5 Signs Your Organization Has Outgrown Native Salesforce Integrations

Introduction: You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See

If your organization is using Salesforce as its CRM, chances are high that you or your colleagues are using at least one native integration to move data into Salesforce on a regular basis. There’s a reason these integrations are so popular: they are easy to use and available for no additional cost. Despite their convenience, native Salesforce integration and import tools are limited in the features they provide. When an organization stretches the use of these tools beyond their boundaries, it causes data integrity issues including duplicate records, mis-labeled gifts, and incorrect donation records. Over time, these data issues become harder to fix, leading to eroded donor trust and a tougher climate for raising funds. But don’t worry! We are here to help you spot the signs your out-of-the-box integrations are no longer meeting your needs.

In this article, we talk though the signs that your organization has outgrown the use of native Salesforce integrations. By identifying problems before they get out of hand, your organization can have more confidence in its data, proactively fix issues, and save time on complex data cleanup projects. We will also cover the basics of forming a robust data integration strategy for getting all your information where it needs to go—quickly and accurately.

What are Native Salesforce Platform Integrations?

Also known as “out-of-the-box” integrations, native integrations are built-in solutions for connecting third-party platform applications with Salesforce. Organizations can access these native integrations within the Salesforce AppExchange, an expansive market for add-ons to an organization’s Salesforce instance. Nonprofits often rely on native integration tools because they’re easily available: they come with Salesforce, so they take little-to-no time to set up. They are also free, or very low-cost, so there’s no extra budgeting or approvals required to get up and running. Check out Popular Salesforce Apps and Integrations for Nonprofits.

There are other good reasons to use native integration tools. They work! At least for a little while. Imagine you’re a Salesforce customer using Classy for an online fundraising campaign. Using Classy’s native Salesforce integration to get your first batch of donor data into your CRM is a way to speed up an otherwise manual process. Similarly, if your organization uses Constant Contact or Mailchimp for communications, the native Salesforce integrations for these platforms make it easy to sync email opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and other key metrics with supporter records in your CRM. The problems with native import and integration tools start to occur once your organization reaches a certain threshold for size, activity, and complexity—all of which we get into in further detail below.

The Hidden Problems Native Integrations Create Over Time

Incomplete or Incorrect Data Mapping

Native integrations are built to help move data fields from one platform to Salesforce. Integration tools for fundraising platforms like Fundraise Up, Classy, or GiveCampus speed up the process of connecting donation data by detecting donor names, addresses, donation amounts, and other fields—and moving that data to corresponding fields in Salesforce. Sounds simple? It is . . . up until a point.

Duplicate record creation is a common problem resulting from native import and integration tools. These tools can detect an existing donor in your database off an exact name or email address in an import batch, but if the same donor uses an email address or nickname that differs from what is in Salesforce, native import tools will create a duplicate donor record with a brand-new giving history. Duplicate records for the same donor cause a variety of issues down the line including inaccurate giving histories, errors in soft credit, missed acknowledgements, and decreased donor trust over time.

Limited Customization or Field Control

Out-of-the-box integrations often result in incomplete or incorrect data mapping for complex organizations. Getting data from one field into a custom field in Salesforce can also be difficult if the integration doesn’t fully support certain fields and often requires some manual record cleanup after an import.

Native integrations are the same for all organizations. As your organization changes its data needs, your Salesforce integrations cannot change along with it. These integrations are typically designed for standard, one-size-fits-all use cases, and what works for a small nonprofit just getting started may not meet the demands of a growing organization with more specialized workflows, reporting requirements, or multiple connected systems. For many teams, field complexity is the true sign of outgrowing a native integration tool. Once a certain amount of customization is required for data imports, a more robust integration plan is necessary too.

Lack of Real-Time or Bi-Directional Data Flows

Another flaw of native integrations is that many of them only work in one direction: from a third-party platform into Salesforce. With bi-directional syncing, data moves from Salesforce into a third-party platform as well. Two-way data movement allows an organization to load giving data into an email marketing platform with ease and send automatic acknowledgements to donors or automatic appeals to donors about to lapse. Without bi-directional syncing, teams must rely on complicated data pulls, creating lists, importing data, and spot-checking information for outreach, which can delay customized communications—or prevent them altogether.

Disconnected Data Sources

Native integrations only sync two tools at a time. For example, you may have one native integration between Classy and Salesforce, one between Mailchimp and Salesforce, and another between Eventbrite and Salesforce. That is three separate unique integrations for your organization to manage, a patchwork of tenuously connected data sources, all traveling through your CRM. At first, disconnected systems might not pose significant problems. But once your organization has hundreds or thousands of donors, hosts multiple events, runs several high-impact digital fundraising campaigns each year, disconnected systems start holding your efforts back.

Imagine your organization wants to host a complex fundraising campaign associated with Founder’s Day—a significant source of funding each year. Your team may host events, book speakers, launch digital fundraising appeals, send direct mail appeals, and lead corresponding marketing campaigns to get the word out to friends and donors. All of the sources of data: events platforms, digital fundraising tools, email marketing systems, external vendors, and more all need to send information into Salesforce. Without a robust integration solution, all that data travels one way into Salesforce, one tool at a time. After wrapping up multi-channel campaigns, it can take weeks or months to catch upon entering all the data that needs to live in Salesforce—and create major backlogs that prevent timely reporting.

