What is the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack?

The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack is a free solution offered to organizations to help them get started using their Salesforce CRM. It’s the first step to configuring the solution for your nonprofit.

The Salesforce NPSP uses and elaborates on the data model used by the CRM to organize data. This standard data model is designed to help users understand how the data is organized comparable to a spreadsheet or database. To understand this concept, we must first go over some standard Salesforce terminology:

  • Object: Objects are like the spreadsheets you use to track information. They are the tabs at the top of your Salesforce screen that measure different aspects of your nonprofit. Standard objects that are a part of Salesforce include accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities. You can also create custom objects to track specific priorities.

  • Fields: Every object has fields attached to it. This is where you find the details of the object you’re looking at. For instance, under your “accounts” object, you may have a field for client contact information like their cell phone number.

  • Records: Records are like the cells of a spreadsheet. This is where you input information according to the correct object and field of that data. For example, within the “accounts” object, you may have a field for the donor’s name, and the record shows that the donor’s name is Phil Smith.

Salesforce apps, like the NPSP, are sets of objects and fields that help organize individual aspects of your nonprofit. The great thing about this specific Salesforce solution is that it organizes data by building out the standard Salesforce data model.

We said from the beginning that the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack is a great way to start customizing your Salesforce solution. However, it’s not the end-all-be-all app. You’ll want to look for a complete fundraising solution that works side-by-side with this data model for easy organization of key metrics, but we’ll cover this in more detail later.

How to use the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack features

  • Accounts are used to organize records about supporters’ households, companies, and other sources of funding.

  • Contacts track data about individual stakeholders such as donors, volunteers, members, etc.

  • Opportunities hold records of promised or fulfilled donations.

  • Campaigns are used to help your nonprofit track the progress of each ask and activity. You can tie them to certain opportunities.

Past these standard objects, the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack also offers additional customized objects that are specifically used for nonprofits. For instance, affiliations, relationships, engagement plan templates, and recurring donations can all be tracked in their own specific Salesforce objects.

Your nonprofit can use each of these different features built into the Salesforce NPSP to organize the data you collect about each of your funding sources.

This all sounds pretty cool, right? But have you noticed a few key things missing from this solution? It’s all about organizing data, but how do you collect that data? In order to maximize the use of the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, you’ll need to expand its functionality with integrations or apps for a complete fundraising solution.

Source: Read more at SalsaLabs