We're 5 years old and still growing. Currently, our organization has 7 staff members and our budget is under $1 million. About 20K in the CRM. One person administers the CRM (yours truly) and we try and avoid hiring outside consultants as much as we can help it.

Convio Common Ground is priced per user at $100/user/month. That includes all support costs (web, phone & email) for Common Ground and all updates. For much larger organizations, you would need to speak to Convio about pricing as I believe they do discount for larger purchases. The cost of the first 10 seats of Salesforce is donated by Salesforce, after that it's $360/year per user. Basic Salesforce support is included.

We do a handful of ask campaigns a year, now thanks to the segmenting tools in Common Ground we are planning to do more. In Common Ground we track individual donations made on our website (thanks to Convio's online tools that automatically sync with Common Ground), donations received through the mail, workplace giving pledges, corporate gifts, eCommerce transactions (we sell things like awareness pins & bracelets, t-shirts, etc.), event registrations and grants.

I know organizations 10x our size are using the same tools successfully, they only pay more for more users. Their volume may be higher than ours, but the process is still similar. They may also require more customization for functionality outside of Common Ground on the Salesforce platform.

I couldn't disagree with this more. Maybe true if all a nonprofit wants to do is store contacts. But even the smallest nonprofit should be able to see a 360 degree view of the people and organizations they interact with. Even the smallest nonprofit organization needs to make sure that everyone who should be thanked for a cash donation or for volunteering or for an in-kind donation is being thanked/acknowledged. Even the smallest nonprofit organization wants to track progress over time. It doesn't matter if it's tracking from 100 contacts to 500, 1,000 contacts to 5,000 or 100,000 to 500,000.

It's more efficient to start with a strong CRM like Salesforce/Common Ground and grow in to all its features than have a spreadsheet that can't scale. I want to tell our donors that we are spending their money on mission, not on building a system to redo what we didn't handle well when we first started out.

Our nonprofit organization has been using Salesforce as our CRM since 2006, and Common Ground since last summer.

Two issues you raised... One, the reporting/query question. The canned reports in Common Ground are good starting points and they're ridiculously easy for even the most novice user to configure to an organization's own needs. Next month, Salesforce is rolling out significant improvements to their reporting/dashboard interface, and of course Common Ground users immediately enjoy that benefit. I don't know when you last looked at Common Ground/Salesforce, but if it was any longer than a couple of months ago, your information is probably out of date. We get updates from Salesforce 3 times a year, and then Convio is updating the nonprofit-specific functionality on top of that.

For example, Convio's last update to Common Ground included new direct market tools built on the Campaign object in Salesforce. This allows us to query the database and build segments of constituents in a way that just isn't possible with Salesforce out-of-the-box. Being able to build segments based on exclusion data, for starters. And also point and click easy for the end user. It's nice for the geeks reading this to have reporting tools that take a comp sci degree to use, even better when the tools are easy enough to use that program staff can do it themselves. From where I'm sitting, that saves the organization a lot of money. No one in our org has had to get on a plane to South Carolina to learn how to use our CRM and get the most out of its data.

Second issue is around resources/data load. That's the beauty of Common Ground. It's the Salesforce platform. Doesn't matter if you're doing an export from your dual, quad-core Xeon box or from my iMac. We routinely export tens of thousands of records. The GUI only displays 2,000 records in detail in its report (but you can display roll-up data on hundreds of thousands of records at once) and then you click a button to export the data to Excel, which takes maybe 30 seconds on a slow day. It's just downloading a file like any other. Crunching the export happens on the Salesforce side, not locally. Check out http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ and how many transactions Salesforce deals with on a daily basis.

I do have to admit that complex joins in reporting are a challenge in Salesforce, and that's probably what you heard. It's really good on parent - child, and even parent - child - grandchild relationships. It can get dicey with cousins. But then if that's a deal breaker there are 3rd party reporting tools, some offered at discount to nonprofits, that bridge the gap. Pretty much anything that Salesforce/CG doesn't do there's an application that will help.