A Bridge to the Future

I just got back from a Commons Community Sprint in Denver and my faith in the Salesforce community is refreshed and renewed. There’s a new sprint project in town and it’s got potential to be an important one, of a scale that the community hasn’t taken on since NPSP was first created. And I’m really proud that people—all of them new to sprinting, many new to the Salesforce community—took to this project enthusiastically, even knowing how big this task could be. I’m confident that as word gets out many more people

(that weren’t in Denver) will also step up.

[Yes, this should be Freebie on a bridge. But there wasn't time to ask my designer.]

Nonprofit Bridge

This new project is nothing short of a community commitment to bring forth a choice for organizations that want to use the power of the Salesforce platform to work with individual people but need simplicity, ease of setup and adoption, and low total cost of ownership. We need this choice to deal with some uncomfortable realities:

1. The Industry Clouds and Person Accounts are complicated.

2. People are anxious that Salesforce will stop supporting NPSP someday.

3. NPSP is old technology.

4. Most small organizations have (and will always have) very little in-house Salesforce expertise.

I’m going to say more about all of those in a moment. But first I need to contextualize: To the best of my ability, I believe I have captured four statements of objective fact about where the nonprofit Salesforce ecosystem/community stands today. Because of that reality, many people—myself included—believe nonprofits need more choices than the current three:

• Nonprofit Cloud (NPC),

• Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP),

• or “vanilla” Sales/Service Cloud.

[I have plenty of opinion and value judgement that will come later. Disagree with me if you need about the objectivity of those four statements. I’m easy to find via LinkedIn, the Trailblazer Community, Ohana Slack, and elsewhere.]

Industries Clouds and Person Accounts are Complicated

I’ve written so much about the new Nonprofit Cloud (recently renamed “Agentforce Nonprofit.” But I doubt that’s going to stick.) that maybe I don’t need to repeat myself much here. [Just search for "NPC" on this site.] I’ll just show you the entity relationship diagram for Nonprofit Cloud fundraising as a reminder:

That's just fundraising!

Salesforce designed NPC to meet the needs of enterprise level nonprofits (That means “big.”) and sophisticated fundraising operations, so I’m not even qualified to assess whether the complexity is appropriate for the use case. I don't work with organizations of that size or that well-funded. I’m going to just assume this is only as complicated as needed to solve for the use case and not more. But that still leaves it quite complicated. Most small nonprofits just don’t have the sophistication in their fundraising nor the scale of donations and, therefore, could get by with a much less complicated tool.

Similarly, I’ve written about the ways that Person Accounts introduce a lot of complexity and confusion. Opinion here: I do not believe it’s really feasible to hide this complexity from users. Even if it were technically possible to do so with things like screen flows, Lightning Web Components, tab renaming, or the like, that will introduce significantly more complexity in the back end that will impact system admins at these nonprofits, most of whom work solo, are accidental admins, and have more to their job than just care and feeding of Salesforce.

People are Anxious about the future of NPSP

As I have said many times in person and in writing, I do not believe Salesforce has any current plans to stop supporting NPSP. Those organizations using it can continue to do so indefinitely. New orgs can install it. We have not reached “end of support,” nor “end of life,” the code is still visible, and when bugs are discovered or support is needed, Salesforce has continued to act. But despite that demonstrated level of continued support for NPSP, people are still anxious about when or if that will change. Can you blame them? Frankly, I have a level of anxiety too, for all the reasons I’ve spoken about before. There are objective reasons to be anxious. Maybe the level of anxiety is higher than it “ought to be,” or maybe it’s lower. But it’s there and we should name it and respond to it appropriately.

NPSP Is Old Technology

We reached “end of innovation” many years ago. NPSP has barely gotten any new features since I joined the Salesforce ecosystem in 2013. The code is old and, as I understand it, very complicated, and, for example, the package uses workflow rules rather than putting non-code automation in Flow. With the shift to new Nonprofit Cloud, Salesforce officially announced that NPSP would no longer get updates other than support. It’s old tech, it’s not going to be updated or refreshed. Again: objectively true.

And we know that old technology doesn’t last forever. (Just a surprisingly long time. See: COBOL, vinyl records, Salesforce S-Controls, …) But even if we can be reasonably confident that NPSP will continue to work, before I implement a new org on NPSP I need to at least acknowledge that I’m about to use older technology. I might make the choice to go ahead, but I want to do it with eyes open.

Small organizations have little in-house Salesforce expertise

I’ve said before that I think the barrier to initial entry to Salesforce is higher than it was a few years ago. Initial implementation is not as straightforward as it was when you could just get an NPSP trial and convert it to a production org. Plus the platform itself has grown more complicated (and more powerful) and other considerations have changed as well, most importantly: security.

For all those reasons, smaller nonprofits might choose some other CRM or leave the platform rather than adopt Nonprofit Cloud unless they have another choice that can make sense. That’s the understanding that led to the Nonprofit Bridge project.

What Will Bridge Be?

The team at the Denver sprint had a little fun mashing up a famous Denver sculpture, a famous bridge, and a unicorn.

I don’t think we know, yet, what the Nonprofit Bridge sprint project is going to “produce.” As much as we want to jump into “solutioning” and building things, we’re trying to move forward with humility. So far, only the voices of about twenty people have been in the discussion—that is not representative of this vast nonprofit and education Salesforce community. So for first steps we want to raise awareness that conversations are happening, we want to bring more people and their ideas into the mix, and we want to grow the pool of volunteers to help with whatever “we” decide needs doing. (“We” is meant to stand in for “the community,” not just “those working on the Bridge project.”)

But that being said, Bridge already has a statement of vision and values:

Vision:

We see a need for a future-proofed entry point for nonprofits to the Salesforce platform, where every organization can choose the level of complexity that meets their needs. We aim to design a modular suite of features that can extend the core platform to support common nonprofit CRM needs.

Values:

Accidental Admin-friendly

Turnkey

Community Owned and Maintained

Reasonably Future-proof

Accessible Design

No harder migration path/streamlined path to future migrations

Declarative first/low code

Unmanaged, for maximum transparency

No technical decisions that would limit future innovation

I actually think that's some pretty heady stuff!

So here’s a quick call to action: If that vision inspires you, follow this LinkedIn group, join discussions in the #nonprofit channel of Ohana Slack, watch this and other Trailblazer Community Groups, and consider coming to future sprints to directly volunteer with this project.

Next week: Starting to think about what needs to go into a Minimum Lovable Product.