What Salesforce could do for your NGO.

Two demonstration systems built for Ghanaian NGOs, one for a skills training programme and one for a Village Savings and Loan programme, show what changes when a programme moves off spreadsheets.

It is Thursday afternoon and a quarterly donor report is due on Friday. The programme manager needs the number of women trained, how many finished the course, and how many were working six months later. The attendance figures are in one spreadsheet, the follow-up survey results are in another, and some of the field data is still on two officers' phones. The M&E officer knows which file holds which numbers, but she is on leave until Monday.

Most NGOs in Ghana will recognise some version of this. The data that proves a programme's impact usually exists. It is just spread across a dozen spreadsheets, a few phones and one person's memory.

This article looks at what changes when a programme moves from spreadsheets onto Salesforce, using two demonstration systems built for Ghanaian NGOs: one for a skills training programme and one for a Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) programme. The dashboards shown here come from those demos. The figures are demonstration data, not results from a real organisation, but the systems work in the same way a real NGO's would.

Why spreadsheets stop working

A spreadsheet is a good first tool for a small programme. It is free, everyone knows how to use it, and it can be set up in an afternoon. The problems start as the programme grows across regions, cohorts and years.

The first problem is that there is no single source of truth. Registration sits in one file, attendance in another, loans in a third and outcomes in a fourth. Each file may be accurate on its own, but nobody can say how the whole programme is doing without spending days copying numbers from one sheet to another, and every copy is a chance for a mistake.

The second problem is reporting. Donor reports are rebuilt by hand every quarter. By the time the numbers are compiled, they are already out of date. Problems that need quick action, such as a loan that has gone overdue or a graduate nobody has followed up with, stay hidden in a file until someone happens to look.

The third problem is security. A shared spreadsheet makes no distinction between a field officer, a programme manager and the executive director. Anyone with the link can see every beneficiary's phone number, savings balance and loan record, and can change or delete them. For organisations that hold personal and financial information about vulnerable people, that is a real risk.

A spreadsheet is a good first tool and a poor tenth one. Most growing NGOs reach the point where it costs them more time than it saves.

What Salesforce is, and what it changes

Salesforce is a cloud platform that combines a database, an automation tool and a reporting tool. Businesses use it to manage customers. NGOs set it up to manage the people and activities in their programmes.

The most important difference from a spreadsheet is that everything about a person is connected. In a skills training programme, the application, the trainee, their attendance, their certificate and their employment status six months later are all linked to one record. In a savings programme, the community, the group, each member, every meeting, every savings deposit and every loan are connected in the same way. Instead of tabs in separate files, they are linked records that can be searched and reported on together.

Salesforce can also carry out routine tasks automatically. In the two demos, when a trainee drops out, the next person on the waiting list is moved into the cohort. When a loan goes overdue, it flags itself and creates a follow-up task for the responsible officer. At the end of a savings cycle, the system calculates each member's share-out, which is their savings plus a share of the interest the group earned.

Dashboards update as soon as data is entered. Completion rates, the proportion of loans at risk, total savings and the gender balance of participants are always current, so the Thursday afternoon scramble for the donor report is no longer needed.

Access can also be set up to match how the organisation is run. Field officers see their own groups, managers see their region, and leadership sees programme totals. That is covered in more detail later in this article.

Cost is often the first concern for NGOs. Through its Power of Us programme, Salesforce gives eligible nonprofits 10 free licences and discounts on additional ones.

Both demos were built without writing any code. They use features that are configured through Salesforce's settings screens: custom objects to hold programme data, fields that add up totals automatically, validation rules that stop incorrect data being entered, automated processes called Flows, approval processes, a role hierarchy and dashboards. That means a trained programme officer or administrator can maintain the system, and the NGO does not need to employ developers or run its own servers.

Demo one: a skills training programme

The first demo follows a vocational training programme from start to finish: applications and selection, training in cohorts, certification, and follow-up on employment and income after the training ends. It covers several skill areas across different regions. The Programme Overview dashboard below brings all of this together on one screen.

Headline figures. The demo programme has enrolled 660 trainees across 48 cohorts in 7 skill areas. Of those, 456, or 69 per cent, have been certified.

