The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) offers nonprofits a powerful, scalable, and customizable platform for successful fundraising. After all, managing and reporting on constituent and donor interactions are critical to raising the funds that support a nonprofit’s mission. The latest version of the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack offers a range of innovative features and advancements that assist you with constituent relationship management.
What is Salesforce NPSP?
The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack or NPSP is a free solution to get a nonprofit organization started utilizing its Salesforce CRM. The Salesforce NPSP utilizes and develops the information model used by the CRM to sort information. This is intended to assist clients with seeing how data is coordinated compared to a spreadsheet.
To get a good grasp of this concept, here are some standard Salesforce terms:
- Object: Objects represent the spreadsheets you typically use to keep track of data – these are the tabs on your Salesforce screen that gauge the different areas of your nonprofit. Accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities are some of the standard objects you will see, but you may opt to add custom objects as necessary.
- Fields: Fields contain the details of the object you are looking at, and every object has one attached to it. It contains relevant information about your object.
- Records: Think of records as cells of a spreadsheet you would normally use to track information – this is where you can input data based on the object.
The NPSP are sets of objects and fields that enable you to identify, collate, and organize the individual aspects of your nonprofit. This particular Salesforce solution is primarily designed to build the standard Salesforce data model as you keep your data streamlined. While this is a great way to start customizing your Salesforce solution, it’s important to note that you will still need a complete fundraising system that will work to complement this data model.
- Basic features may be availed by up to 10 users for free
- It can be customized and configured based on your specific needs.
- Initiates the larger configuration process.
- Developed by Salesforce, so you can expect the data models to work seamlessly.
Being able to track, organize, and optimize the variables powering your nonprofit leads to growth and greater outreach, and these key features are equally important:
Donor Management
Donors are at the very heart of every nonprofit organization, and a good donor management system is imperative for keeping track of them efficiently. Furthermore, this gives you an in-depth look at their varying or consistent interests in your campaigns, their causes, and their demographics. It allows donors to conveniently make donations or claim items from auctions and other fundraising initiatives. With donor information and analysis, you can easily build and curate campaigns, send out event invites that will have better turnout, and help you raise more funds.
Donation Management
Donors support your nonprofit because they believe in your mission, and at the end of the day, transparency and dependability are of utmost importance. Donation management tools can help you divide monetary donations to causes, art to auction campaigns, and many others.
Engagement Management
Your donors, program participants, constituents, and volunteers hold vital positions in your nonprofit organization. Hence, building and sustaining enduring relationships with them is important – staying in constant touch involves monitoring and managing their engagement.
Your NPSP is equipped with the right set of tools giving you the following capabilities:
- Gain insights about how your stakeholders are interacting with your organization.
- Track and manage the onboarding process of your volunteers.
- Set up campaigns to manage and track the engagement of your constituents.
- See and understand how donors are engaging with you.
Volunteer Management
A seamless onboarding process is necessary for managing your volunteers, selecting their schedules, and taking on tasks based on their respective skill sets is made possible by this feature.
Campaign Management
Your NPSP portal enables you to build and manage your social media strategies and launch email campaigns conveniently. Generating new member sign-ups in response to these campaigns is also made possible by this tool – an almost effortless way to start the onboarding process.
Analytics
The data is great. But it means nothing without analytics. Built-in reports allow you to keep track of the donations you receive based on defined criteria and measure the consistency of your campaigns. A dashboard allows you to view these reports daily, proving effective during an active campaign to strategize in run time.
Utilizing the Features of your Salesforce NPSP
Standard Salesforce objects are designed to organize nonprofit data specifically and can be customized to suit your needs:
- Accounts can be utilized to organize records of sources of funding.
- Contacts track data about donors, individual stakeholders, volunteers, and members.
- Opportunities hold data of committed or fulfilled donations.
- Campaigns are used to track the progress of each task which you can then link to opportunities.
Apart from these standard objects, the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack also offers additional customized objects such as relationships, engagement plan templates, and recurring donations -these can all be tracked in their specific Salesforce objects. Your nonprofit can utilize these different features built into the Salesforce NPSP to gather the data you collect. Now that you can organize your data, you will need to broaden its functionality with other apps and integrations for a complete fundraising solution.
Maximizing the use of your NPSP
To reap the full benefits of your NPSP, you will need to develop a software toolbox that will allow you to integrate your fundraising tools with this critical database. Further, it will assist you in streamlining organizational reporting and the tasks and activities you perform. Fundraising tools do require a financial investment on your part. By investing in a complete fundraising solution that integrates with Salesforce, you can be assured that the software will work alongside your NPSP to collect critical information for custom reports.
Here are a few tools that are worth your time:
- Donation Pages
- Donation Tracking
- Peer-to-peer Fundraising
- Marketing Automation
- Online Petitions
- Click-to-call advocacy forms
- Secure payment processing
A total fundraising solution integrated with Salesforce will work with your NPSP to gather important information and generate reports.
These steps will guide you through the process of building a robust fundraising system with reliable data:
- Your data model should be compatible with Salesforce NPSP.
- Ensure that all integration features can be configured.
- Protect data from unauthorized access.
- Talk to a consultant who can assist you in customizing a fundraising solution.
Conclusion
Fundraising can be stressful and time-consuming, especially when organizations are hampered by inadequate or incompatible technological infrastructure. The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Platform (NPSP) has been meticulously designed and developed with the convenience and success of every nonprofit in mind.