The Core of Salesforce.
Salesforce was built for for-profit companies’ sales teams, but they specifically created a module called the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for nonprofits that tailors the built-in features for nonprofits. You can think of NPSP as simply “Salesforce for Nonprofits”. Salesforce with NPSP has become the go-to app of choice for nonprofits globally.
NPSP is geared towards fundraising and it has a ton of features that are really good at keeping administrative time to a minimum while also thoroughly tracking all the important details.
This is part of a series of posts providing a basic introduction to what Salesforce is and how it can be useful to you and your nonprofit. Click here to see all of the posts in this series.
NPSP is also really great for nonprofits that do minimal or no fundraising. Many of my clients use the customizability of Salesforce to also track their programs, service recipients, and outcomes – and many do even more, using Salesforce to track maintenance projects, work orders, staff performance evaluations, time logs, case notes, and much more.
Another huge benefit of NPSP is that nonprofits can have up to ten Salesforce users for free – and heavy discounts after that as well. Most of my clients have never paid Salesforce a single penny!
This post is about the very core of what Salesforce offers for nonprofits. I provide context around the for-profit origins of different Salesforce features because it helps to explain how they function they way they do. Let’s dive into the structure and see how it works.
Accounts and Contacts
The two most basic features of Salesorce are Accounts and Contacts. These names come from the for-profit world, but have clear corollaries for nonprofits.
In the for-profit world, Accounts mostly represent other companies. And Contacts are people within those companies. For nonprofits, Accounts mostly represent households (the households of donors or of clients) and Contacts mostly represent people within those households (the donors and clients themselves). In almost all cases, Contacts require an attached Account – but don’t worry, with NPSP, if you create a Contact, a Household Account is automatically created for them.
Nonprofits can also use Record Types (link) to differentiate Accounts that represent “Household Accounts” and those that represent “Organization Accounts”. All my clients use both and will use “Household Accounts” for the households of donors, clients, and volunteers, and use “Organization Accounts” for different vendors, corporate donors, foundations, etc.
Contacts can also be similarly differentiated into different types. It’s customizable and depends on your unique needs, but common Contact Record Types include Donors, Clients, and Vendor contacts.
The Usefulness of Household Accounts
If you aren’t used to it, having a “Household Account” attached to every Contact may seem like overkill, but it’s actually quite handy. Let me explain.
Imagine you have two donors from the same household, let’s say a husband and wife. You want to track their separate information (i.e. names, birthdates, communication history, volunteer history, individual donation history), and also their shared information (i.e. their shared address and shared donation history). With Household Accounts and Contacts, you can then do all this.
In the example below, we’re looking at Evan’s Contact record. You can see his individual giving in the “Donation Totals” area.
If we go to his and his wife’s Household Account, you can now see their shared donation information. From the Household Account, you can also see all the Contacts in that household (in the component on the right).
Relationships Between Contacts
In addition to grouping Contacts under the same Household Account, you can also create Relationships between Contacts. So we can create a Relationship record between Evan and Eva Marie indicating they’re each other’s spouse. Below is a screenshot showing Eva’s Contact. On right of the screen, her Relationship record connecting her to Evan shows he’s her husband.
When you create one Relationships record, it also creates the corollary for the other person. So on Evan’s Contact, you can see his connection with Eva Marie showing that she is his wife.
You can make Relationships between any two contacts, and each Contact can have as many as you’d like. Relationships can be between people in the same Household Account, or people from entirely different Accounts. The screenshot below shows three of Donald Duck’s many relationships, none of whom he lives with.
If you click “View All” at the bottom of the Relationships component, you can see all of Donald’s relationships.
Using Relationships consistently can be extremely helpful to keep track of very important information about how your donors and clients are connected.
Opportunities aka Donations
For-profits and Opportunities
In for the for-profit world, Salesforce uses the Opportunity record to indicate a sales opportunity. Opportunities link to either a Contact, Account, or both.
Here’s a made-up example using a coffee roasting company, called The Roastery. They’re using Salesforce to track their sales, and they’re in the preliminary stages of making a deal to supply Cafe Fibonacci with 15 bags of coffee beans weekly. The Roastery is primarily communicating with Louie Latte, the manager of the Cafe Fibonacci.
In Salesforce, The Roastery would create an Account for Cafe Fibonacci.
They’d create a Contact for Louie Latte (connected to the Cafe Fibonacci Account).
And an Opportunity representing the potential sale (connected to both the Cafe Fibonacci Account and Louie Latte).
You can also see above that Opportunities go through many different stages as the potential deal becomes more likely, ranging from “Prospecting” to “Value Proposition” to either “Closed - Lost” because it’s not going to happen or “Closed - Won” because a deal was made and the sale will go through.
