Last week, Salesforce announced a new vision for Nonprofit Cloud, the suite of Salesforce nonprofit technology solutions built for the nonprofit sector.
With this announcement, Salesforce noted that the existing industry-specific apps used by thousands of nonprofits will continue to be supported. These include Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for fundraising and relationship management and the Program Management Module (PMM) for client and program management, as well as the Power of Us program that donates the first ten licenses free to nonprofits.
However, for now it is unclear to what extent these solutions will be supported, and the migration path(s) from NPSP to Nonprofit Cloud are still in development. Understandably, for these reasons, the announcement of Nonprofit Cloud has caused some uncertainty among nonprofits using Salesforce. But don’t worry! This blog is going to take you through the big announcement and provide some advice for next steps your org can take.
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What is Nonprofit Cloud?
Salesforce stated that one major goal of Nonprofit Cloud is to make it easier for the nonprofit sector by breaking down information silos within organizations and their partners. They want to make it easier for you to collectively achieve greater impact through collaborating with stakeholders, sharing information, learning from and using data. They convened their partners and your nonprofit peers to find solutions to four priorities for nonprofits:
- Deliver powerful programs through programs and case management
- Grow fundraising income with data intelligence and insights
- Know and expand the community with personalized experiences
- Measure, learn, and share from impact
It is this collaboration that helped them arrive at their new vision. Previously, the nonprofit applications were being layered on top of the platform. Now, they are being built directly into the core of Salesforce, gaining access to the innovation available across all Salesforce industries. The new Nonprofit Cloud seeks to help you tackle all of your goals in a single solution.
They will continue to maintain support for existing offerings like NPSP, Nonprofit Cloud Case Management, the Program Management Model, and more. But they will also offer a new solution to nonprofit organizations with reimagined program management, case management, outcomes, marketing engagement, and fundraising in a single solution. Available now, their next generation of Nonprofit Cloud has a new way to support your programs and case management, tapping into the full power of the Salesforce platform. Fundraising and outcomes will be added to this single solution later this year.
Benefits of Nonprofit Cloud:
Faster and easier access to nonprofit technology
Your programs, fundraising, engagement, and outcomes are more unified. You will be able to make data-driven decisions faster so you can focus on what is working and where you need to drive change. You will also have easier, and much faster, access to innovation from across all of Salesforce. Salesforce’s platform has technology solutions built for hundreds of other industries and use cases, and this new innovation will connect you directly to this portfolio of best-in-class solutions.
Greater cross-sector impact
Building Nonprofit Cloud directly into the Salesforce platform makes it easier for you to adopt technology used in other industries like Health & Life Sciences and the Public Sector.
This means the technology reflects more of how you actually get your jobs done – working with program participants, their families, governments, healthcare organizations, and other nonprofits together to ensure everyone is achieving their goals.
Impact is driven by all
With this reimagining of Nonprofit Cloud, they are building every component with outcomes in mind and are partnering with the customer community to determine what data is critical to capture. This will give you a simpler way to measure outcomes without as much work with heavy customization, and in a more standardized way.
Impact and Next Steps for Nonprofits
Though this announcement comes with a bold vision for expanding support for nonprofit success, there are still many unanswered questions that leave room for concern. While await more clarity on features, functions, costs, and migration paths, here are some suggested paths your nonprofit could begin planning for:
Current customers: Don’t jump to change your operations just yet. Once there is some more clarity on features, flexibility, and migration paths, you can prepare to transition or not. There may be a strong case made for recentering a Salesforce instance around the new Nonprofit Cloud product-line down the road. And a migration path is being developed for NPSP version 3.
New and prospective customers: It might be wise to consider adopting the new Nonprofit Cloud over the NPSP. Thinking long-term, it’s likely we will see a trend of most nonprofits using Salesforce migrating to the Cloud in the next 5 to 10 years.
Change is exciting! But can also require some heavy lifting and usually comes with a steep learning curve. At Soapbox Engage, we are here to support you all through it. We are standing by for more details, and will be sure to communicate what we learn with you all. We have been supporting nonprofits with technology since the origins of NPSP, and we are ready to support the nonprofit community through this next phase of nonprofit tech development!
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you with Salesforce, check out our Salesforce Consulting Services.
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