It has been almost a year and a half since the release of the Non Profit Starter Pack (NPSP) version 3.0 and a number of our clients are now wondering if it might be time for them to upgrade. Back when 3.0 was released, I was working at Feeding Matters, a non-profit that is a champion for pediatric feeding struggles. We were early adopters of 3.0 and it made a huge difference to our organization. While there haven’t been any announcements to stop supporting 2.0, there are many really great reasons to upgrade. Below are some of my favorites.
#5 Health Check
Not the most glamorous, but this new feature will not only identify which parts of your data have the sniffles, but how to go about fixing it. I was able to clean up orphan contacts and empty accounts with ease. Think of it like chicken soup for your CRM. Yum.
#4 Address verification
Data can get dirty and addresses are one of the places where we see the greatest inconsistency. Is it Street or St? Arizona or AZ? Can’t somebody else fix this? YES. Feeding Matters sends out a yearly mailer and for many of our donors, this is the only contact they received. It had to look clean. There are currently three services available to do this in NPSP 3.0. Learn more here.
#3 Affiliations
While this was available in 2.0, it made a lot more sense for us to implement it with the household accounts (see more below). We can track where our contacts work, where they volunteer, what boards they are on, even the organizations where they are members. We could set the primary affiliation for the person, so we could define who they were to us. The more we know about our contacts, the better we are able to tailor our messaging to reach them.
#2 Admin Settings all in one place
It is now all under one tab, so no more searching around! Making admin changes was difficult and often time consuming. Like most non-profits I wore many hats and time was a huge commodity. Increase my efficiency? Yes please!
#1 Households are accounts!!!
Welcome to the fold, Households! While families are obviously key to Feeding Matters mission, we were not using households prior to v3. Having Household as a custom object presented some reporting challenges for us and we had elected not to use it. Now with v3, Household is a standard object. With this new model, our report generation was simplified. For instance our donor report for the annual report is a click of a button away.
While we were able to upgrade with little issue, every organization is different, so please make sure to always test in a sandbox before installing a new app.
Michael Potavin is a nonprofit Salesforce consultant. Prior to joining Sputnik Moment, Mike was the IT director for Feedings Matters, a nonprofit who is a champion for children who struggle with feeding.