Trainees by status. Besides the 456 certified, 51 trainees are currently in training, 54 are enrolled and waiting for their cohort to start, and 99 have dropped out. In a spreadsheet, the dropout figure is often the hardest to find, because trainees who leave early tend to disappear from attendance sheets without being recorded anywhere. Here, it is part of the same record and shows up automatically.

Employment outcomes. This chart shows results from the six-month follow-up. Of the 620 follow-up results recorded in the demo, 254 people are employed, 190 are self-employed, 85 have gone on to further training, and 91 are unemployed. Taking employment and self-employment together gives the dashboard's positive outcome rate of 72 per cent. This kind of tracking is what many training programmes leave out. It is easy to report the number of people trained. It takes more effort to find out how many are working six months later, and the answer matters more to donors and to the young people themselves. With follow-ups recorded against each trainee, the system can also list who is overdue for a follow-up, so the team knows who to call.

Trainees by gender. Most donors ask for results broken down by gender. In the demo, 378 of the 660 trainees are women and 282 are men. Because gender is recorded once on each trainee's record, the same breakdown is available for every other figure without extra work.

Application funnel. The funnel shows the intake process across all cohorts. In the demo, 660 applicants have been selected, 148 are on the waiting list, 96 were rejected, 20 are under review and 38 have submitted applications that haven't been reviewed yet. Because the waiting list is part of the system, a place left by a trainee who drops out can be filled automatically.

Starter kits. Many training programmes give graduates a starter kit, such as tools or equipment, to help them start working. In the demo, kit requests go through an approval process before anything is handed out. So far, 292 kits have been distributed, 82 approved and waiting for distribution, 61 are waiting for a manager's approval, and 21 were rejected. The approval step means that valuable equipment is not handed out without someone responsible signing it off.

Behind the dashboard, staff work from saved lists such as "Applications awaiting screening", "Waitlisted applicants" and "Overdue outcome follow-ups". Each list updates as records change, so the team starts each day knowing what needs attention.

Demo two: a Village Savings and Loan programme

In a Village Savings and Loan Association, a group of community members meets regularly, usually weekly, to save small amounts. The pooled savings are lent to members, who repay with interest. At the end of each cycle, usually a year, the group shares out the money, with each member receiving their savings plus a share of the interest earned. VSLAs are widely used in Ghana, particularly by women in rural areas, and NGOs that support them often monitor dozens or hundreds of groups.

The second demo manages groups, members, weekly meetings and savings, and a loan book. It applies a lending limit of three times a member's savings, and it calculates the share-out for every member automatically at the end of a cycle.

Headline figures. The demo programme has 17 savings groups across 4 regions, with 348 members. Together they have saved GHS 152,000, and 306 members are currently eligible for a loan under the three-times-savings rule.

Members by status and gender. Of the 348 members, 327 are active and 21 have dropped out. Women make up 235 of the members, or 68 per cent, which reflects a common goal of VSLA programmes: giving women access to savings and credit.

Loan portfolio. The chart shows GHS 15,115 in active loans and GHS 6,903 in overdue loans. A manager can see at once that almost a third of the outstanding balance is overdue. In a spreadsheet, that figure would only appear once someone had worked through each group's loan records. In the demo, each overdue loan has already created a follow-up task for the officer responsible.

Savings and membership by region. The regional charts compare the four areas the demo covers. Greater Accra has the most members, 105, and the highest savings, GHS 45,095. Ashanti has 81 members with GHS 37,300, Volta has 82 members with GHS 36,295, and Northern has 80 members with GHS 33,155. Comparisons like this help managers decide where field officers' time is most needed.

The proportion of loans at risk, the list of members eligible for loans, and comparisons between one cycle and the next all come from the same live records. There is no separate reporting file to keep up to date.

Keeping beneficiary data safe

This is the area where Salesforce offers the most that a spreadsheet can't. NGOs hold sensitive information about the people they serve, including phone numbers, household details, savings balances and loan records. Salesforce lets an organisation control who can see and change each piece of that information. Both demos use the same layered model, described here from the broadest setting to the most detailed.

The demos use three levels of staff. Leadership sees programme-wide totals through dashboards, but doesn't have direct access to individual beneficiary records. Programme managers can create, view, edit and delete records within their own region only. Field officers and facilitators handle day-to-day work for their own groups or cohorts: members, meetings, attendance, savings and loans. They can't see programme budgets or other officers' data.

