Charting Your Course: The Journey from Accidental Admin to Empowered Nonprofit Salesforce Consultant

Does this sound like you? You love Salesforce, you love coming up with solutions, and you want what you do to be making a MEANINGFUL contribution to the world. Whether you are already a consultant or just starting out OR you are already working at a nonprofit and using Salesforce, if what you want is to create value in your community, you can do that by being a nonprofit Salesforce Admin or Salesforce Consultant.

I have found an interesting pattern lately at how people arrived at being nonprofit Salesforce consultants. Most of us have heard the term “accidental admin” — which is especially the case in the nonprofit world.  I was at a webinar of women founders recently and @Melissa Hill-Dees introduced me to a new term “the accidental consultant”. Years ago, I sort of found myself in this category. I had worked at a job where I was the Director of Development and had been there designated admin, though I had never used Salesforce.  I was in a position in life where I could no longer hold a full-time job and when I left, my mentor called me to consult with one of her clients on their Salesforce org.  I tried to set up their Volunteers for Salesforce, but eventually found the truth, that I was deep in an area I knew NOTHING about.  I had fundraising, marketing, database, and SQL query experience at nonprofits, but not enough Salesforce experience to cut the mustard.  

I later met a man who was doing the same thing.  He had 20 years of computer programming experience and read code all day, but no nonprofit or business experience.  He was volunteering to set up Salesforce for a nonprofit that he supported and was studying learning as he was going.  He invited me to a user group and we decided to help more nonprofits by starting a nonprofit to help nonprofits with their Salesforce.  We confessed we had little experience, but he was a computer programmer with 20 years of experience and I had 10 years of nonprofit marketing and fundraising experience, so we sold them.  So really I was an accidental consultant with the first call from my mentor turned on purpose consultant, without a clear path or mentor to guide me.

Fast-forward 7 years later and the accidental consultant was the category that some of my students in the last round of this training program fell into.  @Ruby was helping her husband’s nonprofit get Salesforce going to move their mission forward to help people get jobs after being incarcerated.  She started helping other nonprofits, but NPSP is a beast and she knew she needed help and a framework to unwind it all.  @Rebecca started helping organizations with their virtual events and virtual presence during COVID and quickly learned they needed help with their Salesforce too.  She started to help them, but without the background knowledge of the inner workings of nonprofits and how Salesforce benefits them, she was not serving her clients to the fullest capacity.

These aren’t isolated incidents.  It is easy to feel like your drowning quickly when you first try to help a nonprofit with Salesforce.  When I founded Salesforce Saturday for Nonprofits I found people in these situations:

• Newly certified, already helping nonprofits, not feeling confident

• A nonprofit professional, very versed in nonprofit needs and structure, but did not understand Salesforce or NPSP

• Experienced Salesforce consultant who knew nothing about nonprofits or that NPSP was different from Sales Cloud

Next week, I’ll be posting another article about the first secret I wish I knew before diving into the deep end of nonprofit Salesforce consulting.