Salesforce Launches The Nonprofit Cloud!
Humble NPSP Beginnings
When Salesforce.org (then Salesforce Foundation) made the decision in the late 2000’s to build applications for nonprofits, the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) was launched as a basic set of functionality that made Salesforce more nonprofit “friendly”. With the Nonprofit Starter Pack, nonprofits could work with partners such as Arkus to migrate their data and customize Salesforce to manage fundraising, donation management, and a variety of other nonprofit use cases. Back then much of the functionality needed by nonprofits required custom configuration, and although most nonprofits share similar requirements, each implementation was unique, costly, and not easily repeatable.
As the Salesforce.org Nonprofit ecosystem grew, so did the need for expandable, repeatable, and scalable solutions for their nonprofit customers. Salesforce.org began to invest in their own technology and have built their product development team into a small army over the past couple of years.
Nonprofit Success For All
From an end user perspective, NPSP 2.0 was more of a true fundraising/donor management application, with core donation management, donor engagement, and canned reporting and analytics. Shortly after 2.0 came 3.0, which moved NPSP to the new Lightning Experience user interface, made Households part of the core data model, and really set the stage for the Nonprofit Cloud.
Parallel to the transformation of NPSP into a true nonprofit constituent management solution was the use of the greater Salesforce platform for a wide array of nonprofit use cases. From using Pardot Marketing for donor and constituent engagement to using Salesforce Community Cloud for the creation of alumni and membership centers, the entire platform has been embraced by nonprofits across the world. Add to that the hundreds of AppExchange partners bringing their nonprofit tools onto the platform for online giving, wealth screening, case management and more, nonprofits for the first time could realize running their organization on one platform… Salesforce!
A Brand New Nonprofit Cloud
It comes as no surprise that we see the launch of the Nonprofit Cloud this month. Less of a new product suite, Nonprofit Cloud is more a clear articulation of how the entire Salesforce platform can potentially be leveraged by nonprofits of all shapes, sizes, and missions. With NPSP at the core, nonprofits can now tap into the Nonprofit Cloud to build solutions to manage fundraising, programs, advocacy and much more by leveraging the best of what Salesforce has to offer and following the Nonprofit Cloud best practice solution set model.
To support adoption of the new Nonprofit Cloud, Salesforce has bundled together packages of products for sale at a further discounted price. These “Growth Kits” will allow nonprofits to use other products for their CRM, Marketing and Internal Collaboration needs (NPSP, Pardot, and Quip). To support the move to Growth Kits, Arkus has aligned with Salesforce.org to provide thoughtful and agile implementations that empower nonprofits not only to move successfully to Salesforce but realize the Nonprofit Cloud vision for their organization.
Are you new to Salesforce and interested in the Nonprofit Cloud for your organization? Are you an existing Salesforce customer and interested in taking advantage of all Nonprofit Cloud has to offer? Tell us about it on the Salesforce Community or chat with me @rboyleSF
