Blog
January 26, 2017
Or How Two Different-Sized Organizations Used Salesforce NPSP as Their Foundation
The Boston Athletic Association (BAA) and the International Justice Mission (IJM) are two different nonprofits in size, mission and geographic scope. As unalike as they are, both chose Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) as the technological foundation upon which to build and scale their organizations to support their missions now and 20 years down the road. NPSP has key capabilities that are important to nonprofits of all sizes including Donation Management, Grant Management, Program Management, and Reporting & Analytics. These two organizations — BAA and IJM — were featured at an event earlier this month in Boston, “Building Your Enterprise Solution on NPSP: Fundraising and Beyond,” hosted by ACF Solutions in partnership with Salesforce.org.
Here’s the abbreviated tale of two organizations of different sizes and scopes and how they both selected NPSP as the building block to meet their needs and scale their organizations into the future.
Selecting the Platform
Every year, the Boston Athletic Association handles multiple road races, including the flagship Boston Marathon, a 30,000-person event that is second only to the Super Bowl when it comes to media credentialing. Matt Barry, who is BAA’s acting CIO, spoke at the NPSP event about the numerous challenges with which this 20-person organization contends including multiple and disparate data sources, outdated systems, complex event planning and the limited size of its staff. The goals of any new technology system, as laid out by Barry, were to improve participant experience, consolidate data sources and make their small staff more efficient. After reviewing several systems, Barry settled on Salesforce and the NPSP because of its flexible and extendable cloud-based platform with core CRM capabilities. In addition, the ability to later integrate communities and marketing functionalities as well as the wide availability of resources confirmed the BAA’s choice of NPSP. ACF Solutions is presently working with the BAA to implement NPSP.
Designing an Enterprise Solution
The International Justice Mission, a multinational faith-based organization with a mission to protect and bring justice to people living in poverty globally, also adopted the NPSP. Unlike the BAA, IJM is a very large organization with field offices in 17 countries and more than 750 employees. The IJM also chose NPSP as its foundation to support their aggressive goals to expand their work exponentially by 2020 and 2030. In choosing NPSP, IJM wanted a single platform from which they could manage fundraising, marketing and donor engagement with key touch points with their financial and HR systems.
The NPSP provided most of the key components they needed for donor and donation management. The tools needed to support online donations (Classy), advocacy (CQ Roll Call Engage), e-commerce (Drupal), reporting and financial reconciliation (Apsona) and wealth screening (WealthEngine) were available off the Salesforce AppExchange. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was integrated into NPSP to provide IJM the necessary and sophisticated tools to develop and target its communications based on underlying constituent data such as donor levels and advocacy engagement. Salesforce Communities was also implemented to provide a portal, where constituents could manage their profiles and donors could access giving history and receipts.
Whereas BAA is at the start of its implementation process, IJM, partnered with ACF Solutions as its implementation partner, is on the brink of launching its Salesforce instance.
The moral of this tale of two organizations is that the NPSP provides a flexible foundation upon which to build large and complex CRM solutions, and small. Watch this space for new chapters as the BAA and IJM continue to extend Salesforce to scale and support their missions.
