These Are Not Turnkey Products

A few weeks ago I wrote about the distinction between platform and product. It's a blurry line (at best) with a lot of things in the Salesforce world. I think this is confusion that the nonprofit Salesforce world has been bedeviled by for a long time, particularly due to the fact that most of us use a common tool, the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). I ran across a great illustration of the confusion when I was at NPSP Day Philly the first week of December. (A great event, by the way. Watch for one near you!)

There were several people at the event that were on the fundraising and development team of a local nonprofit that is known as a place to swim or exercise. (You've heard of them...) Their organization is in the middle of a Salesforce implementation that, honestly, sounds like it's been mismanaged. I'm sure there is more going on than just what I heard from those folk in side conversations throughout the day. But the main thing I was able to gather was that at some point the person implementing basically told the fundraising team that because they had an org with the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), they should be able to "just start using Salesforce" for their development work. [Not a quote, just my way of expressing what I gather they were told.] The implementation had originally been planned to start with program management and I got the impression that nothing was done to refocus the work on fundraising other than tell them to start using Salesforce.

That first week in December, that org's fundraising team was using Salesforce but found themselves entirely unable to report on simple things like "How is the Giving Tuesday campaign going?" And from what I could tell, the main obstacle wasn't about not understanding Salesforce reporting. It was fields that weren't accessible, data that wasn't available, and the like. What I realized is that the person telling the fundraising team to use Salesforce is unaware of the distinction between product and platform. He seems to have thought that since they "had" NPSP they could just "start using it." But he'd done nothing to set up the instance to use NPSP features.

That is not the way things work! And just to be 100% clear, this story would be equally true if their org was on Nonprofit Cloud (NPC, currently named "Agentforce 360 for Nonprofits"). Neither "works" from the moment you "turn it on." They require extensive configuration and customization.

The folks from this org described being on calls where they asked for, for example, a Gifts This Year rollup. The guy would quickly "do something" then tell them to refresh their page and there it was. I can't be sure, of course, but it sounds to me like in the moment he was simply adding fields to the page layout (or fixing field level security) that should have been there in the first place. They described this happening repeatedly.

Basically Nothing Is Preinstalled

I've pointed this out before so I'm just going to quote myself:

You don't get to convert a trial org into your real instance. You can get a trial and play with it, but when you get your real instance it will be essentially a clean org, perhaps with NPSP installed, but only the package, none of the extras that were part of the trial, including record types, sales processes, page layouts, metadata records for NPSP features (like reciprocal relationships settings), and more.

(This is, again, exactly how it works with NPC as well.)

The upshot is that even if you are implementing the most basic possible use case for Salesforce in the nonprofit context—which is to say "a simple use of NPSP/NPC to track donors and donations"—it will not work for users "out of the box." The page layouts will not show things like donation rollups for Total Gifts This Year or Last Year. Users won't, in fact, have permissions to view those fields at all, neither on page layouts, nor reports. When users try to enter a new donation, they won't find an opportunity record type whose page layout has the fields they need, whose stages match the stages fundraisers use, or that can record multiple payments on a single pledge. Users won't be able to send email acknowledgements for gifts. Most of this stuff exists in the back end, it's just not enabled.

From the user perspective, they're going to decide that Salesforce is either broken or useless, or at the very least very confusing, and walk away if they can. Sadly, our beleagered friends from NPSP Day Philly don't have the option of walking away. Their contract for Blackbaud/Raiser's Edge expired at the end of 2025. So they had no choice but start doing their work in Salesforce. That means they're coming up with all manner of workarounds to just record something, anything. Who knows which opportunity stages they're setting gifts to? Who knows if they're entering donors in consistent ways? I get anxiety just thinking about it. (And they're not my clients.)

The Trials are Products (ish)

If you spin up a new trial org (for either NPC or NPSP), I would say that's a product.

What you get with a trial is a fully-configured Salesforce org [presumably] meant to show off how you would/could do fundraising as though Salesforce was a fundraising application, not an extensible platform. Fields are on the pages, record types are enabled, buttons and quick actions are in place, donation rollups calculate, etc... It's basically a turnkey fundraising tool. I would call that a product.

[Side note: That first login for the first user is still gonna to be rough. All kinds of annoying pop-ups, all list views go to empty Recently Viewed, some objects have no list views set up at all, you're not immediately in the right app, etc... But plenty of products have less-than-ideal UX when you first use them.]

However, since you can't use that trial for more than 30 days, it's not that relevant that the trial is a product. It's not a product you can buy! When you get your real instance, you merely have the platform (essentially Sales Cloud) with a bunch more metadata sitting in the back end. You have to start customizing to even get to the point of having what you experienced in the trial org. I don't think enough people understand this distinction, particularly because this isn't how it used to be. Until a few years ago the process for getting your Power of Us donation was that

• you created a trial org,

• put in your Power of Us application,

• and when that was approved your trial org converted into a full Enterprise Edition.

In that world, nonprofits all started with the same product. That gave us a common language and common experience.

Moving to Platform

But as soon as we customize our Salesforce instance to do more things than fundraising, or to do fundraising in different ways, or to add features to our particular type of fundraising, or to not do fundraising at all but still use the Household Account Model, we move from the world of product into the world of platform.

And, frankly, that's where all the power is. NPSP or Agentforce 360 for Nonprofits are just two offerings in the world of nonprofit fundraising software. There are others,

including Raiser's Edge. If you lay those three next to each other as products, you have to make a selection for your organization based on features and price. (What else is there?) Raiser's Edge might win in that head-to-head. (Might.) But what I think makes Salesforce a better choice than Raiser's Edge (for those organizations that have made an informed decision) is that Salesforce is a more extensible platform. If there's a feature of Raiser's Edge that you love that doesn't exist in NPC/NPSP, all you have to do is add it from the AppExchange or build it custom. On the other hand, if you want to add your program management database into Raiser's Edge, you really can't.