NPSP Enables Nonprofit Success

By: Adam Kramer, Senior Project Manager, KELL Partners and Salesforce MVP

I couldn’t be more excited about the recent announcement of the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). Years of development by Salesforce.org and the nonprofit community have resulted in the creation of the most popular Salesforce app for nonprofits. It’s a very exciting time for our nonprofit Salesforce community.

NPSP offers an industry-standard data architecture, and provides key building blocks for constituent and donor management.

What does this all mean?

For starters, NPSP comes with built-in functionality to manage programs, donations, volunteers, and supporters. Think of these as the base building blocks of the Salesforce CRM system. Whether you need to track grants and deliverables around them; manage volunteer hours, shifts and registration; or engage constituents, NPSP does all of this and more out of the box. It’s so much more than just another fundraising system.

Take, for example, the just-released Engagement Plans. This new functionality in NPSP allows users to assign tasks with dependencies around them. Most systems simply offer moves management for fundraising professionals (this typically entails actions like assigning a task to follow up with a donor prospect via email a few days after an in-person meeting, another task to do so via phone if you don’t hear back, and so on towards securing the donation).

Engagement Plans do this beautifully, but they’re not just tied to fundraising. You can create tasks based on case management, volunteer management — or anything programmatically or operationally you’re tracking in Salesforce. Engagement Plans are a great example of a building block that can connect to any other building block. NPSP helps you drive impact, not just raise funds.

Importantly, these building blocks are truly flexible. Many other technologies require rigorous and repetitive data entry, which takes valuable time away from your critical processes and from deeply engaging constituents. By contrast, NPSP gives you flexibility on how to enter data. Whether it’s the NPSP import object to import people, donations, and campaign membership all at the same time, a plug-and-play batch tool downloaded from the Appexchange, one of many online form tools or online donation processors, or simple one-off entry through Salesforce’s native UI — entering data never bogs you down. You can streamline processes around what matters — understanding your constituents and keeping them in the fold — rather than getting their latest information into the system in the first place.

NPSP also comes with various great reports and dashboards that you can leverage from day one — built for nonprofits, by nonprofits. This is where the Salesforce platform can really soar. Customized reports are easy to create, including reports that combine different types of records together into a single view. NPSP is built on top of many core Salesforce objects and features, which allows you to use reports to gain rich and holistic insights into your programs, fundraising, and constituents.

I’m very happy with what I’ve seen added to the Nonprofit Success Pack recently. More is to come given that Salesforce.org releases and automatically pushes updates to your organization every two weeks. I can’t wait to see what’s next.