We recently wrote about the release of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, the new industry solution released by Salesforce. On the heels of this blog, we were faced with many curious customers debating about whether it’s time for them to switch from NPSP (Nonprofit Success Pack) to Nonprofit Cloud and the answer is… it depends. In this article, we’ll expand on that exact subject.
Wait… What is Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Again?
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is a new Salesforce for Nonprofits solution designed to meet the unique needs of nonprofit organizations and help them better achieve their missions. Nonprofit Cloud is built on the Salesforce platform, and it includes a range of features that are specifically tailored to nonprofit organizations. These features include tools for managing donor relationships, programs, fundraising campaigns, and outcome measurement. Nonprofit Cloud also includes advanced analytics capabilities, which can help organizations track their impact and measure their success.
While it’s still early days, there are a few key features that may make a difference in the feature set:
Omnistudio
Omnistudio enables you to build digital-first experiences for your users tailored to your industry. This is not a new solution. In fact, other industry clouds already take advantage of Omnistudio like Financial Services Cloud for automated onboarding and account opening. Put plainly, Omnistudio is a mechanism by which you can design guided, dynamic user experiences for repetitive tasks like, volunteer or partner onboarding, or appointment setting with a click-and-drag UI. Omnistudio can also be used outside of Salesforce, which enables nonprofit organizations to create experiences for program application and enrollment flows, to event registration, attendance tracking, and more.
Life Events and Milestones
Life events and Milestones is a clever way to keep track of important milestones in your constituents’ lives and deepen your connection with them. Already a major component of other industry solutions like Financial Services Cloud, this is adapted for Nonprofit Cloud.
Insights Platform Data Integrity
Insights Platform Data Integrity offers features for nonprofits such as standardizing addresses to USPS postal standard format, updating based on USPS national change of address database, and validating email, phone number, and deceased status.
Accounting Subledger
Accounting Subledger (Starter) semi-replicates an accounting sub-ledger in Salesforce. The usage of this is a bit more complicated because, from my understanding, Starter doesn’t get someone “all the way” to a sub-ledger. Its features and comparison to Growth edition is here.
So… What’s The Difference?
As a core product, the Nonprofit Cloud can leverage Industries Common Components to extend functionality and is automatically available in Salesforce core languages. Making this change enables Salesforce.org to utilize more of Salesforce.com’s capabilities without reinventing the wheel. The Nonprofit SKU combines everything needed instead of selling each component separately.
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud brings a lot of powerful features across contacts & account management, program & service tracking, program participant profiles, assessments, and Automations.
Why Person Accounts?
In Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, every contact is automatically part of a related household. For example, if you create a contact record in NPSP called Sam Supporter, there will also be an Account record called Sam Supporter Household. In the new Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud data model, householding is optional.
Using Person Accounts in the Nonprofit Cloud allows for tracking additional types of relationships with standard Salesforce junction objects.
This includes:
– Traditional households, blended families, extended multi-household relationships, etc.
– Timebound relationships – an employee of an organization
– A dependent who was formerly a member of a household but now has started their own, etc.
Should Our Organization Make The Migration from NPSP to Nonprofit Cloud?
We break this down into three types of profiles:
- Current NPSP Customers
- Current Salesforce Customers (Not Using NPSP)
- Net New to Salesforce (Not Current Customers)
For Current Salesforce NPSP Customers
Current Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack Customers should stick with Nonprofit Cloud in most instances. There are many reasons for this, but predominantly it boils down to the fact that transitioning to the new Nonprofit Cloud requires migrating to a brand new Salesforce org due to the substantial change in data model. This can be a very disruptive change for any organization who’s been a NPSP customer for a long time.
If you’re an existing NPSP customer, here are some more reasons you might want to consider staying put.
- Address management is not currently available in Nonprofit Cloud but are on the roadmap.
- Customizable Roll-ups are not currently part of Nonprofit Cloud but are on the roadmap.
- Nonprofit Cloud for Program Management and Case Management are different than the configuration and object model of these solutions that already exist within the Nonprofit Success Pack and current users may not see feature parity.
- Organizations taking advantage of Volunteers 4 Salesforce (V4S) have not been given an answer as to whether V4S will work with Nonprofit Cloud.
- Salesforce will continue to maintain support for NPSP customers indefinitely.
For Current Customers (Not Using NPSP)
Current customers of Salesforce that are not currently using NPSP could go either way and it depends on a wide variety of factors. Generally speaking though, here are some considerations for Current Customers Not Using Nonprofit Success Pack:
- Transitioning to the new Nonprofit Cloud requires migration to a new Salesforce org due to the changes in the data model. This is the same for accounts using person accounts or not using person accounts.
- Clients already using Salesforce should consider which functionalities they will gain versus the functionalities they may lose in switching to Nonprofit Cloud at this time.
- Salesforce is currently focused on organizations just getting started with Salesforce as opposed to asking existing customers to migrate – more to come on this at a later date.
- Sales Cloud and Service Cloud licenses are included in the cost of the Nonprofit Cloud license and could be cost saving for those already using or wanting to use Service Cloud.
- The licensing cost is more expensive than the previous licensing cost so it will be helpful to do a cost-benefit analysis on the best option.
For Net New Customers Who Are Not Current Salesforce Customers
Similarly to Current Customers, New New customers also have a few decisions to make when it comes to which Salesforce technology they side with for their next project. Here are some considerations for Net New Customers that do not currently own Salesforce:
- Net new Salesforce customers should assess what they need to manage in the system and when it will be needed. If the emphasis is on managing programs and clients, case management with program participants, or requires similar functionality, they could be a good fit for the new Nonprofit Cloud. However, fundraising or outcome measurement would be a wait until features are added in October. Nonprofit Cloud can be extended with fully integrated grant making capabilities by late July.
- Nonprofit Cloud will take an unknown amount of time to catch up to the current functionality available in the other Salesforce nonprofit products, including for the Case Management Module.
- In some cases, it may be beneficial for a client to use the NPSP and related products until Nonprofit Cloud has time to catch up and eventually exceed existing functionality. The cost of migration and re-implementation should be considered if the client decides to use the other nonprofit products and may want to switch at a later date.
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