Introduction
The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack is a free solution integrated into the Nonprofit Cloud provided by Salesforce for all a nonprofit organization’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) needs. The widespread benefits and features that NPSP offers can seem intimidating at first. Still, once you get started, you will find it easy to use and incredibly beneficial.
How do you get started with understanding the essentials of NPSP?
Before diving deeper into how Salesforce NPSP expands on the standard data model to store data in an organized way, there are three main terminologies to understand.
- Objects are considered spreadsheets that are used to track information. These are the tabs at the top of your Salesforce screen that measure various aspects, such as accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, and any custom object to track specific priorities.
- Fields are attached to objects and provide details of the object you are looking at. For example, the ‘accounts’ object may give you client contact details.
- Records are the cells of the spreadsheet. On Salesforce, this is where you input information according to the object. For example, the ‘accounts’ object may have a field with the donor’s name.
NPSP is a set of objects and fields that help your organization create individualized experiences to ensure you only see your priorities. It is a great way to start customizing your Salesforce solution.
Within objects, there are four main components:
- Accounts are used to organize records.
- Contacts track data about individuals such as donors or volunteers.
- Opportunities hold records of any donations that may be pending or have come through.
- Campaigns track the progress of activities and include donor management and marketing aspects.
These, however, are just standard objects. You can customize objects specific to you and your nonprofit with affiliations, relationships, engagement plan templates, and recurring donation tracking.
What are the Features of NPSP?
NPSP offers several features that focus specifically on nonprofit organizations.
Donor management is the most essential part of a nonprofit organization since donors make any nonprofit run. Proper donor management lets you know details about your donors to customize emails or phone calls better. It also gives your donors easy ways to make donations, allowing for stress-free interaction for both parties. With the information provided through donor analysis, you can even build personalized campaigns and send out invites and emails to help you increase donor retention and raise funds.
Donation management helps manage donations, allocate them to wherever you want, and keep track of who it is coming from and how often. This option enables you to follow the money and provides a standard data model to record details about donors and clients. That also adds fundraising capabilities to track donations on one system. Record types include donations, grants, in-kind gifts, major gifts, matching donations, and even memberships.
Engagement management helps you monitor, track, and manage engagements from different people. This tool enables you to set up campaigns to track and manage constituents’ engagement, make sure your volunteers’ onboarding process is seamless, and even help your volunteers determine the best position for them.
Volunteer management ensures your volunteers have a smooth onboarding process, allows them to make their schedule, and even picks positions based on their skill set. It provides your volunteers are engaged and will enable you to follow their journey.
Campaign management helps you build and manage entire campaigns from the NPSP portal. You can create personalized emails to send to different groups of people and even launch a detailed social media campaign that can be run outside of Salesforce. Campaign management can automatically track any new member sign-ups in response to these campaigns.
How does NPSP work with Salesforce?
NPSP was built for a community of over 47,000 nonprofits and has worked to provide essential tools to manage different aspects of a nonprofit organization. This package is a managed package, meaning that it has objects, reports, tools, and settings you can add to Salesforce and even upgrade with new features constantly being released. The Nonprofit Success Pack is an app found through the App Launcher feature on your home page. Here is how it works with Salesforce:
- Nonprofits do not typically interact with clients or the community in a business-to-business scenario. That is where the Household Account model comes in. This model groups people (or Contact records) into households (Account records). Donations (or Opportunity records) are associated with these people and households. The Household Account on Salesforce helps you track entire households to keep track of the programs and the people.
- Relationships track connections between contacts, while affiliations track connections between contacts and other accounts. Relationship and Affiliation objects follow how stakeholders are connected and even to organizations.
- Get access to Objects that help you track how gifts are allocated and even follow a donor’s giving history. Prebuilt fundraising tools help track recurring donations and even streamline gift data entry.
With NPSP, you can track the following:
- Multiple addresses for accounts and contacts.
- Relationships between contacts and organizations.
- Deliverables that are used to track requirements.
- General Accounting Units (or ways to track funds and where they are allocated).
- Payments made toward an opportunity.
- Recurring donations.
- Batch Gift Entries (which allow entering gifts in a bulk process).
What does Salesforce NPSP Integrate With?
One of the most significant benefits of investing in NPSP is the integration capabilities of apps available in the Salesforce AppExchange. Through App Exchange, you can integrate with individual tools, such as apps or plugins, designed to perform a specific function (such as collecting donations online). These tools include tools not connected to Salesforce, such as prospect research databases.
NPSP can integrate with donation management solutions such as Crowdrise, Classy, QGiv, and Payment360.
NPSP can integrate with event management tools such as Eventbrite and Fonteva.
NPSP can integrate with charity auction apps such as OneCause and connect it using the prebuilt Salesforce connector on AppExchange.
NPSP offers a Salesforce add-on to track volunteer activity called Volunteers for Salesforce (or V4S).
Because of all its integration capabilities, NPSP is an excellent addition to your nonprofit to ensure all your needs are fulfilled.
Do you know all the Benefits?
Salesforce’s NPSP is an open-source platform with very little code required to run an application.
NPSP grows with your nonprofit as various apps are built into the platform, enabling NPSP to evolve and change with your nonprofit. You will not need to invest in another solution and deal with the data migration process again. While you may need to purchase additional licenses and storage as your nonprofit grows, you will not need to worry about moving to another solution ever again!
AppExchange has many different solutions, which means you will have a marketplace of tools to choose from. Other CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) can have complicated integration processes, but NPSP can be expanded using tools without moving data.
How do you know when to make the Switch?
NPSP is an excellent addition to any nonprofit with its many features and benefits. Change can be scary, especially when it comes to such a significant change (even if it is only for the better), and there are things that you will have to consider before changing to another CRM.
If you are an organization ready to invest, NPSP can be a strong fit for you. Due to NPSP’s wide range of functionality, the price of purchasing storage and other licenses may be steeper than it would be for a smaller organization. This solution is great for larger organizations who understand how much money they would be putting into the pack, especially when there may be costs associated with hiring a strategy consultant to migrate data and help you customize the solution.
If you are okay with a longer implementation timeline, NPSP may be right for you. Implementing NPSP involves a complete shift in how your nonprofit organizes and views data. Even though the data migration will be easy, it will still be time-consuming. According to DML OmniMedia, Salesforce implementation can take 12 to 18 months (about 1 and a half years), from the initial discovery process to the final training dates.
Analyze your organization’s needs, the tools you are using, your budget, and your anticipated timeline before making the change to Salesforce NPSP.
Conclusion
The shift to NPSP may seem scary because Salesforce is a large platform offering many tools and services for all your nonprofit’s needs. Luckily, our team of experts here at Prudent can ensure you make the change effortlessly. Click here to learn more about the features and benefits of Salesforce NPSP!