NPC

OK, here goes. Delving into NPC.

Random thoughts… Scared…

Outcome

What do I want to know:

• What are the gotchas compared to NPSP?

• What are the annoyances that make it not useable?

• What do you have to build rather than get out of the box?

• Anything good?

• Any other good resources?

• Where to start?

• What Australian stuff can’t we do?

Features

What I need to look for

• Donation Management

  • Households

  • Individuals

  • Corporates

• Online Donations or Integration

• Pay by Phone

• Recurring Giving / Direct Debits

• Events

• Bequests

• Matched Giving

• HNWI

• Tax Statements

• Emailing or Integration

• Community

Resources

Best Practices Guide

• Thanks to Dar and the Commons team for putting this together.

  • Other Resources including Ideas and Known Issues

Implementation Guide

Documentation

Trailhead

Recommendation Deck

What’s Included

OMG I am having such a hard time understanding what is included:

• Is Pipelines and Segmentation included? - Seems to be Base User

• Is Record Alerts included? - Seems to be Industries Service Excellent

• Is Omniscript included? - Seems to be OmniStudio User

• Is Data Processing Engine included? - seems to be part of Data Pipelines Base User

• Is Grantmakin included? it says “If you have Nonprofit Cloud for Grantmaking”… Is this another licence? Ooh yes, there is a “Nonprofit Cloud for Grantmaking” with the link to the product hidden in the weeds on the main nonprofit page.

There is this excellent document for Public Sector Solutions, I would like to find one exactly the same but for NPC.

The What’s Included in Nonprofit Cloud help document is less than useful.

But this help document, Security and Permissions for Nonprofit Cloud, is more useful.

The Implementation Guide seems to spell it out more.

I will NOT be one of those people who promises things that are not included in the base pricing of Salesforce, unless it’s absolutely needed and we go into it knowing the costs.

Getting Started

For this review I’m using a pre-configured trial org, but noting anything interesting.

Setup

• Record Types

  • Business Account and Organization Business Account.

    • First we have to Australianise the spelling

    • Why both, that is confusing.

    • I think renaming them to Organisation Account and Business Account will be good.

      • Business Accounts only those who are there for running the business.

      • Donors are Organisation Accounts.

    • However the API Name for Organisation Account is Business_Account!?! AND the API Name for Business Account is Org_Business_Account.

      • I HAVE to swap them around.

  • Household Business Account

    • I get why they call it that - because it tracks the money of the Account, but I would like to call it Household Account.

• Duplicate Rules

  • Set them up, even though we know Salesforce Duplicate Management is not appropriate for prime time and we need to buy a full package.

• Data

  • Participant Roles

Data Model

Contacts and Accounts

I quite like the Relationship Model, it fits with my third normal form brain, and gets rid of some of the complexity there was in explaining things in NPSP. However, I hope it is easy enough to report on, and easy enough to view on the page, and create.

Extension Objects

Yep, I knew this was going to be an issue.

• No simple fields on the Account to show Donation Value, to show an Indicator of the value of the Account to the organisation.

Tags

• Yet another set of Tags. (There will probably be more of these Yet Another Salesforce Object - YASO… things in NPC).

  • Topics? Personal Tags? Old Tags? Why can’t they just work together and pick one?

  • And this goes back to old school ways of manually adding categories to records, rather than let the record speak for itself.

Interaction Summaries

• Wow, if Interaction Summaries can make NOTES disappear, then that is good. But it is just another YASO thing.

Features

Data Pipelines

• Is Data Pipelines really included in NPC? at no extra cost?

UI

Accounts

• Of course you are going to need Salesforce Indicators to show

  • What type of Account this is

  • Are they a donor

Person Account

• Indicators or Giving Summaries

  • What type of Account this is

  • Are they a donor

Contacts

Components

Giving Summary

• is quite good.

• But it needs some colour and Indicators!

• WHY THE BIG BLANK SPACE?

Action Launcher.

• Why is this a separate component than Activities?

  • Do not tell me that it’s different again on Cases?

  • And where are the buttons?

Header

• Oh they really want you to have Images of your Contacts don’t they?

  • See The Fancy Contact Page for why not!

• And if you turn off Image on the component, you don’t get the Account Icon even.

  • But the Account icon is a ridiculous oval shape.

• No quick buttons on the fields (change record type, change owner, view hierarchy, multiple phone numbers) - why do they do this shit? Why do they remove features?

• And then all other objects look different - DO NOT USE!

Account Relationship Graphs

• I think I could get used to them.

• I think they could be useful.

• They are very very cumbersome to set up though.

• They take up so much room, and not a lot of data visible (you can show fields but they take up much more room).

• Maybe more useful with flex cards, and indicators and colours, so you can see AT A GLANCE what is going on.

Trial Org

This is just going to a list of annoyances of how they have set up the trial org.

• Oh no, it’s the new new new UI, so much newness to deal with at once.

  • This new UI is horrible! Tiny button font with round buttons!

Permissions

• I removed the PSL for Grantmaking since it’s an extra cost.

Apps

• Different Apps for different business functions - I prefer users to mix and match their own tabs rather than going into different apps.

• Console apps - ugh. I set them up, but I don’t like using them.

• Too many Lightning Pages!

Fundraising Operations

• Why do they always put the most useless thing on the home page - Recently Viewed Gift Batches? It’s like saying the user who uses this is only doing manual data entry. Nope!

• Very very very limited persona that this app is set up for.

  • No Party Relationship Groups

  • No Contacts

Accounts

• They’ve got that silly 3 column Account View - I have never seen that work in real life, because people WANT to see the fields first, not the related lists.

• List views not set up appropriately. Ugh, there is so much work to do to make these trials even moderately useful to a new client who has not ever seen Salesforce before.

• I still need to add my standard fields of City State Country

• There were NO related records shown on any Lightning Page - this BREAKS the standard tenet of Salesforce to see EVERY relationship.

Party Relationship Group

• Not set up at all well

• No related list

  • But are there related Lists?

  • See above re related lists not set up!

• New and New Group button

Permissions

• Duplicated Permission Sets with no reason as to why there are two.