For nonprofits on Salesforce

Why nonprofits with Salesforce are turning to Civis Analytics

Keep the CRM your front-of-house relies on, and add the layer it was never built for. Three reasons mission-driven teams are making the move.

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SOC2 FedRAMP Moderate MCP-ready for Claude 100+ nonprofits served
The three reasons
Reason 01 · Save significantly

Unique Salesforce record archival

Archive records the CRM doesn't need to hold and cut your storage fees significantly, without losing access to a single record.
Reason 02 · Power to your team

The analytics & AI a CRM was never built for

Claude gives non-technical marketing and fundraising staff unprecedented access to their data: answers and reports in plain language.
Reason 03 · Power to everyone

Put Claude in the hands of your whole team

Civis connects Claude to your governed data: non-technical marketing and fundraising staff get answers in plain language, no analyst required.

Powering analytics for mission-driven organizations

International relief Hunger relief Environmental advocacy Refugee support Disaster response
Unique to Civis · Salesforce record archival

Big savings on Salesforce storage fees.

The capability nonprofits come to Civis for first: archive what your CRM doesn't need, and stop paying to store it. Your archival savings alone will nearly pay for the Civis Platform that unlocks a new analytics workbench and AI tools for your entire team.

Storage & ingestion savings
Up to 50%
lower Salesforce storage and ingestion costs

Civis' Salesforce connectors and transformation scripts archive historic data not needed in the CRM, and updated records are easily retrieved and exported back to Salesforce as needed.

Unlike others, Civis does not limit or charge users based on the number of records processed.
Salesforce record archival within Civis: historical records are continuously archived from Salesforce into the Civis data warehouse, stored in full, exposed through aggregate tables and views, and exported back to Salesforce as needed.
The challenge

Salesforce is a great CRM. It was never meant to be your database.

Your CRM excels at the work in front of you: relationships, communications, lightweight reporting. But as your data grows, storage costs climb, and its data was never structured for advanced analytics, let alone AI.

Where the CRM shines

CRM strengths

  • The everyday tool for front-of-house, fundraising, and member communications
  • Tracks person-level interactions and constituent history
  • Centralizes records and gives the whole team universal access
  • Decent lightweight reporting for day-to-day questions
Where it falls short

CRM weaknesses

  • Its data isn't structured for advanced analytics, much less AI
  • Storage and seat costs climb steeply as your data grows
  • Can't centralize everything: third-party data lives elsewhere
  • Limited joins and sharing make sophisticated reporting hard
Salesforce, before and after Civis

Keep Salesforce up front. Move the heavy lifting to Civis.

Civis sits behind your CRM as a true data warehouse and analytics workbench, archiving what Salesforce doesn't need to hold and unlocking analysis it can't perform.

Salesforce alone

Everything lives, and pays rent, in the CRM

Salesforce storage used100%
  • Years of donation & campaign history sit in expensive CRM storage
  • Analysis means point-and-click templates and capped joins
  • Third-party vendor and email data never get fully combined
Salesforce + Civis

The CRM stays lean. Civis becomes the warehouse.

Active in SalesforceArchived in Civis
  • Rarely-referenced records archived to Civis, so storage costs drop
  • A true SQL database with an interactive analytics workbench
  • All sources unified, deduped, and synced back into Salesforce
How Civis works with Salesforce

An out-of-the-box integration, and everything after it.

Civis ships with a native Salesforce integration that makes a new connection quick to set up. From there, your data is centralized, cleaned, analyzed, and sent right back where your team works.

Out-of-the-box integration

A native Salesforce connector imports your objects incrementally: easy to set up and simple to run nightly.

A true database & workbench

Query, segment, and build dynamic interactive reports, then push updated records and lists back into Salesforce.

Salesforce archival

Continuously flag rarely-used records for archival and store them in Civis, significantly reducing CRM storage costs.

