Introduction to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising

Introduction to Salesforce's Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising

For nonprofits, the impact of technology on philanthropy and fundraising cannot be overstated. Salesforce, a trailblazer in the realm of customer relationship management (CRM), has unveiled a new solution designed for nonprofit organizations - the Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising. This offering, part of the new Nonprofit Cloud, promises to streamline how nonprofits manage donor relationships, streamline fundraising efforts, and ultimately further their missions.

In this blog post, we'll introduce you to the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising, exploring its key features and the potential it holds for the nonprofit sector.


A Tailored Solution for Nonprofits

Salesforce's Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising (NPC Fundraising) is specifically designed to meet the unique needs of nonprofit organizations. With its suite of tools and features, this cloud-based solution helps nonprofits engage with donors, manage fundraising campaigns, and measure their impact in an entirely new way.

Adopters of NPC Fundraising can make use of four apps to perform common nonprofit responsibilities and tasks:

  • Fundraising Strategy: Offers a top-level understanding of fundraising activity and data.
  • Donor Engagement: Provides quick access to track and manage your marketing efforts with campaigns and source codes.
  • Philanthropy & Partnerships: Work with and record interactions with major donors, grantmakers, and planned givers on high-impact giving.
  • Fundraising Operations: Assist donors with their requests and process routine gift entry.

Learn more about NPC Fundraising apps and features here.

Guide to Fundraising During COVID-19

What is Sticking Around from the NPSP?

Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising will change the way organizations approach donor engagement and fundraising efforts. But it also makes use of several familiar fundraising features (albeit in a different format) known from the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). Some of the highlights include:

  • Gift Entry: Offering the ability to log single gifts or create gifts in bulk.
  • Gift Commitments: Enabling the creation, scheduling, and management of gift commitments and installments.
  • Fund Designation: Allowing donors to designate gifts to one or more funds.
  • Soft Credits: The capability to attribute soft credits to individuals or organizations who have influenced gifts.
  • Fundraising Campaigns: Streamlined creation and management of fundraising campaigns.
  • Accounting Subledger Integration: This integration is improved and comes out-of-the-box.
  • Deduplication & Merging: To keep your data clean.

High-Touch Fundraising Experience

What makes NPC Fundraising stand out from previous solutions is the enhancement of the "high-touch fundraising" experience, offering a more streamlined approach for gift officers to manage their portfolios and engage with donors effectively. We’ll take a look at a few of these enhancements below:

Interactions Summary

With the new Nonprofit Cloud, Interaction Summaries provide a way to log detailed notes about donor interactions, facilitating a deeper understanding of:

  • Donor relationships
  • Donor affiliations
  • Life events

Donor Support Profile

Additionally, a Donor Support Profile view simplifies donor support operations with:

  • Recent Alerts, such as notifications for when upcoming installments are due.
  • Actions Launcher, that enables you to quickly pause/resume a commitment, change a payment method, update schedule for recurring donations, or search for other actions or Flows.
  • Timeline, that tracks completed, upcoming, and overdue changes to the donor profile.

And, of course, in addition to the above, the Donor Support Profile provides quick access to key information:

  • Contact information
  • Communication preferences
  • Gifts and payment data
  • History of past interactions

NPC Fundraising Donor Support Profile

Accounting Subledger

Another significant addition is the out-of-the-box Accounting Subledger integration, a solution that prepares your fundraising information and assists in reconciling fundraising data with your accounting systems. The enhanced connection streamlines collaboration between fundraising and finance teams, with the Account Subledger Growth edition included in Nonprofit Cloud.

While it was possible to buy the managed package version of Accounting Subledger with NPSP, this out-of-the-box core version of Accounting Subledger is significantly faster and more flexible.

An Improved Gift Data Model

It's important to note that Fundraising in Nonprofit Cloud employs a new data model, introducing two new objects alongside the familiar Opportunities:

  • Opportunity: For large gifts, grants, planned gifts, and other major gifts.
  • Gift Commitment: For commitments to gifts that haven't been fully received yet, including recurring donations, grants with payments, pledges, and planned gifts with payments.
  • Gift Transaction: For recording actual payments or gifts received, including recurring donation installments and one-time gifts. This architectural shift aims to provide a more precise way to track various types of gifts and payments while retaining the popular features from NPSP.

NPC Fundraising Gift Data Model

Integration and Scalability of NPC Fundraising

The Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising is designed to work seamlessly with other Salesforce products, such as Marketing Cloud and Einstein Analytics, further enhancing its capabilities. This integration allows nonprofits to have a unified platform for their various needs, from marketing to analytics.

What's more, Salesforce's cloud solutions are known for their scalability. As your nonprofit grows, the platform can expand to accommodate your evolving needs.

Guide to Fundraising During COVID-19


Salesforce's Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising represents a continued effort to leverage technology for good. By providing an all-encompassing platform to manage donor relationships, streamline fundraising campaigns, and harness data-driven insights, this cloud solution has the potential to refine how nonprofits operate.

To learn more and explore the specific features and benefits of Salesforce's Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising, be sure to visit the official Salesforce release notes. Stay tuned for further insights into how this powerful tool is shaping the future of nonprofit fundraising.


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