Where to find Salesforce training for nonprofits

If you are a nonprofit Salesforce user, your options for training are expanding every day and it may be tricky to tell where to start: should you budget for an in-person training or just Google your way to success?

This will depend largely on your own comfort zone and experience with technology, but there are many directions you can turn for support. If you are a supervisor of Salesforce users, you should think about how your team best learns and how quickly you need to ramp up new users. If you’re a Salesforce user, it is incredibly common to be hired without previous experience and thrown into the deep end where you need to get up to speed quickly to execute campaigns immediately.

In this previous post, we outline Top Resources for Salesforce Users which are primarily free, and include Googling and using the Salesforce Success Communities. But what about when you need a true foundation, not just daily help with technical questions?

Here are our top recommendations for more comprehensive Salesforce training for nonprofits:

1. Trailhead [free]: This is a new training platform developed in the past year and has caught on like wildfire in the Salesforce community. It is completely self-paced so you can fit it in around your schedule. Check out our deep-dive into the nonprofit Trailhead courses here. Join Salesforce.org for a webinar highlighting Trailhead on December 17.

2. Salesforce Fundamentals for Nonprofits Webinar [free]: Salesforce.org is offering monthly webinars that “focus on four steps to start your journey, from basic navigation in Salesforce to the basic training we suggest you take online. In addition, we have some quick tips to share about setting up new users.” Register here.

3. Salesforce Basics for the Accidental Admin [$85]: Idealist Consulting offers this 2-day, 3-hour webinar once a quarter, and it is designed to give new or beginning-level users an overview of the Nonprofit Starter Pack. Our next one will be January 20-21: register here.

4. Salesforce Admin Certification [$200 test fee]: While not nonprofit-specific, if you have been using Salesforce for a while or become a system administrator and want to reinforce your knowledge and add an impressive badge to your resume, consider getting certified through Salesforce. We offer tips for passing the admin exam here.

Finally, no matter what training you invest in, if you’re using Salesforce on a daily basis you will find enormous value from spending 15 minutes on the Power of Us Hub each morning. Check out our tips in "5 Steps to Making the Most of the Power of Us Hub" for how to make the most of this time.

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