem work with the nonprofit sector in the most ethical and impactful way.

Finally, speaking of impact...

Impact

2019 was a year with increased emphasis on impact in the world of Salesforce. I saw evidence of this in three areas:

Sustainable Development Goals: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) took center stage at Dreamforce this year. At the opening keynote, co-CEO Keith Block said “At Salesforce, we believe that business is the greatest platform for change. And that’s why we have signed up with the U.N. to focus on supporting 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These are very important to our future." The SDGs were adopted in 2015 by 193 member countries of the UN as specific impact areas for improving the global health and welfare of the planet by 2030. The SDGs were everywhere at Dreamforce and Salesforce has set a goal of donating $17 million and generating 1 million volunteer hours for SDG-related causes before Dreamforce 2020.

The SDGs on display at Dreamforce 2019

Salesforce has also created a Trailhead learning module about the SDGs. It is great -- and kind of amazing -- to see Salesforce drawing the attention of its full client base and ecosystem to these global initiatives and challenging all of its customers and partners to follow in Salesforce’s footsteps and adopt specific SDGs for their corporate philanthropy efforts.

Impact Reporting: In September 2019, SFDO released its second annual Social Impact Report. This report highlighted the results of SFDO’s efforts in three areas: technology, workforce development, and volunteerism. These efforts were also mapped to the SDGs, as in the chart below that shows the number of SFDO’s nonprofit customers that work in the area of each SDG. For example, SFDO counts 638 of its nonprofit customers who do work in the area of SDG #2: Zero Hunger.

Source: Salesforce.org Social Impact Report 2019

As SFDO continues to encourage its nonprofit customers to become more impact focused, it is great to see SFDO also beginning to measure the impact of its own efforts. Hopefully in the future SFDO will provide year-over-year metrics for greater transparency into how its efforts are trending. It would also be great to see SFDO tie evaluation of its own impact to the social impact generated by its customers. For example, could SFDO move beyond counting the number of customers aligned to each SDG and start to look at whether those customers were actually having greater impact on a specific SDG as a result of their use of Salesforce’s technology? For example, what specific progress are SFDO's 638 customers working on SDG #2 making in eliminating hunger? No doubt this would be a complicated endeavor, but again could provide another opportunity for Salesforce to lead the way in demonstrating how businesses can hold themselves accountable not only to outputs and outcomes, to but true social impact. 

Impact Labs: In October 2019, SFDO announced the creation of Impact Labs. The announcement stated:

“Salesforce.org Impact Labs is a collaborative program to co-design innovative technology solutions that address the toughest social issues facing us today. We combine the expertise of our community with the power of the Salesforce platform to take risks, find new solutions, and address complex social issues together. We will start by hosting 3 to 4 Impact Labs next year on different social issues that are surfaced from the community. The goal is to co-create technology solutions that can accelerate sector-wide change.”

Through Impact Labs, SFDO states it will issue open calls for challenge areas, then collaborate with a variety of stakeholders on designing technology solutions to those areas through three-day design sprints, and then finally make use of pro-bono Salesforce employees to develop the solution on Salesforce products.

Again, it is great to see SFDO taking a lead on innovating new technology for the sector. What is not clear about Impact Labs is how this initiative relates to existing sources of technology innovation such as the work already being done at Open Source Sprints, and the solutions being developed by Salesforce SI, ISV partners, and SFDO itself. It would also be good to hear how these solutions will be owned, managed, and supported and whether they will be sold or offered for free to the sector.

It would also be great to see Salesforce take the lead in inviting other large vendors in the space such as Blackbaud and Microsoft to work together on ideating and developing new solutions for the sector.

Benioff spoke of this level of vendor cooperation in his Dreamforce keynote when speaking to this slide:

Source: Dreamforce 2019 Opening Keynote

"How many of you have more technology than Salesforce in your company? Raise your hands...Well, we have partnered with all the other major companies and we are working to build a set of relationships so you can do this. We realize that you do have more than Salesforce and we commit to you that we will work with everybody. We will not create boundaries between us. We will operate as one community."

If Salesforce can commit to this level of cooperation with competitors for the good of its business clients, could it not also do so for the sake of its social sector clients? After all, most nonprofits, too, have more than just Salesforce in their organizations. I'm imagining a slide like the one above at Dreamforce in 2020 when SFDO announces that it is partnering with Blackbaud, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and others, to enable nonprofits to use everyone's technology more effectively. Now that would really put the "dream" into Dreamforce.

And there you have it. That’s my take on the most significant themes in the world of Salesforce for nonprofits in 2019: acquisitions, products, ethics, and impact.

Thanks to everyone at SFDO and in the SFDO ecosystem who continue to make Salesforce such a vital and relevant technology for the nonprofit sector, and to the nonprofits who are leading the way in harnessing this technology to drive their missions forward. Here is to our greater collective impact in 2020.

To learn more about my consulting services for nonprofits and Salesforce partners, visit www.watthamlettconsulting.com