It has been a year since Salesforce released their new core product for foundations; we wrote about Grantmaking last summer, exploring its built-in budget capabilities, templates, and data model. While plenty of organizations embraced the transition to this new core offering, there are just as many who chose to stick with the Nonprofit Service Pack (NPSP)—and are now wondering whether the time has come to make the switch. Those who are grappling with the upcoming sunsetting of foundationConnect are also intrigued by this newest core offering; let’s dive into what it can do, why it matters, and whether it may be the right fit for your organization. Remember, your tech should support and enable your preexisting systems and processes!
For a quick refresher, Salesforce is a web-based platform which lives in the cloud. Since Salesforce started up 25 years ago, it has leveraged the term “Cloud” within its ecosystem to refer to features that are packaged and made available within a specific cloud. For example, the Sales & Service Cloud—your foundational layer—is packaged to provide CRM and customer service features to your grants management staff. Read on for how Nonprofit Cloud now encompasses these features!
What’s the difference between NPC and NPSP?
Currently, many nonprofit clients—grantmakers and charities alike—are using the Nonprofit Service Pack (NPSP) and have already invested heavily in customization. NPSP rests atop Salesforce’s foundation layers, allowing nonprofits to steward fundraising goals by clarifying the relationships between donors, households, and the companies they work for. It allows nonprofits to manage campaigns and programs while overseeing other nonprofit-specific efforts such as grant allocations.
As a more robust and flexible product, Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) is a significant disruptor in the sector—but it is also still in development. A number of features available in NPSP are not yet built out in NPC; for example, the data migration guide is only expected to be released later this year. The recent Spring ‘24 and Summer ‘25 release for NPC brought many changes, here are a few:
- Fundraising for community foundation and other campaigning organizations (source code URLs for data tracking)
- Donor segmentation through custom scoring based on donor behaviour
- Providing gift receipts is now streamlined
- Attributing gift donations between multiple campaigns for more long-term impact
- Improved tracking of payment data, including integration with independent software vendors
So, what is Nonprofit Cloud?
Through Nonprofit Cloud, Salesforce is offering their grantmaking clients easier access to a full portfolio of product innovations. This is revolutionary, as clients currently need to rely on third-party applications for certain functionalities; with NPC, they can now access industry tools, reducing (but not eliminating) dependency on other vendors. There are two specific industry tools that will make an enormous positive impact for you: OmniStudio and Business Rules Engine.
OmniStudio
OmniStudio is an all-in-one platform for deploying custom applications without extensive coding knowledge, which dovetails with the declarative approach Salesforce provides. This positions OmniStudio as a bridge between full, complex levels of coding and point-and-click processes like Flow (see below for a use case exemplifying how this might impact your team’s capacity and workload). On top of that, OmniStudio offers certain pre-built templates and components—forms, tables, charts—which can be customized to suit your business needs. This lessens the use of third-party tools, keeping your Salesforce experience more streamlined.
Use case: using OmniStudio, your Grants Manager can create a budget template for applications and reports without asking the System Administrator to go in the backend and create this for each fund. This will save you valuable time in cycle planning year over year, as well as when launching a new fund.
Business Rules Engine (BRE)
Are your grantmaking practices based on complex decision-making processes? Do you have specific eligibility and suitability criteria? BRE is made for organizations who have a higher level of complexity to their grantmaking operations; its main elements include expression sets and lookup tables, creating decision matrices that automate the eligibility quiz review. This makes your work as a grantmaker scalable—you can roll out new funds, handle more applications, and train your staff without needing to rely on IT.
If you are familiar with Salesforce, you may be wondering how BRE differs from Flow. While a flow is typically used to notify staff that the time has come to make an informed decision, the BRE makes an autonomous decision based on a set of rules (that you determine). There is a time and place for both tools, and your organization’s team size, capacity, and complexity of operations are all key factors in deciding which tool to implement.
Use case: Depending on your needs and requirements, you are able to notify non-eligible applicants mid-application why they do not meet your criteria, as well as provide important context for your program officers.
