Apprentice Hoots: Hidden gems – surfacing powerful features in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for managing households successfully

Apprentice Hoots: Hidden gems – surfacing powerful features in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for managing households successfully

Charities and Nonprofit organisations’ aims and objectives are different from your average business organisation. With very different purposes, they need a different system in place than your standard Salesforce system and that’s where Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) comes in.

What is NPSP and who uses it?

The Nonprofit Success Pack is an app that sits on top of Salesforce and is preconfigured to manage fundraising and constituent management within Salesforce to make the daily life of nonprofits easier and enable them to focus on the things that really matter! 

NPSP is perfect for any charity or nonprofit organisations that want to use their data to segment their donors in meaningful ways, manage their programs and campaigns, as well as engage with key constituents and manage members using their charitable services.

Recently, we have had a few similar questions from our customers regarding Salesforce’s NPSP and I wanted to share with you the hidden gems we have revealed to our charities and nonprofit organisations.

Hidden gem #1: Moving contacts between households

Has your key fundraiser’s Aunty Theresa just moved from America into their household within the UK? Or has your member just moved from their mum’s house to their dad’s? Or has an error been made on the system where you have two different households created in Salesforce for one household…

NPSP has got you covered! You can move an existing contact into a different household as shown below:

1. Find the account you are wanting to move the contact into;

2. Click Manage Household;

3. Search for the Contact you want to add to the Household and click the add button;

Alternatively, if the contact doesn’t exist you can add a new contact.

This adds the contact into the Household members – but this is not saved to the Household record at this stage.

4. Click Save

Aunty Theresa has now joined the rest of the Smith household!

Hidden gem #2: Adding relationships to type

Within Salesforce NPSP, you can define relationships between contacts i.e, John Smith is Rebecca Smith’s dad.

However, there may be relationship types that are not defined in out-of-the-box NPSP that your organisation needs. For example within NPSP, there is currently no way to define that Nathan and Rebecca are brother and sister but NPSP does have the capabilities for you to add your own relationships – we can also make them reciprocal!

Let’s jump back to our example of the Smith Household

Rebecca and Nathan are siblings, however one is male and the other is female. If Salesforce can determine the contact’s gender from the values inserted into the gender field, then the reciprocal relationship is created using the value that matches the gender. If no gender is specified, then Salesforce uses the neutral value. To do this, we need to;

  1. Update the Relationship Type Picklist field values.

Setup > Object Manager > Relationship > Fields & Relationships > Type > New > Type the new values into the text box > Save.

  1. Navigate back to the NPSP app;
  2. Click the NPSP Settings tab or find this in the App Launcher;
  3. Click Relationships > Relationships Reciprocal Settings > New Reciprocal Relationship;
  4. You can now define the reciprocal relationships as shown below:

You will need to make three reciprocal relationships as shown below:

NameMaleFemaleNeutral
BrotherBrotherSisterSibling
SisterBrotherSisterSibling
SiblingBrotherSisterSibling

Other examples might include: deceased spouses or divorced and former spouses.

Now when we add a relationship to Rebecca’s contact to say Nathan is her brother, the reciprocal relationship will be created on Nathan’s contact to say he has a sister called Rebecca.

Hidden gem #3: Viewing relationships between contacts visually

Finally, with lots of relationships now being added to the mix, you might want a simple way to view them visually. To do this;

  1. Search for the contact;
  2. Click the drop down in the top right corner;
  1. Click Relationship Viewer…

 Voila! You can see all the relationships between the contacts!

You can click on more of the members to view more relationships also…

These relationships will be described based on the contact you are viewing it from – click on Theresa if you would like to view the relationships from her perspective.

NPSP is full of so many cool little tools and is one of my favourite packages out there due to its thoughtfulness – if you would like to find out more about what NPSP could do for your Nonprofit Organisation. Please reach out here!

Owl see you later,

Charlotte

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