5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Native Integrations

We’ve covered the basics of the pros and cons of native integrations with Salesforce. Here is a list of the major indications that your organization has grown beyond its native import tools:

1. Duplicates and other data errors are a constant problem

It’s a common scenario. You notice that donor giving data is missing from your Salesforce records. You scour Salesforce to see what happened and spot it: a duplicate record. It’s simple enough to merge records, but it’s only possible when you detect them.

If the data in Salesforce feels off no matter how many times you clean it, chances are you’re running into problems during your imports and need to address your integration tools.

2. There’s a lack of trust in reporting

Do you and your colleagues dread the annual donor honor roll? Is campaign wrap-up reporting a messy picture? If straight-forward reporting requires hours of checking, fixing, and re-checking your results, your data processes are not where they need to be. When your team does not have confidence in the reports you pull, data integrity issues are officially out of hand. These are all indications that your import tools are insufficient to meet your organization’s complex data needs.

3. You can’t answer basic questions about your supporters easily

When a colleague in annual giving asks, “How many donors gave twice in the last year?” or a volunteer manager to know what percentage of your donors are also volunteers and you can’t answer without caveats and explanations, that is a sign your data integration isn’t up to par.

4. You spend hours each week editing and moving data

This sign is one of the most important indications of an insufficient data integration process. Many organizations have staff spending hours pulling spreadsheets, editing rows and columns, and even manually keying in data within Salesforce for hours each week. There is a better way.

Not only is this a waste of valuable staff resources, but the more time members of your organization are also spending on manual data entry the more vulnerable your data is to human error. If you or your colleagues are spending more than an hour each week on moving data, or worse, after typical working hours, it’s time to reassess your operations.

5. You have too many manual workarounds

Native integrations don’t have many options for customization. If you need to adapt an import to include a field that isn’t native, perform calculations on fields, or make edits to gifts, you have to get creative in Excel, Salesforce, or at some other point during the import process. Manual workarounds are a common stopgap, but long-term reliance on them will cause data integrity issues for everyone.

How Data Integration Issues Affect Different Teams

Salesforce Administrators

The persisting data issues that native integrations cause affect Salesforce administrators more directly than anyone else working at a nonprofit. That’s because Salesforce admins are tasked with data integrity, reporting, and maintenance. Administrators are the first line of defense for data issues, and often the first people to get a call to triage errors, which can involve working late or over the holidays. When a single import flagged incomplete gifts as processed or includes the wrong data on a transaction, a Salesforce administrator is the one who cleans up the affected records. Failed syncs and error logs can lead to hours of extra work each week.

Development and Fundraising Teams

For development staff, data problems hold back daily operations in less obvious—but important—ways. Data errors caused by flawed imports might look like an incorrect giving history, a report that misses donors, or a missed acknowledgement letter. Over time, these small errors add up to a loss of donor trust, declines in donor retention, and limited cultivation for major gifts.

Marketing and Communications Teams

Marketing and Communications teams rely on accurate data to reach the right audiences with the right message at the right time. Personalizing a newsletter to volunteers with upcoming volunteering opportunities and specifics on how volunteers further the mission of an organization are ways to keep you volunteers feeling appreciated and engaged.

Similarly, sharing an impact report on a specific initiative of your organization to the exact donors who’ve supported that initiative shows you know about your donors’ interests, which builds trust in your institution. Without accurate data, marketing teams send mass emails and blast all members of a list with all updates. These scattershot approaches to communications dampen audience interest over time, lowering engagement rates and increasing unsubscribes.

Solution: Save Time and Increase Data Integrity with a Fully Integrated Nonprofit Tech Ecosystem

By now, you should be familiar with the signs that native or “out-of-the-box” Salesforce are no longer working for your organization. Luckily, there is a better way to move your data where it needs to go.

Explore Other Application Integration Solutions

With a customizable solution, also known as a middleware software solution, your organization can make the most of all your third-party tools for fundraising, accounting, event management, and more. A more flexible, scalable solution like Omatic Cloud seamlessly syncs all your external tools with Salesforce so you can have access to accurate, real-time data without the need for time-consuming and error-prone manual imports. Report on stats, engage with supporters, and create forecasts with more confidence than ever.

Create a data ecosystem, not a patchwork of tools

By investing in integrating all your data sources, organizations can combat the silos created by disparate systems and create a technology ecosystem in which all their data systems are talking to and updating each other. When resources are limited, this also allows organizations to realize the full value of their technology investment and achieve more with existing systems they currently have.

Conclusion: Your Data Should Empower, Not Exhaust You

Your data is one of your organization’s greatest assets to support your cause. Accurate, clean data at your fingertips makes supporter engagement, reporting, and other operations possible. At the end of the day, nonprofits exist to serve their missions—not to wrestle with clunky data operations.

If your organization is struggling with incorrect data mapping, limited customization options, manual workarounds, untrustworthy reports, and duplicate records, it is time to re-evaluate your processes and invest in a solution that works.

Ready to future-proof your data workflows? Explore alternatives to native Salesforce integrations today!