Benefits of Nonprofit Cloud
NPC will open up many doors and pathways for organizations, large and small, to streamline and automate their systems and processes, thanks to the core integration with Salesforce’s foundational layer. This also signals a larger shift: Salesforce is investing into this sector, increasing the sophistication of their nonprofit offerings to better serve the needs they are hearing. Nonprofit Cloud will also grant you access to multiple other modules: Fundraising, Program Management, Marketing, Operations, and Grantmaking. Think NPC might be right for you? Check out our assessment of the capabilities and benefits of each of these modules below.
Nonprofit Cloud’s Modules
The major benefit of NPC is that it gives all grantmaking clients easier access to Salesforce’s full portfolio of product innovations; let’s explore how some of those key modules will better enable your impact. For the purposes of this article, we will be focusing on the most relevant features: Fundraising, Operations, and Grantmaking.
Grantmaking
One of the biggest benefits of adopting Nonprofit Cloud is access to the Grantmaking Module, which is only available when paired with NPC. You can read more about our earlier review of this industry-disrupting tool here, with its awesome capability to define, measure, and evaluate an organization’s logic model or theory of change.
Grantmaking not only includes a portal template, but also its own data model, which is far more detailed than existing solutions like the Outbound Fund Module. This saves time when setting up your GMS because it reduces the need for additional data modeling. The module is also frequently updated - for example, the Spring ‘24 and Summer ‘24 features included:
- Empowering applicants to add collaborators to an application via the portal
- Complex applications allow applicants to drop in and out, incomplete sections are highlighted
- Differentiating between forecast and actual budget (variance)
- Adding results via Flow against indicators, calculating goal completion as a percentage
- Track outcomes at program level (in addition to KPI tracking at the grant level, which has also been made available on the portal for improved collaboration)
If you want to see this in action, view this Salesforce webinar.
Fundraising
This module provides easy ways to engage donors, raise funds, and drive outcomes with built-in tools for strategic planning and data-driven insights. You can:
- Create digital and capital campaigns
- Designate incoming transactions as specific or general funds
- Quickly provide guidance to your donors using the Donor Support console
Please take into consideration that, as NPC remains in development for the next few years, not all functionality from NPSP is available yet.
Operations
Is your organization committed to becoming more data-driven? The Operations module is here to help you on that journey by letting you:
- Manage your data within and outside of Salesforce using data clouds (such as AWS)
- Keep your data at your fingertips by integrating Slack
- Add additional security with Shield (read more about our top cybersecurity tips)
- Leverage Tableau (named CRM Analytics in the Salesforce ecosystem) to analyze your data
With these features, this module becomes not only part of your tech stack, but part of your team, streamlining processes and information sources to save time and resources.
How Grantbook Can Help You
We’ve covered all the tech specs and various elements of these new products; now, let’s take a look at NPC from a business perspective, and the steps that will be needed to ensure a complete and sustainable implementation and adoption.
As tech consultants exclusively serving philanthropy, we understand grants management: best practices, process optimization, grant coding, and selecting the products and systems that will work best for you. With access to the entire Grantbook brain trust of tech specialists, project managers, and change management pros, you are unlocking the experience we have built over the past decade working with foundations on technology planning and strategy, process re-development and optimization, and operational excellence.
We create custom solutions for our clients who specialize in areas like research, womens’ funds, participatory grantmaking, and family foundation. We understand the importance of grant coding and taxonomy, and how they directly impact your ability to budget and track your grants through the journey of donor and cycle planning, to application and award, and even impact tracking.
We help you:
- Set up your optimal licensing framework with a mix of Salesforce products (clouds, modules) and independent software vendors. As a trusted member of the Salesforce Partner program, we know the perfect pairings!
- Mix and match services to suit your situation—whether you need to select a new system, run an audit of your current one, reexamine your processes or ensure a smooth rollout and adoption, we’ve got you covered. An integrated learning and development approach is key!
- Map your organization’s people, process, tech and data needs, identifying pain points and gaps in capacity, resources, and information to make sure any new system can adapt to your unique requirements.
We would love to hear from you!