Nonprofits and Opportunities
Most nonprofits don’t go through a sales process, but they do have fundraising processes. For nonprofits, Opportunities represent donations (rather than sales). In sum, nonprofits primarily use Accounts as Households, Contacts as Donors, and Opportunities as Donations.
Here’s an Opportunity with a very simple layout. It shows the Amount, Stage, related Contact and Account, and the “Close Date”. This Opportunity is directly tied to Evan Evanston as the Primary Contact, but you can see that his wife, Eva Marie, is related to the opportunity as well (which happens automatically because they share the same Household Account).
As you make Donation Opportunities and fill in the “Primary Contact” field with a donor, the donation totals that we saw previously on the Contact and Account are recalculated.
This screenshot below is automatically calculating these donation metrics based on the Donation Opportunities related to Evan. The column on the left that has the money amounts are summing the “Amount” from each of his related Donation Opportunities within the given time range of the field. The column on the right has the number of donations made (rather than the dollar figure).
My example above of a Donation Opportunity is quite simple, but you can get very complex with them. With each donation, you can track acknowledgement of the donation, recurring donations, matching donations, donations related to campaigns, tribute information, payment information, allocation information, and much more. I won’t go into all this here, but there’s a lot that can be done.
Payments (attached to Donations)
There is a separate Payment record that goes with Donation Opportunities. There are many purposes for this, primarily that you can track Donation pledges from their actual payments. With separate Payments, you can also have multiple payments related to one Donation. The screenshot below shows a Donation Opportunity totalling $1,000 (highlighted in green) along with two payments of $500 each (highlighted in red).
And a simple Payment record looks something like this.
Campaigns
The word “campaign” is used by for-profit companies to refer to marketing initiatives. Campaigns are communications to customers and their corresponding behavior in response to those communications. Grouping activities (e.g. website visits, discount code usage, webinar signups) by Campaigns can help marketers understand how effective their marketing initiatives performed.
A campaign can be quite simple. It could be a single email to a handful of email addresses. Or it could be a complex venture that includes multiple emails, physical mail, advertisements, billboards, etc.
Nonprofits also rely on communications to drive towards particular goals, and so can utilize Salesforce Campaigns to their great benefit. Let me give you an example.
Let’s say a nonprofit sends a series of emails running mid November through mid January as part of a campaign to drive end-of-year and holiday giving.
In the screenshot below, we can see that 35 folks are a part of this campaign. The graph on the right shows us that 28 donated, 6 left the email unopened, and 1 clicked the donate link, but didn’t donate. Tracking this “End-of-Year Holiday Giving” campaign in Salesforce shows the high level overview, including the fields under the “Other Information” area (on the left) as well as the graph on the right.
You can also dive into a particular Contact’s history to see how they’ve responded to different campaigns.
You can also go to a Contact’s record and see a history of all the Campaigns they’ve been involved in (whether they were active in it or not).
Campaigns don’t have to track just money. In the campaign below we’re tracking the status of the Contacts RSVP from an email introducing a “Spring Fling Fundraiser Event”. Note that this campaign is about notifying contacts about the event – this is not about donations raised at the event itself.
The three status options are “Unopened Email”, “Will Attend”, and “Cannot Attend”. You can see that 3 contacts “Will Attend”; 2 Contacts are “Unopened Email”; and 1 contact “Cannot Attend”.
Campaigns can be simple or very complex. The most rudimentary campaign can be simple way to group donations by different kinds of events. More complicated campaigns track online activities and actions. Salesforce offers a very robust product to do anything you want in this area, though unfortunately the more advanced features cost extra. But in short, when it comes to Campaigns, It all depends on what you want.
Leads
In the for-profit sales process, a “Lead” is someone who is not a customer, but that might be a good fit for their product or service. A Lead in Salesforce operates similarly. It distinguishes between a Lead – a potential customer – and Contact – someone in the midst of their sales process.
One of the main functions of a Lead in Salesforce is that you can press a button and convert it into a Contact and Account (and ideally an Opportunity) once you’ve decided that the lead is more actively engaged in the sales process.
Most nonprofits don’t use Leads – they just use Contacts for everyone – which is why I’m talking about them at the end and not spending too much time on them. But some nonprofits do use Leads for early-stage prospective donors, clients, volunteers, etc. Leads can be a useful tool depending on your circumstances.
Conclusion
Most Salesforce users interact with Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities the vast majority of the time they spend on Salesforce, so you’re now even closer to understanding the foundation of what Salesforce has to offer. Remember though, Salesforce is infinitely flexible to your needs, and all my clients optimize their Salesforce systems through customizations.
Book a free 15 minute call with me to chat about your organization and how we can utilize Salesforce’s NPSP and core features to save you hours of time.
And also please keep reading to dive deeper into what Salesforce has to offer!