Unified data warehouse

Combine Salesforce with vendor files, email, and digital data for one holistic view of every supporter.

Identity resolution

Dedupe and connect contacts across systems, with free CASS/NCOA address correction for reliable direct mail.

Claude, built in

Ask questions in plain language and build reports without code: Claude works on your governed data, no analyst required.

31%
storage freed
The archival payoff

Archiving historic records cut Salesforce storage by roughly a third.

For organizations holding years of donation and campaign history, Salesforce storage fees become a real line item. Moving rarely-referenced records into Civis keeps them accessible through reporting and aggregated metrics, without paying CRM rates to store them.

100%
of archived history stays accessible via reporting
Nightly
incremental syncs keep the warehouse current
The readiness gap

AI is only as good as the data beneath it.

Getting Claude-ready means moving your data through three layers, each one a prerequisite for the next. Most nonprofits stall before they reach the top.

01
Ingest
Warehouse ready
  • Ingest pipelines (ELT / ETL)
  • Data transformations & lineage
  • Managed or BYO Redshift / BigQuery
02
Organize
Analytics ready
  • Deduplicated, identity-resolved records
  • Data catalog & governance
  • Documented & described tables
Claude works here
03
AI ready
AI ready
  • Context discoverable by Claude via MCP
  • Centralized business logic specific to your org
  • Governance based on your policies

Each layer is a prerequisite for the next. Civis builds all three, so Claude lands on data it can trust.

For everyone, not just analysts

Put Claude in the hands of your whole team.

Once your data is AI-ready, Civis integrates Claude directly with your governed warehouse, so non-technical staff can ask questions and build their own reports, with every access, security, and privacy rule already enforced.

Ask in plain language

Conversational queries, real answers

Pose questions in everyday terms and get answers from your live data: no SQL, no report tickets, no waiting on the data team.

Build it yourself

Reports & dashboards, no code

Generate reports and dashboards on the fly and publish them to the whole org, no analyst or programmer in the loop.

Move faster

Quicker answers, sharper strategy

Less time waiting on data pulls means more time for strategic reporting and marketing planning: the work that moves your mission.

DD“Which lapsed donors gave more than $500 last year, and how do their gifts trend by region?”
Claude reads your governed, identity-resolved warehouse through the Civis MCP connection, returns the segment with a regional breakdown, and offers to save it as a dashboard, all within each user's existing permissions.
Governed by design: every Claude answer respects the rules you already have.
Data governance Per-user access SOC2 · FedRAMP No data leaves the platform
Claude in practice

Secure, accurate, and built to share.

The three things the data layer has to get right before Claude is safe to put in front of a whole organization, each wired up to a nonprofit's own data on day one.

Secure
MCP server

Claude, talking to the warehouse

Connect Claude to the Civis MCP server and ask questions in plain language: no SQL, and no copies of data ever leave the platform.

Accurate
AI-readiness tools

Claude-ready data context, so it answers correctly

Civis Platform walks teams through the metadata, examples, and business context Claude needs to reason about their data, and keeps that context fresh as data and models evolve.

Self-serve
Governed publishing

From one analyst's spreadsheet to the whole org

Create analysis and reports in Claude and publish it to Civis, so insight stops bottlenecking on the data team. Per-user permissions are what make opening it up safe.

The stack

The nonprofit data layer beneath Claude.

Most nonprofits have CRM records, program data, spreadsheets, and documents spread across dozens of systems. Civis creates the governed source of truth Claude needs to answer accurately and securely.

Claude

Desktop · Browser (coming soon)
Plain-language questionsNo SQLNo data leaves the platform
▲   answers grounded in governed, documented data   ▲

MCP & nonprofit context layer

The bridge to Claude
MCP serverTaxonomiesEmbeddingsBusiness logic
▲   context, governance, and identity make the data legible   ▲

Civis data warehouse

Identity-resolved · catalogued
Managed or BYO Redshift / BigQueryLineageSOC2 · FedRAMP
▲   ingested flat-fee from the tools nonprofits already run   ▲

Source systems

Where your data lives today
Salesforce NPSPRaiser's EdgeEveryActionEngaging NetworksSpreadsheets
Why Civis

A nonprofit-specialized platform, not a general-purpose tool.

