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Nonprofit Success Pack(NPSP) – Volunteers for Salesforce

What is Salesforce NPSP

The Nonprofit Success Pack is part of the Nonprofit Cloud for Salesforce (used as the Nonprofit Starter Pack). On top of the Salesforce Enterprise Edition, the managed packages in NPSP are designed. The many packages that allow you to use Salesforce are provided by NPSP. It is possible to handle the core relationships between individual donors, their households, and the people they work for.

The NPSP of Salesforce uses and builds on the data model used to organise data by the CRM. This standard data model is designed to help users understand how close to a spreadsheet or database the data is structured. We must first go through some traditional Salesforce terms to comprehend this concept:

  • Object: Objects are like spreadsheets that you use to track data. They are the tabs that calculate various aspects of your non-profit at the top of your Salesforce screen. Accounts, connections, leads, and opportunities are standard items that belong to Salesforce. Custom artefacts may also be generated to monitor particular goals.
  • Fields: There are fields attached to any object. This is where the specifics of the item you’re looking at are located. For example, you can have a field for client contact details such as their cell phone number under your “accounts” item.
  • Records: Records are like a spreadsheet’s cells. This is where you enter information according to that data’s right object and field. For instance, you can have a field for the name of the donor inside the “accounts” object, and the record shows that the name of the donor is Phil Smith.

Salesforce applications, such as the NPSP, are collections of objects and fields that help to organise the nonprofit’s individual aspects. The best thing about this particular Salesforce approach is that by building out the standard Salesforce data model, it organises data.

From the begin, we said that the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack is a perfect way to start customising your solution for Salesforce. It’s not an end-all-be-all app, though. You’ll want to look for a full fundraising solution that works for easy organisation of key metrics side-by-side with this data model, but we’ll cover this later in more detail.

Now here we see how we customize the volunteers:

Volunteers for Salesforce is a fantastic module that has a whole slate of super-useful features for managing a volunteer program at a nonprofit organization. If you manage your volunteering on Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, chances are you’ve clicked on the Find Volunteers button when you’re managing sign-ups for a Volunteer Shift.

You might have clicked right back out again, thinking, ‘This looks good, but it doesn’t allow me to search for what I really want to search for.’ You do not track volunteer skills, for instance, or get your volunteers to set their availability on their personal website. So, how do you look for exactly what you want then?

Customizing the ‘Find Volunteers’ Tool

The great news is that this tool can be really easily customized! You can change the collection of available search filters to (almost) any Communication Log area. One common scenario we find is that all contacts connected with a specific organization may want to be searched for by volunteer managers. We’ll need to start tinkering to do this…

The first move is to navigate to the Contact object in Object Manager in the Setup menu, and then click the Field Sets portion. The VolunteersFindCriteriaFS Field Collection you’ll find here.

You can add, remove and re-order these fields! Here we can add the ‘Primary Affiliation’ field.

What’s more, once we’ve asked the tool to go find us some volunteers, we can also change the columns that are shown in the search results. This is the Field Collection from VolunteersFindFS. Again, we may add these fields, remove them and re-order them. I am not interested in seeing volunteer numbers in this case, but I would like to see the Primary Affiliation alongside applicable Volunteer Skills and Availability.

And we’re done with that!

Let’s assume I’m a volunteer manager and I’m searching for ACME Corporation volunteers to staff a shift. Navigating to the Shift record, clicking the Find Volunteers button and searching for Primary Affiliation is all I need to do now.

We have now fully redefined how, as well as how we see the outcomes, we can search for qualified or valuable volunteers! It’s important to remember that I’ve only done this for the Primary Affiliation area – you can do this in your Salesforce Communication database for other regular or custom fields you have.

If you’re still not sure if the NPSP is right for your nonprofit, Cloudy Wave will help you assess and even set up the NPSP for your organization.