At Fíonta, we help smaller nonprofits get up and running with the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for supporter management, fundraising, donor management, and basic grants management.
While Salesforce’s primary platform for nonprofits is now Nonprofit Cloud, Salesforce NPSP is still supported, and interested nonprofits can still invest in it.
In this guide, we’ll review nonprofits’ unique software requirements and assess the surrounding technical environment. From there, we prepare clear documentation of implementation options and our recommendations. Lastly, we perform expert, hands-on work to address the highest priority recommendations. This type of starting engagement gets clients moving in the right direction as new Salesforce NPSP users.
Before you get started with the NPSP, we want to help you understand what it is and how it can be a useful tool for your nonprofit. In this guide, we’ll cover:
- What Is The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)?
- How Can Nonprofits Use NPSP?
By the end of this guide, you’ll have a deeper understanding of how NPSP can be valuable for your organization. Let’s dive right in!
What Is The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)?
The Nonprofit Success Pack (or NPSP) is a set of packaged Salesforce configurations that enables nonprofits to use Salesforce’s core CRM as a fundraising system, supporter relationship management solution, and more. It’s a solution offered to charitable organizations to help them get started using their Salesforce CRM and is the first step to configuring Salesforce for your nonprofit.
The NPSP overlay itself is free and remains free for the first ten licenses, which gives nonprofits access to the CRM if they’re not already using it. NPSP can be accessed via the Salesforce AppExchange. With the switch to Nonprofit Cloud as Salesforce’s primary platform for nonprofits, be sure to specify to your Salesforce account manager that your ten free licenses will be put towards NPSP. Otherwise, it will be assumed that the licenses are for Nonprofit Cloud.
What does NPSP include?
NPSP comes with a wide variety of functions and integrates seamlessly with other Salesforce AppExchange solutions for email marketing, lead deduplication, volunteer management, and more.
You’ll get access to portals, dashboards, and features to help with:
- Building a community for donors, members, and volunteers
- Increasing employee productivity through case management
- Automating daily processes and manual tasks
- Tracking donations and managing the donation cycle
- Tracking grants you’ve applied to
On top of this, NPSP allows you to visualize reports in simple dashboards so that you can understand performance. It comes with over 70 industry reports and dashboards to make it easy to see how you measure up to others in the sector.
How Can Nonprofits Use NPSP?
Because NPSP is designed to configure the Salesforce CRM to be useful for nonprofits, it comes with many features that can be used to your advantage immediately after implementation. A few of the common ways it is used include:
- Fundraising. Cultivate donor relationships, manage your donation cycle, track online donations, move prospects up the donor ladder, and more.
- Volunteer management. Salesforce is perfect for tracking volunteer contact information, skills, availability, assignments, and other volunteer-related designations or tasks. With the Volunteers for Salesforce app, you can host volunteer-specific web pages and create custom volunteer sign-up forms.
- Membership management. There is basic support for membership-oriented organizations, to track joins, renewals, and similar activities.
- Grants management. The Nonprofit Success Pack includes basic functionality to track grants for which your nonprofit has applied, including when they’re due, when a decision is expected, intermediary conversations with program officers, and even anticipated revenue.
- Constituent Relationship Management. A core benefit of using Salesforce is tracking your interactions with supporter in a centralized, controlled, and secure way. This protects your nonprofits from losing important contact data due to recording errors.
- Case management. Salesforce tracks service requests and what was performed for each so every interaction with every supporter is tracked. Cases can be escalated based on rules, and end-users can check the status and update their cases with a web-based portal.
If you want to expand your Salesforce system’s functionality, you explore the Salesforce AppExchange. While NPSP may be less flexible than Nonprofit Cloud, it is still built on the Salesforce system and thus is highly customizable, allowing nonprofits to adapt their NPSP platform to their needs.
Additional Resources
While nonprofits should strongly consider Nonprofit Cloud, NPSP still provides nonprofit organizations with a number of essential tools for managing basic tasks. Larger organizations should primarily opt for Nonprofit Cloud, but NPSP remains a reliable platform for medium-sized nonprofits.
To learn more about Nonprofit Cloud and other Salesforce tools, check out these resources:
- Nonprofit Cloud: The Salesforce Nonprofit Family Expands. Learn more about Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud to decide whether Nonprofit Cloud or NPSP is right for your nonprofit.
- Salesforce Experience Cloud Explained: A Beginner’s Guide. Your nonprofit can leverage Salesforce to create unique experiences for your supporters online. Discover how by exploring our guide to Salesforce Experience Cloud.
- Combat Ineffective Volunteer Management with Nonprofit Cloud. Interested in how you can manage your volunteer program on Nonprofit Cloud? Explore this guide to what effective volunteer management with Salesforce looks like today.
Build stronger donor relationships. Contact Fionta today and learn more about the NPSP guide!