Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP): A Guide

Find out how Fionta can help you make the most of Salesforce NPSP.

At Fíonta, we help smaller nonprofits get up and running with the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for stakeholder management, fundraising, supporter management, and basic grants management.

We review each nonprofit’s unique functional 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 we can help 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: 

  1. What Is The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)?
    1. What does NPSP include?
  2. 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! 

Learn the basics of Salesforce NPSP.

What Is The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)?

Salesforce.org, a nonprofit social enterprise, is responsible for all of Salesforce’s philanthropic activity, leveraging Salesforce’s technology, people, and resources to improve communities. 

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, stakeholder relationship management solution, and more. It’s a solution offered to 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. The NPSP can be accessed via the Salesforce AppExchange 

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 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.

Find out more about how your nonprofit can use NPSP.

How Can Nonprofits Use NPSP?

Because NPSP is designed to configure the Salesforce CRM functionality to be useful for nonprofits, there are many different ways that it can be used to your advantage. A few of the common ways it is used include: 

  • Fundraising. Cultivate and enable donor relationships, manage your donation cycle, track online donations, move prospects up a 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.
  • Stakeholder Relationship Management. A core benefit of using Salesforce is tracking your interactions with stakeholders in a centralized, controlled, secure way. This protects your nonprofits from losing important contact data because it isn’t recorded properly. 
  • Case management. Whether your cases are inquiries or questions from clients or support requests from stakeholders, Salesforce tracks service requests and what was performed so every interaction with every stakeholder 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.

NPSP – specifically built for nonprofits by Salesforce.org — is strongly supported by a global community and the initial user licenses are provided at no charge to qualified organizations through the Power of Us program. This program provides 10 free licenses to nonprofit organizations and discounts on additional subscriptions, products, and/or services from Salesforce.org. 

Additional Resources

Migrate to Salesforce NPSP with ease with Fionta's help.