Let’s pickup from last week’s email about the New Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (NPC).
Here are some of the reasons why Salesforce decided to bring the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to the core platform:
- It prevents technology silos, which was already happening. For example, the object “Payment” was used within nonprofits and without. The result was multiple objects with the same name.
- It allows other industries to benefit from each other. When a feature is developed for one industry, there’s most likely a use case for other industries. Some examples are Omnistudio and Data Processing Engine.
- It helps reduce operational costs, both in building things twice and support independent versions.
The long-term impacts of this are still being determined. However I think it’s safe to say
- This explains why the salesforce.org community & partner network was folded into salesforce.com.
- This move seemed like a controversial decision at the time, and now it makes total sense.
- There will be technical differences between NPSP and the core Nonprofit Cloud. Some examples are:
- Data modelling differences
- Package naming differences, which impacts 3rd party packages. ISVs will need to adjust their packages, which will extend the “pivot date” (more about this below)
- Person Accounts will be used instead of Household Accounts (did you know Person Accounts are already used by Financial Services Cloud?)
- The first 10 user licenses will still be free. However the price for the 11th and beyond will change from $36/user/month to $60/user/month.
- The first few releases won’t provide feature parity with NPSP. It’ll probably take several years before it’s on par with NPSP.
Given all this, the current approach I recommend is to continue using NPSP for the next several years. I would also be confident in starting new projects with NPSP as well.
At some point, perhaps in 1-3 years, there will be a critical pivot point in which it’ll make more sense to start projects using the new Nonprofit Cloud. It’ll be in the middle of a grey area, which will make the decision challenging.
At some point, Salesforce will invest more into the new product than NPSP. This will be one way to attract users, just like they did with Classic to Lightning and Processes and Workflows to Flows.
Lastly, when the time comes, orgs will need to purchase a new Salesforce instance and migrate. There most likely won’t be an easy button to migrate.
The takeaway
Keep yourself information of these changes. Even you’re not working with nonprofits, these industry-specific enhancements will eventually be available and beneficial to you.