Case Study: Salesforce Consultant for Nonprofits

Are you a nonprofit needing help with FormAssembly or Salesforce?
You can reach out to Nathan Spiwak by email: [email protected]

Nathan Spiwak, Salesforce Consultant.

FA: Nathan, can you tell us a little about what you do?

Nathan: I am a Salesforce consultant so I consult with other non-profits who want to use Salesforce or do more things with it, expand or add new features.   I help them use Salesforce so that it really is benefiting their non-profit and adding a lot of value for them and increasing efficiency.

Normally people use Salesforce to track their contacts.  For non-profits they might be donors or constituents, alumni of their programs or other people that they’re interacting with as well as tracking the organizations they work with, their partners, or maybe foundations that are giving them grants.

So I can help them set up all these things in Salesforce as well as working with them on event management, email marketing, capturing surveys or online applications – employment applications or grant applications or things like that.

FA: You’ve been using FormAssembly together with Salesforce – Can you explain how you are using those together?

A really great balance between really easy to use and really fast to learn.

Nathan: Sure – well I actually found FormAssembly a couple of years ago – I was looking for products that integrate with Salesforce for online web forms or surveys and again – there’s a whole marketplace of options out there and I tried out several form builders that connect with Salesforce.

It was almost like a goldilocks problem where one would be really basic and simple and easy but wouldn’t actually provide the flexibility to add the data to Salesforce in a meaningful way, in a complex way.  Then others were big and complex and difficult and slow and they would have more Salesforce connectivity.  But it was just hard to use and they were often very expensive and so I ended up finding FormAssembly – a really great balance between really easy to use and really fast to learn. You can create a new form in just minutes.

Also the connection with Salesforce was very flexible and very strong – and so you could have a pretty complicated form – not difficult but complicated in that it’s asking lots of different questions – and have that data stored in lots of different places in Salesforce – so it was a great mix between easy to use as well as very flexible and very powerful and it absolutely fulfilled our needs.

it’s pretty much the number one, first add-on that I recommend because almost everybody needs some way to pull information from their website into Salesforce.

As I said, I’m a consultant so I’ve worked with a number of other non-profits and it’s been a great asset for them as well – it’s pretty much the number one, first add-on that I recommend because almost everybody needs some way to pull information from their website into Salesforce or to capture event registration or application information. If e.g. someone is applying for a job a program or if you are asking people who came to one of your events to give you feedback on that and instead of having three or four or five different add-ons that all have a small little niche that maybe addresses one of those areas, FormAssembly could actually take care of all of those – one product one price one thing to learn and it was flexible, enough that you could capture all that information and have it come right into Salesforce.

FA: So for people who are using it, FormAssembly is really the conduit for everything they are pulling in from various different places and funneling that into Salesforce.

Nathan: That’s exactly right – you have information that’s out there, that’s not in Salesforce and you want to get that info into Salesforce – you want your constituents your customers your contacts to be able to enter that for you – you don’t want to have to type it in yourself – then FormAssembly is a great answer for you and it doesn’t really matter what types of information they’re providing you whether its files, documents – any type of information-  you can have that come into Salesforce.  I’ve seen the connection with Salesforce with some sort of email marketing tool and in those emails having a link to a FormAssembly form – so it goes from Salesforce to emails – they click the link – go to FormAssembly and then when they click “submit”, that comes right back intro Salesforce so you have a nice pretty loop where all of the information is coming from Salesforce – going out into the world – getting adjusted and added to by your contacts and coming right back into Salesforce without any administrators having to type that in or import or do any of that stuff which is time consuming and can create errors and problems.

Thanks to Nathan for agreeing to talk to us about his work as a consultant and his experience with using Salesforce and FormAssembly.