What Salesforce's New Nonprofit Cloud Means for Our Community

Today we announced the new Nonprofit Cloud offering, please click over and read that post first to hear the high-level overview. My goal for this post is to speak directly to our existing customers and ecosystem a bit deeper about what this means for you.

But before I jump in, if you know me I always start with a thank you, and I have many people to thank. As I came into the GM role late in 2022, it was with enormous gratitude in my heart for all of this ecosystem has done together to date and with the awareness of the responsibility I feel to each of you as we work through a critical shift in our approach to how we deliver solutions together. 

To our partners and our nonprofit customers who worked side by side with us to achieve this moment, I want to say thank you on behalf of the team at Salesforce.  We see you, and we want to do this work moving forward together with you. I also want to thank the internal Salesforce team and our customer design partners and partner design groups who have been working on this project for over a year.  Change is hard, and you came to this work with the intention to help the change makers and that is how we move forward.

So, what is changing? In the past, we built products beside the rest of Salesforce. We achieved incredible things, building and adopting numerous software packages that collectively delivered the Nonprofit Cloud solution to the nonprofit community, anchored by the Nonprofit Success Pack. Effectively we were operating similar to a Salesforce ISV partner, and while we had special access and insight into platform developments, like any ISV partner there were both technical and structural limitations to what we were able to add to the platform. 

For the first time, rather than layering nonprofit applications on top of the platform, we now have the opportunity, like many other industries Salesforce serves, to build more directly into the core of Salesforce.  This allows us to create standards and synergies across all Salesforce industries. It means when we make decisions about how to implement a feature we start from a rich catalog of common components, available from other industries, that we can repurpose and extend.  Let me illustrate this through an example from our first release. Within the new Case Management application we are making use of a common component called ARC, or Actionable Relationship Center.  ARC allows us to see how a particular contact is engaging across different programs, what recent services they were a part of, and what benefits they have received so far.  In the past this would require us to create and configure custom layouts across all of these objects, and now, by using this powerful and flexible component, we are able to visualize this information cleanly and rapidly, and not just that, but this interface will also continue to gain new features over time. This is one of so many examples. And it’s not just the nonprofit sector who will benefit from this flywheel of innovation.  Many of your organizations solve problems that may also be solved by government agencies or even healthcare institutions in certain countries.  We are now working together, from design to delivery with those teams, to focus on delivering scalable solutions for our customers.  

As I shared in the other blog post, our goal in building this new Nonprofit Cloud is to provide faster and easier access to the full Salesforce Platform and the billions of dollars in research and development across Clouds. However, it’s also to achieve greater cross-sector impact by working hand in hand with other industries like Health & Life Sciences and the Public Sector with better cross-sector engagement and impact for everyone you serve. And lastly, to help everyone drive impact as every component is built with outcomes in mind without heavy customization and in a more standardized way.

I have been having conversations with many of you in smaller settings, to preview some of this information. Now that we have officially announced the new Nonprofit Cloud, I want to continue those conversations, to share my commitments in more depth, and to try to answer any questions you might have. Please comment on this post and I and our team will do our best to answer your questions. And rest assured, there will also be more information rolling out in the months to come. I am guessing many of you have questions about our roadmap ahead.  We plan to have more communications, and also commit to regular engagement in this community, to answer your questions, hear your ideas and to work together.  We don’t have all the answers, but we do have positive intent to create the best solutions available for organizations that trust and look to Salesforce to support your missions.  

We have also pulled together here a summary of brief statements that derive from the most common questions that I have heard from our design preview partners over the last couple of months, to help you think through what this means for your organization.

We plan to continue support for our existing managed package products. 10’s of thousands of customers, like yourselves, are using our current products, and we know that you are achieving great results. In our planned upcoming releases, we have enhancements designed for both our new and our existing solutions. Many of our ISV partners have fantastic integrations with our current products - we are working with them to ensure that they understand our new product architecture, and are able to bring their years of experience and learnings into the new Nonprofit Cloud.

We will help you evaluate the right time for our new products. We have educated our teams and partners on how these new products work, so they can help you decide when is the right time to explore them.  For some customers this might be far into the future, while others may wish to be a part of the new innovation as soon as practical. Regardless of what you choose, Salesforce and the Trailblazer community is committed to help  support you on your path.   

We are deeply committed to nonprofit pricing. Although there are many new capabilities within the new Nonprofit Cloud, from other parts of Salesforce, we have worked hard to maintain our nonprofit discounts across the new products. Our goals here are to simplify access to nonprofit cloud technology, and to make it easier for customers to get started and to get different user roles working together, nothing more.  

We continue to grant free licenses with the Power of Us Program. As I mentioned in my blog post, we will continue to offer and support the licenses to customers who are already using the Power of Us program.  However, for those that are interested, we will also offer 10 free licenses of the new products.  This is the first time that we’ve been able to expand the Power of Us program to include nonprofit specific products, and we are very excited about the potential for these new inclusions to accelerate and deepen the nonprofit experience.

We keep innovating together. We will onboard our ISV partners and community programs, such as Impact Labs and The Commons, so that they can continue to build open-source solutions on top of the Core Salesforce Platform. Our existing products will remain open-source. 

We Will Bring You On This Journey. We plan to keep updating the community as we roll out more products and capabilities over the course of this year. We know that some of you are probably wondering, “Can I migrate?” “How will that work?” and the answer is yes, we are working on tools and guidelines to help you make that journey, when the time is right, and we are collaborating across our entire partner ecosystem to ensure that there are a rich set of resources available for existing customers who want to start trailblazing early.  Please stay tuned for more details, we have an ambitious roadmap, and as we complete items we will add them into a steady stream of information coming to you through the community.

Thanks for all the great work you do, and your continued support as we evolve to find better ways to support you.

If you have any questions, please comment on this post and I and our team will do our best to answer your questions. And rest assured, there will also be far more information rolling out in the months to come.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other posts or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. For more information please visit www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-667-6389.