Imagine if you're a third-party developer creating integrations with the Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP).  Right now, you need to build services on your own that manage the routing of data, creates matching between inbound data and existing data in the NPSP, and much more.  With the NPSP spread across multiple Salesforce packages, integrations for donations, event registrations, and more can be quite cumbersome.

What if instead, the NPSP had a pre-built set of APIs that you could tap into, providing you a landing zone for your inbound data.  A location where you needed to know little-to-nothing about the NPSP, but your organizational clients could know that their data was being properly routed to its own home.

Well my friends, a few good folks from the NPSP developer sprint in DC this week have started to make this happen.  Life as we know it for ISVs will become much better.

If you’re a nonprofit using Salesforce, chances are you are looking for strategies for increasing user adoption among staff at your organization. One element of this is solid training of staff that allows them to understand some essential concepts and get their hands dirty.

But how does one do that effectively and efficiently, and make sure the training sticks? This was a question we were bandying about at the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Starter Pack developer sprint.

Naturally, I thought of Van Halen.

While there's healthy discussion happening in the Nonprofit Salesforce.com Practitioners user group, an area that isn't highlighted enough is new ideas for the Nonprofit Starter Pack.  I don't mean just feature ideas for fundraising, donations, case management, etc.  I'm talking about bug reports, bug fixes, documentation, tutorials, translations, and more.

With such a great community of users and implementers, this seems like a missed opportunity.

During chats at the Nonprofit Developer Sprint in DC this week, Salesforce Foundation staff  made it clear that they welcome community support in a variety of contexts, including ideas that can make the software itself better.  Hence, the Foundation's fantastic support of events like this week's sprint.  The challenge, it seems, is that there hasn't been a path to community engagement in the form of cultivating new feature ideas, bug fixes, documentation, etc.

If you're interested in getting your hands on the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) for Salesforce, there's two standard ways to get started.  Depending on your needs, especially if you're just tinkering before building a full Salesforce implementation for your organization, one of these installs will likely be more useful to you than the other.

The most common way is through a system called Trialforce.  This is the type of Salesforce org that is created when you sign up for the Salesforce Foundation's free product donation form.  The benefit of using this version of the Nonprofit Starter Pack is that it comes pre-built with a number of items that aren't included in the managed package version of the NPSP, like record types that are specific for non-profit organizations.

This can save  you a lot of time getting up and running; however, if you're looking for a customized installation of Salesforce, you might end up spending quite a bit of time deleting customizations.