Salesforce for nonprofits: Everything that you need to know
By Colin Newcomer
Updated August, 29, 2025
Using Salesforce for nonprofits can be a great way to help your organization more effectively connect with current or potential donors, volunteers, and anyone else involved in making your organization a success.
Better yet, Salesforce offers special nonprofit pricing to reduce the cost to your organization and let you use more of your money toward achieving your charitable goals.
In this post, we’re going to cover everything that you need to know about using Salesforce as a nonprofit organization, including the following:
- Why to consider Salesforce for nonprofits
- Salesforce’s solutions for nonprofits and the key features in Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
- Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud pricing details
- How to integrate Salesforce into your organization’s WordPress website with Gravity Forms
Let’s get into it…
Why use Salesforce for nonprofits?
While we’ll get into the more nitty-gritty details about Salesforce’s nonprofit solutions in the next section, let’s quickly run through some of the main reasons why you might want to consider Salesforce in the first place.
More easily manage donors, volunteers, etc.
Salesforce gives you one centralized area to manage all of your data for donors, volunteers, and other people who are important to your nonprofit organization’s success.
In addition to storing basic contact information, you can also store other important details according to your organization’s unique needs.
You’ll also be able to keep track of all your communication and touchpoints with each entity in your organization’s orbit.
Boost donations and fundraise more effectively
Salesforce’s many marketing, sales, and automation tools can help your organization fundraise more effectively and increase the amount of money you generate from donations.
You can find the most effective ways to raise money, how to get the most from your donor relationships, which donor segments work the best for certain campaigns, and lots more.
You can also run your fundraising campaigns more effectively, with tools to track and plan multi-channel campaigns.
Engage more effectively with volunteers, beneficiaries, and others
In addition to helping you fundraise more effectively, Salesforce can also help you more effectively engage with your volunteers and beneficiaries, as well as anyone else that your organization interacts with.
You can easily configure Salesforce to differentiate between donors and other people so that you can optimize your interactions based on each type of relationship.
Track KPIs and other important metrics
Finally, Salesforce can just generally make it really easy to track and measure your organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important metrics.
In addition to tracking donations and fundraising, you can just generally get a good look at how your organization is performing across different channels.
The different Salesforce solutions for nonprofits
Salesforce offers multiple nonprofit solutions, which can cause some confusion.
The most recent solution (and the solution that Salesforce recommends to new customers) is Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (NPC), which Salesforce released in 2023.
However, Salesforce still maintains an older solution called Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP).
While Salesforce recommends that new customers use Nonprofit Cloud, Salesforce has committed to continuing to support Nonprofit Success Pack and it is still possible to sign up for Nonprofit Success Pack as a new customer.
With that being said, because Salesforce wants new customers to use the new Nonprofit Cloud solution, we’re going to focus on Nonprofit Cloud in this post.
Key features of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
There are a lot of individual features that go into Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, so it’s hard to give a full accounting here.
However, here’s a quick summary of some of the most important features that you’ll find in Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud:
- Fundraising management. Track one-time or recurring donations and manage entire fundraising campaigns. The fundraising management tools get very detailed, with support for commitments, soft credits, tributes, and more.
- Volunteer management. Keep track of all your volunteers, including interactions with them and how they’re engaging with your organization. You can track events, roles, shifts, locations, attendance, applications, and more.
- Program management. Manage the programs that your organization runs, including program enrollment and attendance tracking, participant experience, and more. You can also see which volunteers are working in which programs.
- Constituent relationship management. Access a unified view to see all of your donors, volunteers, employees, partners, and beneficiaries.
- Grantmaking tools. If your organization relies on grants, Salesforce offers dedicated features to help you do that more effectively (though you might need to pay extra for the grant functionality).
You can also extend Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud with other products that Salesforce offers, including Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, and Slack integrations.
Again, this is a brief summary of what is a very detailed suite of features. For more information, check out the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud page.
Salesforce nonprofit pricing explained (including free licenses)
As we mentioned in the introduction, Salesforce offers special nonprofit pricing rates that are significantly lower cost than the commercial pricing, as well as free licenses to eligible nonprofits through its Power of Us Program.
If your organization is eligible for the Power of Us Program (more on those requirements below), you will get your first 10 licenses for free.
Beyond the 10 free licenses for eligible programs, the prices are as follows and are correct at the time of this writing:
- Nonprofit Cloud – Enterprise – $60 per user per month.
- Nonprofit Cloud – Unlimited – $100 per user per month.
- Nonprofit Cloud Agentforce 1 for Sales – $325 per user per month.
