Basic premises and use cases for NPSP

As we learned in Chapter 1, Overview of Nonprofit Cloud, Salesforce was founded on the principle of giving back. One of the simplest and easiest ways to give back was to donate the Salesforce product licenses to registered nonprofits to use. The challenge is that Salesforce was created to help corporations and their sales leaders track leads and opportunities and business relationships. Salesforce is defined as a customer relationship management tool. Nonprofits don't have customers.

Let's explore the pain points nonprofits came across in trying to use Salesforce by comparing corporate versus nonprofit. By looking at the differences in what Salesforce offers businesses and what nonprofits need, we can see the gaps that existed before NPSP. The following table outlines some of these considerations:

Table 2.1 – Comparison of standard Salesforce business use cases versus Salesforce nonprofit use cases...