Nonprofit Cloud Features That Will Bring the Impact

This article is feature-focused and dense with acronyms and abbreviations of various Salesforce products, features, and terminology. Here’s a cheat sheet to check if you find yourself asking, “what’s that acronym stand for?” In addition to this, I use the term “constituent” to refer to many types of people nonprofit organizations may interact with, including donors, volunteers, supporters, and stakeholders. 

What is Nonprofit Cloud?

Back in March 2023, Salesforce announced some exciting updates about the release of its new Nonprofit Cloud solution. This is not to be confused with Salesforce's existing product line for nonprofits that many of us have come to know and love - Nonprofit Success Pack, Volunteers for Salesforce, Program Management Module, Nonprofit Cloud Case Management, Outbound Funds Module, and Grants Management Module. This new product, which we will refer to as Nonprofit Cloud or NPC for the rest of this article, is a feature dense solution built directly on the core Salesforce platform. Included in Nonprofit Cloud are solutions for program/case management, fundraising, grant making, outcomes management, and volunteer management.

But what does “built directly on the core Salesforce platform” actually mean? If you’re familiar with the existing products mentioned above (NPSP, V4S, PMM, NCCM, OFM, GMM), you might know that these are all managed packages–meaning that these solutions must be installed on top of the core platform. In other words, they are extensions or add-ons and do not natively exist in all Salesforce orgs. Salesforce owns these products and releases regular updates to address bugs and add new functionality based on demand. Customization of certain aspects can be limited in managed packages to ensure compatibility with future versions.

Nonprofit Cloud on the other hand is part of the core Salesforce platform, and there is no need to install packages from the AppExchange. Instead, all of the features that we’re going to cover in this article need to be enabled and configured to your needs. We don’t want to mislead you here though. Enabling the features is quick and easy, like flipping an on-button. However, configuring them to your organization’s exact requirements, on the other hand, should be carefully planned and could be time consuming based on the complexity of your needs. We highly encourage you to work with a professional who’s familiar with the Nonprofit Cloud data architecture and feature set to get started. Because of the relative newness of NPC, it’s arguably more important to have professional help enabling and configuring your features in NPC at the moment. 

The primary features I’ll cover include Person Accounts, Actionable Relationship Center, Dynamic Assessments, Assessment Forms, Interest Tags, Interaction Summaries, and Life Events. Let’s dive in!

Person Accounts & ARC

While Person Accounts isn’t exactly a new feature to Salesforce, it is a new model to the nonprofit architecture that some nonprofits are likely unfamiliar with. Historically, Person Accounts have been utilized by for-profit businesses with a business-to-customer (B2C) business model, such as real-estate, financial services, legal services, etc. This model works extremely well for nonprofits since, like the examples above, they mostly serve and engage with individuals. The Person Account model in Nonprofit Cloud no longer requires that every contact be related to a Household Account. 

But don’t worry, you aren't losing Household Accounts. They’re still available in Nonprofit Cloud but are more of an “as needed” setup. This benefits organizations that don’t want to clutter their database with Household Accounts with single members while still providing the option to organizations that do need to track households extensively.

An exciting part of this new model is the Actionable Relationship Center (aka ARC) and Party Relationship Groups which is borrowed from Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud. Users can define roles (Party Relationship Roles) and groups (Party Relationship Groups) for all sorts of use cases. For example, you can use Party Groups to track your board members, committee members, constituent households, program cohorts, and much more. Once groups have been created, ARC graphs will help your users visualize relationships directly on record pages. When working on an Account record, you are able to view and interact with all of the Account’s relationships and group memberships in a visually appealing graphical interface. 

Dynamic Assessments

The next feature to showcase is Dynamic Assessments. Dynamic Assessments empower users to create “high-tech” solutions with “low-tech” skill caps. 

In existing solutions such as NCCM, intake forms, program applications, and assessments usually require a combination of object customization and an integration with a third-party form tool. Generally, your admin will need to create custom fields on the Intake or Assessment objects to store all of the relevant data being captured. If your organization has different forms or assessments to capture, then you will need to create different record types, each with their own page layouts and set of unique custom fields.

