In the Salesforce nonprofit realm, there were some major changes recently. Since it’s been just over a year since NPC was released, here’s my updated view on the topic.
Background: When nonprofits want to use Salesforce, they typically install the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). It’s a mature managed package, owned and maintained by Salesforce. Last year, Salesforce announced the Nonprofit Cloud (NPC). The goal is to provide similar functionalities as NPSP, but built on the core platform.
In principle, moving from a managed package to the core makes sense. Sadly, the reality isn’t so straightforward.
Here are some challenges with NPC:
- Nonprofits typically track multiple email addresses and phone numbers for people. With NPSP, these fields were located directly on the Contact object. In NPC, they are located on an extension object called “Contact Profile”.
- An extension object is basically an add-on object. It has a one-to-one relationship with another object. Since Salesforce couldn’t add extra fields on the Contact or Account, they added them to extension objects. By doing this, it makes managing, reporting, and merging records more complicated.
- Speaking of people, the push is to use Person Accounts. That’s fine, except the word “Contact” is still displayed in many places. So users need to understand that an individual is represented by a Person Account AND a Contact. That’s a difficult mental model to maintain for nonprofits, who are generally non-technical.
- Some new object names are void of all context. Examples: Contact to Contact Relationship (instead of Relationships), Contact to Account Relationship (instead of Affiliation), Party Relationship Group (an extension object to the household account), Actionable Relationship Center (instead of… umm, I have no idea).
The takeaway
I’m really hoping Salesforce unifies some of the functionality and wording to make things easier for nonprofits. Until they do, I generally recommend organizations stay away from NPC.