The Salesforce nonprofit starter pack, explained

I have now worked with, and spoken to a number of medium to large charities and not-for-profits, and each share a common challenge: not understanding what the “nonprofit edition” of Salesforce is. While lots has been written on the existence of Salesforce.com’s donation program and it’s features, there is still confusion as to how this edition is different from Salesforce.com’s other products.

This challenge is largely do to the way salesforce.com brands their products. Salesforce.com has decided to make all the products they offer seem like unique, packaged applications. This approach has extended to the nonprofit edition of Salesforce, which has created this confusion.

Salesforce Enterprise Edition, and the not-for-profit edition are the same thing
I want to be very clear, the nonprofit edition is an enterprise edition license of Salesforce. Every feature – including the Force.com developer tools – that enterprise edition comes with, are included with the NFP edition. The only thing that makes the NFP edition unique, is a group of tools which have been pre-installed through ‘managed packages’. These packages are known as the nonprofit starter pack.

What are these tools?
A managed package is a set of functionality that is installed into a Salesforce account. This functionality has attempted to make the standard Salesforce environment more alligned with the standard requirements of a NFP. Here’s a very quick overview of each feature.

Contacts and organizations:

• Renames the “account” object to “organizations”
• Allows individual contacts to be created without the need to associate them to an account (which is required in the standard Salesforce edition)
• Rolls-up donations to the contact – the standard Salesforce edition only rolls up transactions to the account
• Allows multiple phone numbers and email addresses – However, I’m a fan of this tool

Recurring donations:

• This is a light weight tool which automatically crease ‘donations’ that occur on a regular interval

Relationships:

• Allows contacts to be associated with other contacts
• Adds fields for social media addresses

Affiliations:

• Allows contacts to be associated to multiple organizations
• Tracks when a contact is associated to a new organization - for example when they change jobs

Householding:

• Allows contacts to be related to each other through a household record

There is now a 2.0 release of the nonprofit starter pack, which should be available shortly. You can get the detailed on each of the NFP starter pack features here. The Salesforce foundation has a good overview of all the features here.

It’s called a “starter pack” for a reason
While these features may sound great, in practice each of the above features are limited. The light weight nature of these tools are good to get started with, but even simple requirements may not be supported. So don’t get completely hung up on the idea that these tools are a silver bullet for your use of Salesforce.

When you out grow these features
The challenge with working with the nonprofit starter pack is that the behavour can’t be modified (technically this is due to the type of package). This often causes us to uninstall the feature set, and build to the clients specific requirements.

The good news is that the nonprofit edition is enterprise edition, meaning we can make just about anything work – and easily re-create the nonprofit starter pack features. The point that I’m making is rather than bending to the above features, you should divorce yourself from them, and look at your true requirements.