What Lies Ahead
Dreamforce 2014 was jam packed with exciting announcements like news of the rollout of the analytics cloud and Salesforce 1 Lightning. Alongside these new Salesforce features, we have a lot to look forward to in the nonprofit space with an immense amount of investment and updates to both the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) and NGO Connect.
The Salesforce Foundation presented overviews of the product roadmaps for both the NPSP and NGO Connect at Dreamforce in the Foundation Zone, an area dedicated to Salesforce’s nonprofit community. Here, I’ll highlight some of the most exciting features that the nonprofit community has to look forward to in the upcoming months.
NPSP Roadmap
With the launch of NPSP 3.0 this past summer, we saw lots of new enhancements to the product including the consolidation of the previous five packages into one package with one streamlined installation. We also saw new features like tracking multiple addresses, a new household account model, and a simplified settings interface.
Up next for the NPSP include enhancements such as:
- Data Importer: Simplifying the data import process for the NPSP by providing a process to import your data quicker and more efficiently.
- Allocations: Split your revenue into one or more funds or GAU’s.
- Multiple Addresses for Accounts: Add multiple addresses to non-household accounts.
- Contact Merge: Improved UI and behavior with better search and selection options.
- New Household UI: Improved household merge behavior, better default field set setup, comprehensive addressing, donor statistics and setup.
- Lead Conversion: Improved UI and more automated conversion behaviors. Better field mapping with native SFDC lead conversion.
- Salesforce 1 & Lightning enabled: NPSP has 100% compatibility with SF1 and once Lightning is fully rolled out, it will take the mobile experience to the next level.
Alongside these enhancements, NPSP will be pursuing a more formalized community engagement model allowing for easier contributions to the product. Salesforce will also continue to perform comprehensive testing and code analysis to ensure the product meets the highest standards.
NGO Connect Roadmap
While we have lots to look forward to with the NPSP, equally there are lots of updates on the way for NGO Connect. The newest NGO Connect features fall into three main categories:
1) Increase your fundraising ROI. Some of the new features that will help you do so include:
- Adding giving summaries for donations and purchases alongside memberships.
- Inventory enhancements allowing you to integrate item and package stock counts as well as enhanced allocation of inventory items across different media.
- Updates to basic gift entry process.
2) Improve the constituent experience. Some of the new features that will help you do so include:
- Tracking giving at the contact (as well as account) level. This feature will bring hard credit tracking and rollups to the contact level and will function similar to the account level giving feature.
- Updates to volunteer management and creation of a volunteer portal. Your volunteers will be able to connect with you via a portal and you can collect their skills, abilities, availability, and much more.
- Grouping of payments to allow for multiple payments to be run as one transaction.
- Enhanced communities portal for your constituents to interact with you.
3) Simplify operations. Some of the new features that will help you do so include:
- Additional payment processing options.
- Batch entry and upload enhancements making for a better experience for users entering gifts.
- Merge tool which will help automate many of the contact and account merge processes.
- Improvements to giving performance to help your team track your goals more effectively.
There are many additional features and updates to NGO Connect’s functionality as well as integrations with other applications (marketing, de-dupe, etc.) that we can expect in the coming months. Keep your eyes peeled for release announcements which will follow the standard Salesforce seasonal release schedule.
While Dreamforce was jam packed with lots of announcements of new products and features that will greatly help the nonprofit community increase its impact, I think we have lots to look forward to with the bright future that lies ahead for our current nonprofit tools.
Check out some additional posts on new features from Dreamforce:
