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.

Book a demo Request information
SOC2 FedRAMP Moderate MCP-ready for Claude 100+ nonprofits served
The three reasons
Reason 01 · Cut storage costs

Unique Salesforce record archival

Archive records the CRM doesn't need to hold and stop paying CRM rates to store them, without losing access to a single record.
Reason 02 · A real analytics layer

The analytics & AI a CRM was never built for

A true data warehouse and analytics workbench behind your CRM: unified data, real reporting, and predictive models your team can act on.
Reason 03 · AI for 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
Reason 01 · 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. For many nonprofits, the storage savings alone offset much of the platform's cost. The rest is upside: a true 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.

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

One international nonprofit archived roughly a third of its Salesforce records with Civis, and kept every one of them accessible through reporting.

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
100%
of archived history stays accessible via reporting
Nightly
incremental syncs keep the warehouse current
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
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
Reason 02 · The analytics layer

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.

Nonprofit-native ingestion

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

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.

Built for chapters & affiliates

Federated data patterns give national organizations and their chapters one shared, governed view of every supporter.

Reason 03 · 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 across the org. Insight stops bottlenecking on one analyst's spreadsheet.

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 Context kept fresh for Claude
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. A nonprofit-specialized platform, not a general-purpose tool.

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
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.

Donation and campaign history kept accumulating year over year, and using Salesforce as the center of the 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
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
Book a demo
Request info

Book a demo

A 30-minute walkthrough of archival, reporting, and Claude on live data.

By submitting, you agree to be contacted by Civis Analytics.