5 Benefits You Won’t Get Unless You Upgrade to Nonprofit Starter Pack 3

By: Julia Whitehead, UK Non Profit User Group Co-Host, Giveclarity.org

Giveclarity is a UK-based Salesforce.org implementation partner working exclusively in the nonprofit sector. Our aim is to help make organisations better at what they do, enabling them to focus greater attention on their core charitable and social aims. The new Nonprofit Starter Pack 3 is packed full of great new features, and in this Upgrade Month blog post, we share five reasons why upgrading may be a sensible decision for your organisation.

1. NPSP 3 is easier to manage and keep up to date

Did you know that Salesforce.org automatically delivers updates to the Nonprofit Starter Pack 3 every two weeks? Meaning you don’t have to install them yourself, you just enable the features you want.

Existing NPSP packages will continue to be supported and available, but will no longer receive new functionality without installing the NPSP 3 upgrade.

With the new NPSP Settings Tab, Health Check function and central Errors Table your System Administrator is much more in control.

Health Check verifies that all of your NPSP settings are valid, and checks your data for incompleteness or inconsistencies (for example, Contacts with no specified Accounts, Households without Contacts, and so on). You get to know about any issues before your users do, so you can make any changes required.

2. New and improved data import tool

The Nonprofit Starter Pack data import tool has also been improved! The greatest benefit it offers is turning data from a single row of an import into multiple related records (contact, account, donation). Very useful in an initial implementation or data migration.

You can also add custom fields to the import that get written to any of the associated objects/records created. Existing records are matched, and data can be added to the existing record. A holding record is created for specific records that fail, making it quicker to fix those records.

3. Easier grants and membership management

With multiple opportunity membership record types, you can now specify multiple Opportunity Membership Record Types, creating a much better solution for grant making and membership organisations – out of the box – saving you time and money.

The Manage Grants feature is ready to use in NPSP 3. It includes features such as the ability to keep track of these deadlines as you communicate with the funding organization and your grant moves along in its process from Prospecting to Awarded.

NPSP 3 also comes with four new membership-specific fields for the Opportunity (Donation) object ― the values of these four fields, in addition to some standard opportunity field, is ‘rolled up’ to the Contact, Household and/or Account (Organization) record as appropriate, making reporting and highlighting of contacts much easier.

4. Easier household management

Understanding your audience, communicating at the appropriate frequency, and maintaining addresses has always been tricky! The new Household Account Model makes this much easier for you now. It also means more compatibility with the thousands of apps available on the AppExchange.

You can now customize the names of your Households to avoid confusion between Households with similar names. You can also customize settings for formal and informal greetings, the number of Household members listed in greetings, and so on.

With multiple and seasonal Addresses, you can now store multiple addresses for Household Accounts and Contacts as well as seasonal addresses, again meaning you don’t waste time and money communicating with people when they are not there.

5. Improvements driven by you!

Many new features have been created as a result of feedback from you, the users. And in fact, some of the features are created by the users. There’s no charge for upgrades, and yet you constantly get to benefit from ideas generated from thousands of other nonprofits from around the globe.

Looking for help with the NPSP 3 upgrade in the UK or Europe? Learn more at www.giveclarity.org.

Watch the Upgrade Webinar Recording