Matt Kaufman at MK Partners has been hard at work creating the Winter 09 Nonprofit Edition.  I wanted to write this post to give a flavor of what is coming. 

Schema
Person Accounts, Contacts / Accounts, Bucket or Individual Account or One to One
There has been a lot of analysis as to what is the right way to associate a contact to a relevant "account".  The previous NPO Edition used an Individual account bucket and made all contacts that did not have accounts members of that Individual bucket account.  With APEX, it is now possible to do a one to one model where every contact has it's own account.  When a new Contact is created the Account is created in the background and any time the associated Account is clicked on, APEX redirects the user to the Contact.

Creating a Contact

This is great for new salesforce.com users but what about those of us that have been using the Individual bucket model.  First, we are working on a utility that will scan through all of the contacts in the Individual bucket account and create a one to one model account for each contact.  Additionally, we will give you the ability to keep the Individual bucket account model with a "system setting".

Changing the Schema Setting

Householding

Some people use householding, some people don't.  Householding is turned on by default and for every new conact a household is created.  Householding is implemented as a seperate object.  However, we heard a lot of feedback that many people either don't do householding at all, or implement it as part of accounts.  to facilitate this, we created the ability to turn householding off.

Changing Household Model

Affiliations
Another thing that we heard was that you needed the ability to associate people to accounts and people to people in more dynamic ways.  To accomplish this, we implemented Affiliations and Relationships.  Affiliations is the ability to create multiple organizations that a contact is affiliated with.  This is implemented a custom, reciprocal relationship to Accounts.

Affiliations

Relationships
Relationships are the ability to associate a contact to another contact.

Relationships

Donation History
And finally, donation history is the ability to look on the contact record to see the last date for a donation and the current roll-up amount.

DonationHistory