Free Salesforce Data Management Tools for Nonprofits

Community contributed article by James Bullard, Senior Consultant at Exponent Partners.

Data management including importing, exporting and deduping is necessary to keep your data useful and relevant to your users. And there are several free tools available for nonprofits to work with Salesforce data. If you are new to these options, this will be a useful overview for you to familiarize yourself with the landscape.

Important note: As these tools will allow you to mass delete, insert, or update records, we always recommend the following:

• Always have a backup of the data before proceeding.
• Keep a copy of the change file so you can go back to it if necessary.
• Keep a copy of the success and failure files.  Success files include the unique ID of all records so can easily be used to reverse and data manipulations.

I recommend combining these tools to find your best fit. Sometimes what distinguishes tools from one another is purely user interface and/or what you find easier to use.

The free tools covered in the article include:
1) Salesforce Data Export (Backups)
2) Salesforce Data Loader
3) Salesforce Data Management Wizard
4) Dataloader.io
5) Apsona
6) NPSP Data Importer
7) CRM Fusion DemandTools
8) Jitterbit Cloud Dataloader (free version)
9) Eclipse (IDE)
10) Developer Console
11) Workbench

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