On 3/14/2023, Salesforce announced a significant shift of all their nonprofit products. As a reminder, Salesforce has many products geared towards nonprofits: NPSP for Constituent
On 3/14/2023, Salesforce announced a significant shift of all their nonprofit products. As a reminder, Salesforce has many products geared towards nonprofits: NPSP for Constituent Relationship Management and fundraising, volunteer management, program management, case management and grant management.
Unlike core Salesforce features (think of reports, flow, experience cloud,…), Salesforce products for nonprofits and foundations required separate installation (just like other apps from the appexchange). This was a reminder that Salesforce was originally a business to business product and the nonprofit features, while fairly comprehensive, came later (an after thought some might say).
Salesforce is fixing this! Salesforce is recognizing that nonprofits are an important vertical for their business and their products should be as integrated to their core platform as Sales, Service, Marketing,…
This means nonprofit functionalities should be in Salesforce as standard features (always there or activated through licenses); it also means that the release of nonprofits apps will no longer be separate, it will be part of the standard Salesforce release: just a new chapter of the already very, very, very long release notes 😉
As part of this change, Salesforce is also taking the opportunity (technically they have to) to rebuild each product based on the newest technology (flow, AI, lightning…). These new products will be released over time, starting with Program & Case Management with Fundraising coming at the end of the year.
What’s next for current Salesforce users?
Salesforce is used by over 40,000 nonprofit organizations and foundations. That’s a lot! Most of them currently leverage one or more of the Salesforce existing products and thus will be impacted by this across-the-board change. Probably not now, but in time they will have the opportunity to migrate. We count on Salesforce to justify the effort to migrate with significant new features.
Of course, Salesforce is committed to continuing to support their existing products. The question is: for how long? Given the volume of organizations impacted, one would guess many years. We will obviously know more over time. We are in regular contact with the Salesforce product team so we will share any information when it’s available.