Governed Claude access

Permissions are enforced at the data layer, so Claude inherits the exact access each user already has: open it to the whole org without a new security model.

Unified data warehouse

Managed or bring-your-own Redshift / BigQuery, catalogued and lineage-tracked end to end.

Nonprofit-native ingestion

Salesforce NPSP, Raiser's Edge, Engaging Networks, EveryAction, and many more: flat-fee, not per-row.

Identity resolution

A unified constituent record across fundraising, advocacy, membership, and program systems, with federated patterns for chapters & affiliates.

Featured case study

A global medical-relief nonprofit moves its warehouse to Civis, and frees a third of its Salesforce storage.

A leading international medical-relief organization migrated its CRM to Salesforce, an industry gold standard, but faced rising storage costs and growing fundraising data. Civis became the data warehouse and analytics workbench behind it.

Cost savings

Reduced records stored in Salesforce by over 30%.

Data accessibility

Kept historical data available through reporting and aggregated metrics.

Advanced analytics

Now self-sufficient in data maintenance, free to focus on advanced work.

The challenge

The organization supports medical relief in crises worldwide through recruitment, fundraising, and advocacy. As it migrated to Salesforce, higher data-storage fees posed a real financial burden, and managing a growing volume of donation and fundraising data was becoming increasingly complex.

CRMs are excellent at person-level tracking and lightweight reporting, but they aren't true databases, and storage costs climb fast. Using Salesforce as the center of its analytics stack was quickly becoming untenable.

The approach

Through a discovery process, Civis designed a custom data warehouse to centralize the organization's CRM data alongside vendor files and email-marketing data, giving the analytics team a holistic vantage point on its donors.

Civis's broader suite of workflow automation, self-service capabilities, integrated Tableau reporting, and predictive analytics made it the most robust solution. Critically, only Civis could archive old donation and campaign data to save on Salesforce storage.

  • Continuously flags CRM records ready for archival, storing copies in Civis
  • Preserves structure and quality through contact merges and field changes
  • Gives full visibility into donation history via aggregated tables and reporting
Case study · National hunger-relief nonprofit

One hub for fundraising data, and every vendor that touches it.

CIVIS
Salesforce CRM
Analysts
IT team
Response vendors
Email & digital
Reporting

A national hunger-relief organization migrated away from a legacy data warehouse and moved its DWH to Civis. Today, Civis is the hub of a hub-and-spoke integration model that centralizes fundraising data, delivering a holistic Salesforce experience and a shared analytics workbench.

  • One source of truth for analysts, IT, and direct-response vendors
  • Fundraising data centralized from every connected system
  • A holistic Salesforce experience without the legacy warehouse overhead
“

We have a capable tech team, but we're not a software company, and we shouldn't be designing a data warehouse from scratch. We needed to go live with our CRM and analytics together, planned holistically.

MR
Director of CRM Strategy
Leading international medical-relief nonprofit
The opportunity

Nonprofits sit on rich data. Few are fully using it.

34%
make decisions based on data and evidence
Salesforce Nonprofit Trends Report
33%
can personalize messages to specific supporter subgroups
Salesforce Nonprofit Trends Report
31%
can accurately forecast income from fundraising campaigns
Salesforce Nonprofit Trends Report
From Claude-curious to Claude-deployed

Get more out of your Salesforce investment.

Book a demo and we'll show you Civis Platform running against a data model like yours: archival, unified reporting, and a governed MCP connection to Claude included. Prefer to learn more first? Request information and we'll be in touch.

SOC2 & FedRAMP Moderate MCP-ready for Claude 100+ nonprofits served
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