The Nonprofit’s Guide to Data Migration: Moving from Raiser's Edge to Nonprofit Cloud
Is your organization considering a move from Raiser's Edge to Salesforce's Nonprofit Cloud? While this transition can significantly improve your fundraising and donor management capabilities, it helps to know what you're getting into before you begin. Based on real-world migration experiences, here's what nonprofit professionals should understand about this journey.
Understanding the Differences
Moving from Raiser's Edge to Nonprofit Cloud isn't like upgrading your smartphone - it's more like redesigning your entire office. The systems think about your data differently, which means you'll need to rethink some of your processes along the way.
Your Campaigns and Appeals: More Options, Different Structure
If you're used to organizing your fundraising efforts using Raiser's Edge campaigns, appeals, and packages, you'll find that Nonprofit Cloud offers even more ways to track your outreach. This is great news for organizations with complex marketing strategies or multiple communication channels.
This means you'll have a better ability to track which messages and channels are most effective with your donors. However, your team will need to carefully plan how your current categories will map to the new system.
A More Structured Approach to Donor Relationships and Households
Nonprofit Cloud handles relationships between donors (like families, couples, or business connections) with more ways to track complex relationships than Raiser’s Edge. This structured approach gives you better ways to track complex relationships, which is helpful for major gift officers and anyone managing household giving. However, careful planning during migration is required to ensure those relationships transfer correctly.
Understanding Gift Management in Nonprofit Cloud
Gift processing in Nonprofit Cloud is structured differently than in Raiser's Edge, and it's helpful to understand these differences early in a migration. Tasks like recording in-kind donations, making gift edits, or tracking designations follow a different logic and data structure - not necessarily more complex, just tailored to the Salesforce platform’s architecture. There are simply alternate ways of achieving the same goals on a more configurable and future-oriented platform.
Because Nonprofit Cloud is a newer solution, it's actively evolving based on nonprofit and partner feedback, including new features and refinements with every release. It’s worth noting that volunteer management tools are also on the horizon, which will further support organizations managing a broad range of engagement activities. Preparing for these platform differences up front allows your team to build sustainable, adaptable processes and positions you to take advantage of improvements as they’re released.
Contact Information: More Flexibility for Multiple Emails and Addresses
Nonprofit Cloud handles contact information (like multiple email addresses or phone numbers) in a way that's actually more similar to Raiser's Edge than other Salesforce products. This means you won't have to choose which email addresses or phone numbers to keep - you can migrate them all. However, this makes it even more important to clean up duplicate or outdated information before migration, as there is no built-in data clean-up step.
Setting Your Team Up for Success
If your organization is considering this transition, here are some practical steps to prepare:
- Clean house first: Use Raiser's Edge's tools to merge duplicate constituents and remove outdated information before exporting your data.
Talk to everyone who uses your database: Different departments may use different features of Raiser's Edge. Make sure you understand what's essential to everyone's work. - Start with your current fundraising processes: Document how you currently handle campaigns, appeals, gift entry, and acknowledgments. This upfront work will make it much easier to build out user stories and other components of your new system down the road.
- Consider your timing carefully: Plan your migration during a relatively quiet period in your fundraising calendar, not in the midst of year-end giving or a major campaign.
- Budget for training: Even tech-savvy staff will need time to learn the new system and adapt their workflows.
How We Approach Data Migration
Migrating your data isn’t just a technical task - it’s a critical opportunity to set your organization up for long-term success. At Idealist Consulting, we’ve developed a collaborative, transparent approach to data migration based on 18+ years of nonprofit experience.
Instead of relying on static spreadsheets, we use our proprietary tool, Story Navigator, to keep the entire data mapping process inside Salesforce. This gives your team real-time visibility, full control over mapping decisions, and lasting documentation, all within your future system.
Whether you're coming from Raiser's Edge or another legacy platform, our method ensures cleaner data, smoother transitions, and better long-term outcomes.
Want the full breakdown of our data migration process? Read our blog post on how we do it differently.
The Long-Term Value
Despite the challenges, organizations that successfully migrate to Nonprofit Cloud often find they can do more with their data than ever before. The platform offers powerful reporting tools, better integration with other systems, and more flexibility as your strategies evolve. Nonprofit Cloud supports a wide range of mission-critical functions - including fundraising, grantmaking, AI functionality, program management, case management, and outcomes management - offering a comprehensive and unified solution for impact-driven organizations.
The key is approaching the migration with realistic expectations. With proper planning and adequate resources, your organization can navigate this transition successfully and emerge with a more powerful system to support your mission for years to come.
Read about a recent Nonprofit Cloud project in our case study with Global Fund for Children, where we supported a seamless migration from Raiser’s Edge to Nonprofit Cloud.
If you’re interested in learning more about what a migration would look like for your organization, get in touch with our team!
