How are NPSP users feeling about the quandary of whether to stick with NPSP or move over to NPC? I manage multiple Salesforce orgs and am having to think about this for a variety of use-cases.
In some cases, it is unlikely the org will ever make the leap from NPSP to NPC as we have done so much custom configuration o over the 1ast 10 years that the perceived benefits of moving to NPC are less than the effort of moving away from it. Things are working really well and we wouldn't ever manage to get the funding to pay a consultancy to support a full migration. On the flipside, I also support orgs who have only been using NPSP for around 2 years and there isn't a huge dependency on NPSP or major custom configuration to replicate in NPC. So, this is more of a maybe on whether to make the move or just continue where we are - gain, things aren't broken as such and all is working well, but then we won't get the additional things in NPC, if we were to make use of those anyway. And then another org I am helping to implement SF right now, where we started implementing on NPSP over a year ago as NPC wasn't widely used at this point, but due to how long it has taken to gather and validate requirements, there is now the option to shift to NPC now and redo some of the custom configuration on the new platform. I've read and watched a lot of material now on whether to make the move to NPC or not. How are others finding this decision? Has anyone made the leap and how was the process? Is it working out? Do you regret it? How about end users?
I'd love to hear from the community on how this is all going and hear about your experiences.
My sense of the basic difference is that NPSP is optimized for fundraising whereas NPC is best for clients that deliver services to individuals over a period of a few weeks or months. We had a client that worked with unhoused populations, and we opted to go with NPSP only because NPC was still new. If I had to do it again, I would do NPC for them.
We have been working on an NPSP to NPC migration project for a different client for a few months now. The main draws were person accounts, interest tags, relationship groups, and OmniStudio. They don't have much need for households, but they do have "webs" of relationships they manage with various individuals and partner organizations. OmniStudio will also speed development time for partner portal UI components.
As for challenges, migrating contacts and accounts as person accounts was a bit tedious. The donor management and fundraising architecture is also very different. That was a beast. On that note, many donor management CRMs that sync with Salesforce only sync with NPSP, so you need to consider any outside integrations that are currently being used and move to an alternate provider.
The other thing to consider is the deployment process and timeline. It took us about two weeks to migrate all the data during the setup. When we do our final upserts before deployment, we'll only have about two days. Relatedly, we typically like to onboard users to a new system by team — a few at a time — to minimize disruption, but the 10 free Power of Us licenses come as a group. It is not possible to transfer a few at a time. They can only be transferred all at once. That means the productivity hit that usually comes during a period of transition will probably be a bit bigger than usual.
