Four years of Salesforce Elevate: Reflecting on the tool and the path forward

If you haven’t heard, Salesforce announced the retirement of their online giving solution, Elevate, last year. Nonprofits and higher education organizations that rely on the tool for their online donation forms will have to find another solution. For those who have active recurring donations on the platform, who spent a lot of time on their giving forms and learning the tool’s quirks, this probably seems like bad news. It means it’s time to go through the stressful and time-consuming process of implementing another online giving solution again.

At Sleek, we focus on the advantages that change can bring. Elevate’s sunset brings an opportunity to get on a truly modern solution—one that’ll last a lifetime. In this article, we highlight lessons learned from Elevate’s 4-year-long life and discuss how our experience implementing Elevate informs our new online giving solution on QSS™.

Reflecting on 4 Years of Elevate: What worked? What didn’t?

Over the last few years, we’ve implemented and helped manage Salesforce Elevate for our QSS™ customers. Since it’s a Salesforce native tool, recommending it was an easy choice. We’ve learned a lot about what our nonprofit and higher education clients like and don’t like about Elevate. Often times, our customers were excited about the same pieces of functionality and also complained about the same features or bugs. The table below summarizes some of the feedback we heard most.

What comes after Elevate?

Many organizations that used Elevate found it to be a great learning experience. They know a lot more about what’s important when it comes to choosing an online giving solution. Sleek learned a lot, too. With Elevate approaching end of life, we’ve rolled out a custom online giving solution that takes into the account the lessons of Elevate. It’s built on Experience Cloud using Lightning Web Components and, for our clients who have already migrated their online giving onto our new QSS17 solution, it’s a game changer.

You might be thinking, “Can my organization afford this new solution?” The thing is, our online giving solution is a one-time cost. We set it up for you, provide you the tools to spin up new pages when the need arrives, work with your team to make sure it’s customized and personalized in exactly the way you want it (both in terms of functionality and branding). Then it’s yours. There’s no regular fee that you have to pay to host your online giving forms on our QSS17 solution. That means you only have to worry about Salesforce licensing (which you’re already paying if you use Salesforce for your fundraising system–if you don’t, you should!) and payment processor fees–both of which you’d be paying anyway, no matter which online giving solution you use.

In designing our own online giving solution, Sleek business analysts and developers incorprated all the feedback we got from clients when we implemented Elevate and other online giving tools. We were able to build in the best of everything and some of the greatest functionality to provide the giving experience that 21st-century donors expect. That includes searchable lists of designations, shopping cart functionality, online pledges, self-service recurring donation management, peer-to-peer capabilities, giving day dashboards, and much more.

Lastly, with our solution, you have full control over the integration with your fundraising CRM. For example, many of our clients prefer to have online gifts get put into batches that can be manually reviewed and processed before they’re committed to gift records. That way you can reduce the number of duplicate Contacts, re-allocate any gifts where donors requested a specific designation through a write-in, integrate online giving with your receipting and stewardship business processes, and have the final say over what goes into your books.

Don’t take our word for it–click the link below to check it out for yourself and experience the future of online giving!

Ready to learn more? Reach out to use to schedule a personalized demo! We’re confident that whatever your online giving needs are, our solution will handle them and much more.