Walking into the Nonprofit Cloud Keynote, hundreds of nonprofit organizations, partners and Salesforce employees gathered to hear about the continued investment Salesforce.org is making into the Nonprofit Sector.
The Nonprofit Cloud keynote followed the Education Cloud keynote earlier in the morning, where we heard about some new features and enhancements for the Higher Education sector. Embracing the spirit of Salesforce.org, the theme for the keynote was Nonprofit Cloud: Reimagining Technology to Put People First.
As always, the best way to showcase Salesforce’s success is through customer stories, and this year ALS was featured in the keynote. Here are some of the highlights:
Success on the Nonprofit Cloud
Do you remember the Ice Bucket challenge? The success of it going viral kicked off unprecedented growth for ALS. Nonprofit Cloud laid the foundation for them to be able to scale, and scale quickly, and manage their entire mission now on the Salesforce platform.
New Features and Functionality
Salesforce then shared their vision for the future of Nonprofit Cloud via a demo of new functionality included the Insights Platform, Payments, Engagement Hub, and Giving pages.
Details about the upcoming Integrated Payments & Financials were also discussed which will allow organizations to collect revenue faster & enable payments directly through Salesforce by connecting to their preferred payment provider and then with Subledger Integration, all of the donation data and income can be smoothly transferred to a financial system.
Enhancements to Existing Products
Salesforce also reminded us that improvements to Batch Data Import so we can quickly and easily import complex data from spreadsheets into CRM is already GA. We’ll soon see additional functionality for Batch & Single Gift Entry. A simplified data entry tool for gift entry managers should be released Q1 next year.
Program Management Functionality
We’ve been hearing for a while that there will be new Program Management functionality coming to Nonprofit Cloud. Cloud for Good was lucky enough to be a part of the pilot program for these new features and are excited to see the vision coming to the NPSP data model and the new Case Management features.
For Case Managers, these include:
- Track Programs and Services: Track all the programs and services offered by the organization
- Case Plans: Templatized case plans allow you to create and track goals and action items during program lifecycle
- Notes Tracking: Create notes and save as draft and tag to specific topics for better filtering and reporting later on
For Program Managers, these include:
- Manage service delivery-related operations: Track program engagements and services for clients, beneficiaries, volunteers, and even cohorts
- Scale with your programs: Extend with existing Salesforce program management solutions as programs scale
- Make better decisions: View programs, fundraising, and engagement data in a single system
The Salesforce Ecosystem
The Community is such an important part of the Salesforce ecosystem and we need to remember nonprofits, developers, and Salesforce are all in this together. To that end, a major announcement was made around Community-1st development – Open Source Commons Project. Salesforce believes the co-innovation will help them continue to put Community first.
Overall the features being implemented are designed to streamline business processes and increase productivity, empowering organizations to do more good. We can’t wait to see what 2020 brings. What was your favorite announcement?
