Fundraising features

Fundraising was the initial use case when the community started work on Nonprofit Success Pack in 2008. Understanding donor behavior seemed to be a great fit for a customer relationship management system, that is, Salesforce. However, donors donate individually rather than in conjunction with their employer. There are some notable exceptions, such as United Way's use case for corporate-driven pledges and employer-matching gifts, which we will explore in Chapter 10, Configuring Fundraising Features.

The pain point was that the standard Salesforce data structure is focused on accounts. Accounts equate to businesses. And, as mentioned, donors generally give individually. Sometimes donors give as a family. And donor campaigns often target those individuals living at the same physical address. Donors may also give at work or be instrumental in influencing corporate entities to donate. In today's environment, donors want an easy way to donate online but there are those donors who are still more comfortable mailing a check.

Fundraisers employ many strategies to meet their revenue goals; each strategy may require different data and tracking. You begin to see how quickly the situation can become complicated.

Nonprofit Success Pack starts with these considerations in mind and uses many standard Salesforce objects you already know and love as the base for fundraising features:

• Account: An object that holds information about companies
• Contact: An object that holds information about individuals
• Opportunity: An object that holds information about sales
• Campaign: An object that holds information about marketing initiatives, responses, and metrics

The following figure shows the relationships and fields for the four standard Salesforce objects just discussed:

Figure 1.4 – An entity-relationship diagram of standard Salesforce objects used in Nonprofit Success Pack

Configuring the NPSP settings appropriately to handle your organization's use cases requires understanding the use case requirements as well as the settings themselves. We'll get into great detail on the ways to determine what the settings should look like when we install and configure NPSP in Chapter 9,Install Nonprofit Cloud Solutions.

Here is an outline of the various settings we will learn to appropriately configure the Nonprofit Success Pack fundraising features:

• Account Model: This will provide the basis of the rest of the data architecture.
• Households: This is the most common and currently recommended account model used with NPSP and allows the following settings.
• Addresses: This is a custom object in NPSP to allow more than one address.
• Lead Settings: These provide the basis of potential donor information.
• Relationships: This object provides context for how people are connected to people.
• Donations: This is the standard opportunity object renamed.
• Recurring Donations: This is a custom object in NPSP to track recurring donations.
• Bulk Data Processes: These settings establish various automated processes throughout NPSP.

All these settings are found on the NPSP Settings page in the Nonprofit Salesforce instance:

Figure 1.5 – the NPSP Settings page as seen in an actual Salesforce instance

All of these are included in the fundraising features for Nonprofit Success Pack as configurable settings. How the settings are configured will be predicated by the business use cases for the nonprofit customer. We will get into detailed use cases in the chapter on setting up NPSP.