The End of the Road for Salesforce’s Elevate
What happened?
In April, Salesforce announced its decision to stop new sales of Elevate, a tool introduced in 2020 aimed at helping customers achieve their fundraising goals. The announcement was made after a difficult round of product analysis on the future of Elevate, which revealed that the product exhibits a small customer base, limited global growth potential, and a high cost to service.
Despite having a small but dedicated group of active users, Salesforce does not see a path forward for the product. As such, the company has decided to wind down the tool in a measured fashion to honor customer contracts and provide opportunities for customers to evaluate and migrate to alternate solutions.
What is the timeline?
The ability to renew subscriptions will end on October 1, 2023, and Salesforce anticipates that the product will be deactivated on or after October 1, 2024. Salesforce's guiding principles for End-of-Renewal and End-of-Life timelines are to honor the full life of all customer contracts, continue customer support, ensure that customers are able to fully migrate onto alternate solutions, and prevent data and donation losses for customers.
Next steps for nonprofits
As an alternative to Elevate, we recommend Classy, DonorDrive, or Springboard as donation platforms. It’s important to note that there are additional alternatives for nonprofits including Give Lively, Click & Pledge, Soapbox Engage, and Donorbox. The Idealist Consulting team has extensive experience working with various donation platforms, including migrations. If you’d like to learn more about what these platforms can offer your organization or talk through migration options, give us a call!
Salesforce is committed to supporting Elevate for maintenance and bug fixes throughout the life of all contracts; however, there won’t be new innovation with the tool. Salesforce noted that they are not reducing any investment in this sector, and the decision regarding Elevate is independent of its support for the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and the tens of thousands of customers using NPSP-based solutions.
We know these transitions can be overwhelming, so we’ve got your back. Our consultants are experts in assisting nonprofits with donation platform migrations, making the process less of a headache and more of an adventure!
If you are interested in making a transition from Elevate to alternative solutions like those listed above, please feel free to reach out to us directly, we’d love to hear from you.