Access flows upward through this hierarchy. A manager automatically sees everything their team can see, without anyone having to grant access to each record individually.

Default settings. The starting point is a set of organisation-wide defaults. Reference information, such as the list of communities and programmes, can be read by everyone. Sensitive information, such as member details, loans and savings, is private: only the person who owns the record and their managers can see it.

Sharing by region. Sharing rules then give managers access to the records they need. Records marked as belonging to the Northern region are shared with the Northern programme manager group, and no one else. A manager in the Northern region never sees records from Greater Accra.

Permission sets. What each role is allowed to do, such as which kinds of records they can create, edit or delete, is set through reusable permission sets. When a new field officer joins, they receive the same set as their colleagues rather than a one-off arrangement.

Field-level security. The most detailed control applies to individual fields. A field officer can open a training cohort's record, but the cost and budget fields on that record are hidden from them.

Approvals and audit trail. High-value starter-kit grants must be approved by a manager before they are distributed. Changes to roles and statuses are logged automatically, showing who changed what and when.

The table above summarises the model. A field officer can create and edit day-to-day records and submit kits for approval, but cannot see budgets, cost per trainee or other officers' regions. A programme manager has full access within their region, including finances, and approves high-value grants. Leadership monitors programme-wide dashboards and briefs donors without row-level access to individual records. The system administrator has full access, by design, to configure the system and manage users.

The demos also include smaller checks that keep the data reliable as more people enter it. The system warns staff when a new member record looks like a duplicate of an existing one, checks that phone numbers are in the right format, checks that applicants meet the age requirement, and records whether each person has given consent for their data to be held.

These controls also help NGOs meet their legal obligations. Ghana's Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843) sets rules for how organisations collect and handle personal information, and an NGO that can show exactly who has access to beneficiary data is in a far better position than one relying on a shared spreadsheet link.

NGOs already doing this

The demos are new, but the approach isn't. NGOs working in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa already run programmes on Salesforce. CAMFED keeps one Salesforce record for every girl it supports in Ghana and four other African countries, covering her circumstances, payments, attendance and progress. In Northern Ghana, iDE's sanitation business Sama Sama uses Salesforce to link sales agents in the field with managers in Tamale, and has tracked sales of more than 8,600 toilets. In Kenya, the BOMA Project cut the time between a field visit and a manager seeing the results from up to three months to the same day by combining Salesforce with a mobile data collection app. Our own feature on this, "How NGOs in Africa are using Salesforce", goes through eight of them.

How to get started

Setting up Salesforce can sound like a large project, but it doesn't need to start that way. An NGO doesn't need to model its whole organisation on the first day. The demos suggest three steps.

First, apply for Power of Us. Confirm that the organisation is eligible and claim the 10 free licences. The Salesforce tool guide on this site walks through eligibility and the application.

Second, build one programme. Choose the process that is causing the most trouble, whether that is intake and selection, savings groups, or monitoring and evaluation, and set it up using Salesforce's configuration tools, as the demos did.

Third, add people and dashboards. Set up the role hierarchy and sharing rules, load real data, and put the live dashboard in front of staff and donors.

Once one programme is running well, the same approach can be extended to the next. Many NGOs also work with a Salesforce consultant or implementation partner for the first setup, and organisations in Ghana can find local administrators through the Salesforce community groups that meet in Accra.

Back to Thursday afternoon

With the programme on Salesforce, the donor report due on Friday looks different. The number of women trained, the completion rate and the six-month employment figures are already on the dashboard, current to the last record a field officer entered. The programme manager can export them in a few minutes, and the M&E officer can enjoy her leave.

For NGOs still running programmes on spreadsheets, the demos show what a working system looks like, built with the kinds of programmes Ghanaian NGOs run every day. Starting with one programme is a manageable first step.

Where SF Fellows GH fits

We built both of these demo systems, and we help qualifying NGOs get set up on Salesforce at no cost, then place a trained Fellow with you for six months to build the first programme and run the system while your team learns. If you want to see one of these dashboards filled with your own data, book a fifteen-minute call and we will tell you honestly what you qualify for and what would ship in your first thirty days.

All dashboard figures in this article come from two demonstration Salesforce systems built on custom objects with no code, using demo data. Salesforce, Lightning and Power of Us are trademarks of Salesforce, Inc.