With Dynamic Assessments, we use object records to create reusable questions for intakes, applications, and assessments. Included in NPC are the Assessment Questions Sets and Assessment Question Objects. Together, these two objects can create and categorize all of your intake or assessment question needs with a much lower technical skill cap than the custom record type and custom fields route defined above. 

On top of the ease to create questions, NPC comes equipped with additional functionally to drive efficiency. Once Assessment Question Sets and Assessment Questions are created, users can select Assessment Questions and build forms using drag and drop components. And, having multiple use cases don’t pose much greater of a challenge. In OmniBuilder, users can filter their available questions by question sets to quickly find the questions they need to build their forms.

Once a form is designed, users simply click “Build OmniScript” and Salesforce does most of the legwork in the technical configuration. Once the form is ready, it can be deployed for use by internal and external users. The Assessments Lightning Component enables users to select Assessment Forms and send via email to external users. Alternatively,users can complete the Assessment themselves.

Interest Tags

A simple but useful feature that every nonprofit can find value in is Interest Tags. What separates Interest Tags from the rest of the features discussed in this article is their ease to understand and use. With Interest Tags, your organization can create different ways to flag or categorize your data and easily assign records to these categories.

While simple enough as a concept, Interest Tags can be implemented with a hierarchy of categories to meet more complex needs of your organization. With up to three levels of categorization, your team can structure Interest Tags with the necessary granularity to appropriately organize your data and be effectively used by every department in your organization. Paired with ARC graphs, your team can then visualize tag categories and Interest Tags directly on record pages.

If you still aren’t convinced of the impact that Interest Tags can have for your organization, I’ll add in one last note about the value they bring: the ability to create reports and dashboards to highlight common themes and interests across your constituents.

Interaction Summaries

Another feature included in Nonprofit Cloud that was sourced from Financial Services Cloud is Interaction Summaries. This feature goes beyond simple note taking. With Interaction Summaries, your users can create interactions and add attendees, tracking their attendance and recording rich summaries of their interactions. What makes Interaction Summaries even more useful beyond the knowledge sharing capabilities is the ability to create reports and include them in dashboard components. 

Interaction Summaries offer a fine level of granularity while still maintaining a user-friendly interface. You can set up interactions with the ability to indicate the start and end dates/times, interaction types, and locations (which are reusable and searchable!). You can add multiple attendees to interactions that can consist of internal team members and external stakeholders. On the summary information, you’re able to add formatted meeting notes, indicate confidentiality, purpose, next steps, or other custom data to track. Additionally, NPC gives you the ability to associate Interaction Summaries to Salesforce records such as grant or major giving opportunities, program schedules, or grant programs. And last but certainly not least, you can always search and filter Interaction Summaries to retrieve notes easily.

Life Events

As our world continues to become more digitized and the landscape of relationships change, keeping a personal touch on our data becomes ever more important. That is exactly why I love the Life Events feature of Nonprofit Cloud. It’s simple at its core but effective when used correctly. With Life Events, your team can define all of the need-to-know milestones that occur in your constituents’ lives and track them directly on their profiles. NPC comes with some default options such as birthdates, graduations, jobs, and marriages. 

Life Events can be further customized to display the relevant icons within the component, the details you want to show on hover, and the contextual actions that users can take without leaving the page they’re on. For example, when hovering over the “Employed at Nimbus Tech” Life Event (as shown in the screenshot below), you can see the event details and contextual actions. From this view, a user can also choose to send an email to congratulate them or to create a task to follow-up later to ask how the transition is going.

Conclusion

The development and release of Nonprofit Cloud creates many new opportunities for nonprofits to leverage the power of Salesforce to drive their mission forward. This powerful tool allows nonprofits to benefit from the product investments made by other for-profit and public sector industries while maintaining the unique nonprofit industry focus that existed with previous solutions such as the Nonprofit Success Pack. 

Nonprofits evaluating Salesforce or already using Salesforce have much to be excited about with NPC. With cross-departmental use cases surrounding program and case management, fundraising, volunteer management, grantmaking, and outcomes management, organizations can streamline their data management processes into a single source of truth system with tools that benefit every team member and constituent.

Interested in learning more about NPC features and use cases? We’re working on a free webinar demo series covering many of the NPC features discussed here. Subscribe here and we’ll keep you updated with our webinar release schedule and future Nonprofit Cloud blog articles.