Nonprofit Starter Pack

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Contents

This is the Nonprofit Starter Pack Resource Center

Entity diagram for Nonprofit Starter Pack installed in salesforce.com
The Nonprofit Starter Pack is a set of customizations to Salesforce.com CRM that supports some common nonprofit business processes. The Nonprofit Starter Pack consists of custom fields, custom objects, reports, workflow, page layouts, Force.com Code (Apex) and VisualForce pages.

The Nonprofit Starter Pack is made available as a set of Managed Packages (definition of Managed Package) that can be installed by anyone. When a nonprofit signs up for a Salesforce.com CRM donation from the Salesforce.com Foundation, they can choose to have the Nonprofit Starter Pack pre-installed in their donated Salesforce.com instance.

Screensteps documentation for using and working with the Nonprofit Starter Pack is available here. A data dictionary and package contents list is available here.

If you are a nonprofit and you're interested in using salesforce.com with or without the Nonprofit Starter Pack, please visit the Salesforce.com Foundation Donation page.

Purpose

The Nonprofit Starter Pack was created to help nonprofits use Salesforce.com to further their missions. The Salesforce.com platform is very flexible, which makes it very powerful for helping an organization manage it's constituents. However, because it is so flexible un-modified Salesforce.com can look a little too much like a blank slate for some new users. The Nonprofit Starter Pack aims to fill in that blank slate with a configuration that addresses key business processes.

While all nonprofits are different, the Nonprofit Starter Pack was built to support some business processes that are common across a large percentage of nonprofits.

The Nonprofit Starter Pack won't be a fit for every nonprofit. Each nonprofit should evaluate the Nonprofit Starter Pack and determine it if is a good fit.

Functionality

The Nonprofit Starter Pack attempts to support a number of business process that Nonprofits need to handle in their CRM. It is broken into individual packages to address each of the key processes (Current Version):

Nonprofit Starter Pack Contacts And Organizations

Supports the tracking of individuals as well as organizations (2.1.4)

Nonprofit Starter Pack Households

Makes it easy to group people living in the same household (2.4.6)

Nonprofit Starter Pack Recurring Donations

Allows for tracking donations pledged over time (2.0.12)

Nonprofit Starter Pack Relationships

Allows for the tracking of key relationships between individuals (2.0)

Nonprofit Starter Pack Affiliations

Tracks relationships between individuals and organizations (1.55)

Utilities

The Template converter is provided as a utility that may help in migration to the Nonprofit Starter Pack from an existing salesforce.com instance:

HOWTO Videos

Short screencasts showing Nonprofit Starter Pack functionality are on this YouTube playlist. You can subscribe to the playlist to stay apprised of new screencasts.

Strengths and Weaknesses

All software has inherent trade-offs and the Nonprofit Starter Pack is no different.

Strengths

  • Works out of the box for nonprofits with straightforward needs
  • Addresses a number of key needs of the nonprofit business process
  • Allows for easy selection of one to one contact to account model or bucket account model
  • Remotely updateable when code changes and bugs are fixed
  • Easily uninstalled if necessary

Weaknesses

  • About 90% configurable (i.e. you can't change the naming convention for Households)
  • Managed packages are opaque to Users and Developers--you can't see the code
  • Managed packages can't be modified, even if minor tweaks are needed

Dealing with Individuals

Most nonprofits need to deal with individuals--as donors, grant officers, members, volunteers, clients, etc. Salesforce.com has built in support for individuals, but most nonprofits need to augment that to get the kind of information they need, particularly around reporting and analytics.

The Nonprofit Starter Pack has an option to pick one of two data models for dealing with individuals:

  • One-to-One Accounts
  • Bucket Account

Each organization can decide which model is the best fit.

General Installation Issues

The General Installation Issues page provides some general technical tips when installing the Nonprofit Starter Pack packages to an existing salesforce.com instance. Also see: Full step-by-step installation instructions.

Upgrading

Modifying your Salesforce.com database should always be done with the utmost care. Here are some tips should you choose to upgrade.

Upgrading appexchange packages is done by visiting the install link and supplying your username and password. To find the install links, visit each package page listed above.

Upgrading Best Practices

Video of the Upgrade process

Finding the version numbers of the packages you have installed is easy.

Release Notes

Release notes are available for each package:

Uninstalling

You can uninstall the packages in the Nonprofit Starter Pack.

Migrating from the Nonprofit Edition

Prior to 12/1/2008, nonprofits had an option to use the Nonprofit Edition or Nonprofit Template. This has been superseded by the Nonprofit Starter Pack. If you want to migrate from the Nonprofit Edition to the Nonprofit Starter Pack, you can follow these instructions.

Feature Requests and Wishlists

All our issues are tracked on the Nonprofit Starter Pack project site.

If you have a problem, please take a look at our open issues. Here are the open and fixed issues by package:

Staying in touch

Where to Discuss the Nonprofit Starter Pack

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