- Nonprofit Cloud Agentforce 1 for Service – $325 per user per month.
All prices above are billed annually.
Your organization can also access a 30-day free trial of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud with no credit card required. You can start your free trial by using this landing page.
If your organization is seeking grants, there are also separate Nonprofit Cloud for Grantmaking plans that start at $175 per user per month.
Basic requirements for Salesforce Power of Us Program
To be eligible for the Salesforce Power of Us Program, your organization must meet two broad requirements:
- Your organization must be “recognized as a charitable, nonprofit, educational, or social change organization in the country where you are located.”
- Your organization must be able to provide legal documentation showing that you meet that requirement.
However, there are also some smaller details that are relevant, so we encourage you to read the full Power of Us Eligibility Guidelines (PDF).
For example, within the USA, Salesforce only accepts 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. If your organization is designated as a nonprofit under different IRS subsections, it might not be eligible for the Power of Us Program.
The PDF above goes into detail regarding the specific legal documentation that you’ll need to provide based on your organization’s location. It also gives some examples of the general types of organizations that are and are not allowed.
For example, Salesforce does exclude some nonprofits from the program, such as hospitals, health insurance organizations, and economic development organizations.
WordPress and Salesforce for nonprofits: Important forms to create
If your nonprofit website is built with WordPress, the Gravity Forms plugin offers an easy solution to integrate your WordPress website with your Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud plan.
With the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On, you can connect any form that you create with Gravity Forms to your Salesforce CRM. This lets you pass data from your forms to your Salesforce account, including adding contacts to Salesforce.
If you combine this with the general flexibility that Gravity Forms offers for nonprofits, you’ll be able to create all the different types of forms that your organization needs while also syncing all of those forms with Salesforce.
Best of all, Gravity Forms also offers its own special nonprofit pricing via the Gravity Forms Nonprofit license, which gives you access to the core Gravity Forms plugin and every single add-on for one low price.
In this section, we’ll discuss some of the most important forms that your nonprofit should consider creating, along with how Gravity Forms can help you integrate those forms with Salesforce.
Donation form
With Gravity Forms, you can easily create donation forms that let donors make one-time donations or set up automatic recurring donations. You can also give donors the option to choose between making a one-time or recurring donation from the same form, which ensures you don’t miss out on any potential donations.
You can design your donation form from scratch using the visual builder or start from the premade donation form template.
With the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On, you could then sync details about your donors to Salesforce, such as their contact information, donation amount, and any other information that you collect as part of your donation form.
Contact form
In addition to function-specific forms, your organization also needs a general-purpose contact form to let people get in touch.
Gravity Forms can easily create one or more contact forms, with as much simplicity or complexity as your organization needs. If it fits your situation, Gravity Forms also lets you connect these contact forms to your organization’s Salesforce account.
Volunteer application/signup form
If your organization relies on volunteers for one-off events or ongoing work, it can also be really helpful to create a dedicated volunteer application form. This will make it easy for you to stay organized and it will also be easier for you to keep in contact with your volunteers.
Gravity Forms can also help you connect this form to Salesforce and store volunteer information as a different object type from your donors.
…whatever else you need!
The examples above are by no means the only forms that your organization might need. You can also use Gravity Forms to create pretty much any other type of form that you might want.
You won’t need a developer to make forms, either, as you can set up everything using a drag-and-drop builder.
Best of all, regardless of what type of form you create, you’ll be able to connect any or all of them to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
Salesforce API Access
It’s important to note, that to utilize the Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On, your Salesforce account must have access to the Salesforce API. You can check if your Salesforce account supports the required APIs for our Gravity Forms integration by using our Salesforce Connection Verification Tool.
For more information, refer to this Salesforce developer article that outlines the license types known to provide API access. We recommend you check with your Salesforce account executive or Salesforce support if you have more questions on this.
Get started with Salesforce for nonprofits today
With Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, your organization can build better relationships with your donors and volunteers while also finding ways to drive more donations and more effectively manage your programs.
Thanks to Salesforce’s special nonprofit pricing and Power of Us Program, you can do this for free, or at a significantly reduced rate to the commercial licenses that Salesforce offers.
If your organization’s website runs on WordPress, you can also use the Gravity Forms plugin to create all of the web forms that your organization needs and connect those forms to Salesforce in whatever configuration makes the most sense.
Gravity Forms also offers its own Nonprofit license, so you can achieve even more cost-savings alongside Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
If you’re ready to get started, you can sign up for Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud here and purchase your Gravity Forms Nonprofit license here.
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