They don't sell widgets to businesses

As we know, Salesforce is all about selling widgets to businesses, that's why we have Accounts, and Opportunities, and Opportunity Products, and Opportunity Teams and Assets.

NFP's regularly deal with Individuals, and even groups of individuals such as Households or related individuals. Common Objects in Salesforce for NFPs are:

Organisations (Accounts)
Individuals (Contacts)
Income (Opportunities)
Affiliations (Individuals related to Organisations by a role and a time period).
Households (Individuals at the same address).

The Nonprofit Success Pack - NPSP has a great model for dealing with Individuals where the Account record is effectively hidden. If you click on the Account record for an "Individual" you are immediately taken to their Contact page. It's similar to Person Accounts but without the hassle of Person Accounts.

It's all about the money

It has to be. They are generally working on shoestring and existing off donations, grants and the like. Planning to get money in, getting money in, accounting for money and minimising spending are all high priorities for NFPs. A good NFP will have an excellent CFO and an even better Fundraising Manager. These are the people that are imperative to the success of Salesforce for NFPs.

Things that will make a difference to to NFPs in Salesforce are:

An excellent integration to your e-commerce system and website - this is why Payments2Us shines. See Websites and Salesforce for more information.
Automation of emails, receipts etc for donations (eg minimising spending). This includes routing large donations through to the fundraising manager so they can either do a personalised note on the receipt or even bypass the automated receipt to do a hand written note.
Being able to see at a glance who your top donors are, which campaigns are doing well etc is important. The Nonprofit Success Pack - NPSP handles this stuff well (except for maybe expenditure on Campaigns, but Salesforce doesn't do that well anyway).

They get cool tools

NFPs get 10 free Enterprise Sales Cloud licences and deep discounts off all other licencing. Orgs must prove that they have the right tax status to get the Salesforce Foundation grant.

Plus they get heavy discounts on many great apps, and some even for free.

However, with great free stuff comes great responsibility. Salesforce MVP Tal Frankfurt talks about Salesforce for NFPs is like getting a free puppy. Salesforce now has a NFP Readiness Survey.

If a NFP is ready for Salesforce and ready to embrace the changes needed, then they can have such an amazing transformation with the way they do things, and it is a pleasure to work with them.

They have their own Community

We have the Success Community, NFPs have the Power of Us Hub. If you are logging into Salesforce via an NFP Org right now - go and log onto the Power of Us Hub. If you are like me and are a consultant to NFPs it's a little harder to get on there, but not impossible. For those on commercial orgs, sorry - this community is only for NFPs.

Plus they have their own User Group where they get to talk about all the tips and tricks about working with Salesforce specifically for NFPs

You have to do a lot with a little

Working on a NFP org is so challenging because you can assume that you will have little or no money for apps, little or no money for development and you should probably NOT do much development because you probably won't have any budget to maintain or improve the code. (See a post I wrote a long time ago about this - Thinking Like Salesforce.

However, as an Admin, you can now do SOOOOO much with clicks and not code, using Process Builder and Flows, so working with an NFP is going to challenge you to push the boundaries of your knowledge and achieve great things within standard functionality or using apps that are cost effective enough. And when you achieve this, it is such a good feeling.

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So if you want a challenge working with Salesforce, come and work with a NFP org.

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