Soapbox Engage Blog

At the start of this month, we were able to gather in person again for another NPSP Day— this time, in San Francisco! I was fortunate enough to once again facilitate the event alongside Katie McFadden from Common Voyage. It was another exciting day, filled with collaboration and new connections!

The purpose of an NPSP Day is for nonprofit staff, consultants, and Salesforce admin to come together to share knowledge, pose questions, and solve problems to benefit the nonprofit and education sectors' use of the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. And no better setting for NPSP Day than the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco!

We were so grateful to be hosted by Salesforce as we spent the day dreaming up new ways to use their tools. The building itself had amazing conference room spaces and breakout rooms— not to mention a huge full service cafe. They even had baristas! We went to the penthouse of the tower and got the most brilliant view of the entire bay area. These beautiful sights, the great cafe, and a delicious lunch from Mendocino Farms helped provide the ideal environment for stimulating conversations.

There were 32 of us gathered at the Salesforce Tower representing great organizations like YMCA San Francisco, Ukrainian American House, Food and Water Watch, and the Jewish Community Relations Council.

The day started with the “NPSP Weather Report” exercise. We broke into small groups where people shared what about Salesforce was working for them, what wasn’t working, and what was unknown. We wrote these on sticky notes and posted them so the group could see common trends and themes. The exercise helped us identify the patterns and gave us a “forecast” for day’s conversations. We learned the attendees were very interested in fundraising best practices, implementation of 3rd party apps, and NPSP documentation.

We had different rounds of breakouts throughout the day, with distinct sessions for each round. This was a chance to dive deeply into specific use cases of Salesforce. The topics we covered included:

• Donor engagement and communications
• Flows and process automation
• Data imports and exports
• Internal documentation
• Event management best practices
• Reports and dashboards and analytics
• User adoption buy-in
• Moves management
• Finance and accounting
• Fundraising best practices
• Discovery and process design
• And more!

The breakout groups gave us the opportunity to connect more deeply with a smaller group of people. Attendees spoke about how valuable it was to be able to meet and speak with other users, and learn expertise from experienced users that they can use and recommend to their clients.

These connections are sure to continue beyond NPSP Day! Multiple people realized their offices were nearby and exchanged contact info so they could meet for lunch in the future. And one organization wants to host a brainstorming session with some of the other organizations to continue the fundraising strategy conversation. We can’t wait to see these connections blossom!

We wrapped up the day over happy hour at the nearby Natoma Cabana cocktail bar, full of new knowledge and motivated for the future. I can’t wait to see how these organizations flourish by making the most of Salesforce features and offerings. I’m so grateful for the part we can play in making sure organizations working to change the world have the best resources and tools, and know how to use them.

Can’t wait until the next one! In the meantime, you can read about our last event, NPSP Day Seattle!