Shedding Light on Three Concerns About the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
As you’ve probably heard by now (more than once), Salesforce launched the new Nonprofit Cloud early last year. As with any relatively new technology, there is excitement around it. At the same time, there’s also uncertainty, and even doubts, about moving to the new offering.
The truth is that moving to the Nonprofit Cloud may be right for some nonprofits at this time and not for others. While Salesforce has not shared an end-of-life date for NPSP and plans to continue supporting it, we know that their investment and innovation will be focused on Nonprofit Cloud. That’s why it’s important to understand as much as you can about any new product so that you can make a well-informed decision that supports your nonprofit’s goals and strategies.
With that in mind, let’s look at some concerns we’ve heard circulating in the sector about the new Nonprofit Cloud and our take on those topics.
Shedding Light on Three Concerns About the New Nonprofit Cloud
1. The cost of the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
One concern about the new Nonprofit Cloud is that implementing it will be much more expensive than implementing the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). But the reality is not that simplistic.
For one thing, the ecosystem around the new Nonprofit Cloud – including customers, partners, and arguably even Salesforce employees – are still learning the new tools in the offering. And while Salesforce partners might anticipate that a Nonprofit Cloud implementation will require more hours than an NPSP implementation due to the learning curve, that doesn’t necessarily mean that additional costs will be passed directly to customers. In fact, here at Heller Consulting, we’ve already invested time in learning in order to mitigate high costs in Nonprofit Cloud projects to make them feasible for nonprofits.
Also, the cost of implementing the Nonprofit Cloud versus NPSP is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Each solution comes with different features and functionality out-of-the-box. Some of those will matter more or less to different nonprofit customers, and some customers will be willing to pay for customizations that are critical to their organization.
Another consideration is value. Customers may be getting more features/functions (value) out of the Nonprofit Cloud than they would be getting in NPSP. And customers continue to benefit from the Power of Us Program which provides 10 Nonprofit Cloud – Enterprise Edition Licenses for free.
It’s also important to keep in mind that NPSP has been around long enough that there are many established approaches around implementing it. Over time, similar best practices will emerge with the Nonprofit Cloud, making it increasingly easier, faster, and ultimately less expensive to implement the solution.
2. The difficulty of administering the Nonprofit Cloud
Another concern is that the new Nonprofit Cloud is viable only if a nonprofit has expert in-house Salesforce support PLUS significant and ongoing partner support. Our team at Heller Consulting sees it differently.
Of course, there’s always a learning curve for any new solution. And the Nonprofit Cloud has introduced some new tools – such as Data Processing Engine and Omnistudio – to the capabilities for nonprofits, so there are even more new things for customers and partners to learn.
But customers CAN learn those new skills and tools just as they can learn them for any new technology. Also, as with any new technology, customers can make strategic decisions about how much and when they want to invest in partner support, internal staff training, and/or hiring new employees that already have the technical skills and experience needed.
3. The need for an additional extension object to make updates to the Contact/Person Account record
A somewhat technical concern is that Nonprofit Cloud does not allow direct updates to the Contact/Person Account record.
This statement is true, but this constraint exists only for the Salesforce product team, and has informed some of their decisions about the new Nonprofit Cloud’s data model. And it makes sense: Salesforce cannot reasonably add fields that are nonprofit-specific to the “hero objects” (like Contact and Account) that are used across clouds and industries. But nonprofit customers can still add fields to Contact, Account, and Person Accounts.
For example, just as NPSP has giving summary fields directly on Contact or Account records, the Nonprofit Cloud stores giving summary in an “extension object” called “Donor Gift Summary”. This approach might make some reporting requirements more difficult to accommodate, but there’s nothing preventing customers from recreating key information stored in the “Donor Gift Summary” object and populating fields directly on Contact/Account instead. The only limitation is the same as it has always been in NPSP: Salesforce caps the number of custom fields that can be added per object.
Learn more about Salesforce solutions for nonprofits
If your organization uses or is considering a move to Salesforce, there’s clearly a lot to think about. Finding the right technology fit for your organization depends on understanding your options and aligning them with your current technology investments, your organizational goals, and your long-term technology strategy.
Our team here at Heller Consulting is ready to help you determine what mix of Salesforce (or other) solutions might be the right fit for your needs. If they are the right fit, we can also help you to develop a business case and roadmap as well as implement and support the solutions. Contact us today to learn more and get started.
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