Update

A great demo video with Q and A is now available.

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Yesterday, on the Salesforce.com Foundation website Dec 1st, we released the new Nonprofit Starter Pack for Salesforce.com.  This post is intended to provide a first look in to what we have built.

What Is It?
To Date we have provided nonprofit functionality in a template or skin that was a set of customizations that could only be included with a completely new instance of salesforce.com.  This worked great to get a specific set of customizations out but it did not allow for updates or upgrades.  We have addressed this problem by moving to packages.  Salesforce.com has a packaging system for collecting a group of features and providing them to anyone to apply to their instance of Salesforce.  There is a large collection of these packages at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.  The new Nonprofit Starter Pack for Salesforce.com  is a set of 5 packages that can be installed independently or all at once and, more importantly, they can be applied to existing organizations and each can be updated as new features are added.  (Currently, we have only provided these packages as a group for new users.  By the end of the month, we will have the packages available for existing users to install.)

Their are almost 5,000 social sector organizations in 56 different countries using donated licenses of salesforce.com.  Of those organizations, approximately 90% get up an running by themselves using online training and other community resources.  This is the primary community for which we built these packages.  Our goal was to make it as easy as possible for any nonprofit organization to get up and running with enterprise class constituent relationship and other data management.  The other design consideration was to ensure that everything we put in our packages is compatible with core salesforce.com CRM.  As the name says, we have built a starter pack for nonprofits to get up and running with enterprise class CRM.  So, what did we build?

The Packages
Contacts and Organizations

The primary purpose of this package is to deal with the fact that most nonprofit organizations do not have a business to business (or organization to organization) business model but instead operate in a hybrid way where some of their constituents ARE businesses (or organizations) but many are individuals.  Because salesforce is built as a business to business tool we needed to add some customizations to allow nonprofits to effectively manage individuals.  We started with the assumption that when an organization is the primary constituent then the nonprofit needs to operate in a business to business schema with that organization but, when an individual is the primary constituent, the nonprofit most be able to manage the relationship directly with that individual and not via a proxy organization record.  We managed this by writing some code creates a "phantom" account when ever a contact is saved without an organization explicitly defined.  That account is of a special one2one type that can never be "visited".  When ever a link to that account is clicked, the user is taken to the associated contact.  There are also routines that manage the deletion (and protection) of these accounts and their associated donations when contacts are deleted.

Additionally, we augmented the contact information available for each contact.  For each contact a preferred phone and email can be designated and each of two mailing addresses can be described as "work" or "other".

Households

Next is the Household package.  Much like with one2one contact to account relationship described above, a household is automatically created if one is not explicitly defined.  A household can have multiple members.  Also, a household has a phone number and a mailing address both of which show up on each of the household member's contact records.

Affiliations

Affiliations are relationships between a contact and an organization.  These are automatically generated when a contact who is listed as working for an organizations (not an individual in a one2one schema) leaves one organization and moves to another.  These can also be manually created to designate relationships like "on the board of" or "founder of" etc.

Relationships

Relationships are between two contacts.  These are manually created and are reciprocal.  They allow you to record relationships like "is the brother of", "is the colleague of" etc. 

All of the features that I have mentioned so far can be seen in this screencast.

Recurring Donations and Pledges

The final package is for managing donations, recurring donations and pledges.  We renamed Opportunities to Donations and changed the page layout as well as the Stages to be more appropriate.  We also added a Recurring Donations / Pledges object.  On this object you can define either a total of incremental amount as well as the details of the recurrence and the code will do the math creating the open Donation records.

There is a short screencast here to see how this works.