Key Features You Should Activate First After Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Implementation

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is a powerful platform designed to help mission-driven organizations manage their donors, volunteers, fundraising efforts, and program delivery more efficiently. But implementation alone doesn’t guarantee success. Following your investment in Salesforce Non Profit Cloud Implementation services, the crucial next step is to strategically activate the features that will deliver immediate benefits and ensure your organization’s ongoing success.

Activating core features early ensures your teams can quickly align around the system, reduce manual tasks, improve donor experiences, and gain insights through real-time data. In this post, we will guide you through the initial essential features you should activate to optimize your Nonprofit Cloud experience.

1. Configure the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

The Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) is the foundational layer of the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. It adapts the Salesforce data model for nonprofits, offering a structure to manage households, donations, recurring gifts, grants, and donor affiliations.

Why it matters:

• Pre-configured fields and objects designed for nonprofit operations.
• Streamlined donation tracking and household management.
• Enhanced relationship visibility through affiliations and soft credits.

Getting started:

To establish your CRM’s foundation for successful fundraising, begin by selecting the appropriate Account Model: Household, One-to-One, or Individual, depending on your organization’s donor perspective. Following this, configure recurring donations, donation stages, soft credits, and roll-up summaries to automate donation reporting at both Contact and Account levels. These components are crucial for your CRM’s structure and will support all future fundraising activities.

2. Donation and Gift Management Tools

Effective donation tracking is essential for measuring fundraising impact and nurturing donor relationships. Salesforce offers native features within NPSP for recording and tracking donations, whether one-time, recurring, or pledged.

Key features to activate:

• Recurring Donations: Enable recurring gifts for consistent revenue streams.
• Opportunity Management: Customize opportunity stages to reflect your donation pipeline.
• Gift Entry Tool: For batch entry of offline donations like checks or event proceeds.

Once these are set up, integrate your preferred payment processor to enable seamless online giving. This reduces data entry and ensures every donation is accurately recorded in real-time.

3. Engagement Plans and Levels

Engagement Plans allow you to standardize how your organization communicates with donors, volunteers, or beneficiaries at different stages in their journey. This feature automates task creation, ensuring that no relationship-building step is missed.

Initial setup:

• Define Engagement Levels (e.g., Bronze, Silver, Gold) based on donation size, frequency, or other metrics.
• Map each level to a specific Engagement Plan, which includes tasks like phone calls, thank-you notes, or meeting invites.
• Assign plans automatically based on donor behavior using process automation.

These workflows help you scale personalized outreach while maintaining consistency across your team.

4. Enable Reports and Dashboards

No nonprofit can afford to make decisions based on gut feeling alone. Custom dashboards and real-time reports ensure that executive leadership, fundraisers, and program managers can access the insights they need, when they need them.

Suggested reports to begin with:

• Donations by Source and Campaign
• Year-over-Year Giving Trends
• Lapsed Donor Reports
• Volunteer Hours by Program

Dashboards to activate:

• Fundraising Performance Dashboard
• Donor Retention Dashboard
• Program Impact Dashboard

Use Leverage Salesforce’s reporting filters to analyze data by time, donor category, or campaign, enabling you to identify patterns and make data-driven decisions.

5. Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S)

For nonprofits that depend on volunteers, enabling Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S) early on brings immediate structure to volunteer engagement.

What it enables:

• Manage volunteer jobs, shifts, and assignments.
• Collect volunteer applications through forms embedded on your website.
• Track hours, interests, and participation history.

With V4S, you gain a 360-degree view of how volunteers contribute to your mission. You can even integrate with tools like FormAssembly or Jotform for streamlined sign-ups.

6. Salesforce Flow for Automation

Salesforce Flow is a powerful low-code automation tool that eliminates repetitive tasks and ensures timely follow-ups.

Popular use cases:

• Send automated donation receipts after payment.
• Notify relationship managers when major donors contribute.
• Trigger tasks when engagement scores drop or volunteers miss shifts.

By setting up basic flows early in your Salesforce Non Profit Cloud Implementation services, you lay the groundwork for more advanced automation later on, freeing up your team to focus on strategic work.

7. Constituent Communication Preferences

Modern donors expect organizations to respect their communication preferences. Capturing this data and acting on it is vital for trust and compliance.

What to implement:

• Fields to track preferences for email, phone, text, and direct mail.
• Subscription status (opt-in/opt-out).
• Automated filtering of lists based on these preferences.

With proper setup, your outreach will become more relevant, timely, and welcomed.

8. Program Management Module (PMM)

If your nonprofit delivers structured programs or services, such as training, workshops, or community outreach, the Program Management Module (PMM) is indispensable.

Features include:

• Service scheduling and attendance tracking.
• Outcome tracking tied to participant progress.
• Program enrollment dashboards.

PMM allows you to connect service delivery to data, making reporting to funders and stakeholders easier and more accurate.

9. Security and Access Controls

Providing the correct individuals with access to the appropriate information is crucial for security, extending beyond just data protection. Role-based access protects sensitive donor or program data while maintaining user productivity.

Key actions:

• Set up Roles and Hierarchies (e.g., Fundraising Manager, Program Staff).
• Configure Profiles and Permission Sets.
• Apply Sharing Rules to restrict data visibility as needed.

Audit your setup quarterly to ensure continued compliance and internal accountability.

10. Email and Marketing Tool Integrations

If you’re using email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Pardot, integrating them with Salesforce centralizes constituent data and improves campaign performance tracking.

Benefits:

• Sync email campaign results with contact records.
• Segment audiences based on behavior or donation history.
• Trigger personalized drip campaigns based on Salesforce events.

Start with essential syncs like new donor welcome emails, newsletter sign-ups, and event follow-ups.

Conclusion

Completing your Salesforce Non Profit Cloud Implementation services is only the beginning. The true value of the platform comes when you activate the right features to support your organization’s unique goals. From configuring NPSP and automating communications to unlocking program data insights, each of these features builds toward a more connected and impactful mission.

Take time to assess which features align most closely with your immediate needs. Build a phased roadmap to activate additional features as your team grows more comfortable with the platform.

For nonprofits looking to optimize their Salesforce investment, partnering with experts in Salesforce Non Profit Cloud Implementation services can accelerate the process. But even internally, by prioritizing the right tools early, your nonprofit can begin seeing tangible results quickly, enhancing both operations and community impact.