Salesforce Trailhead for Nonprofits
If you’ve been in the Salesforce community for a while, it’s likely you’re already familiar with Salesforce’s Trailhead training program. Trailhead offers interactive, go at your own pace, free training on features within the Salesforce platform. With more than 50 modules (training areas), Trailhead provides admins and developers the ability to build up their knowledge-base through picking and choosing what is most applicable and helpful to them.
What is Trailhead?
Trailhead goes beyond offering interactive training and also provides opportunities to test your knowledge so you can earn badges and points to show off your newfound skills.Trailhead is truly unique in it’s hands-on approach, easy to use interface, and ability to track your training achievements.
*Note that while Trailhead badges are recognized, they don’t pack the same punch as an official Salesforce Admin Certification.
If you're a nonprofit administrator or developer and came across the Trailhead training suite a year ago, there would have been a few relevant modules such as Accounts and Contacts, but you would have had to patiently sift through a series of modules focused on sales pipeline management to locate the information relevant to your organization.
Trailhead for Nonprofits
So, here’s the good news for nonprofits: this year, the Salesforce Foundation has released a Trail of training modules based on functionality found in the Nonprofit Starter Pack, and targeted it toward nonprofit admins! It's common for folks in the nonprofit space to happen upon a role as a Salesforce administrator (accidental admin, anyone?) on top of an existing role within their organization, and getting up to speed can be very time-consuming (not to mention expensive). This nonprofit training program was created to make life a little easier as you learn the power and flexibility of NPSP.
Trailhead will walk users through two core areas of nonprofit management: Fundraising Basics and Donation Management. Those core sections are subdivided into specific functionality within NPSP, such as creating a contact and associated account and managing recurring donations. And this is just the beginning; the Foundation also has several other modules in the hopper that we’re excited to see roll out as well that include Grant Management, Volunteer Management, and Event Management.
Additional Resources for Nonprofits
So, do you have to be a Salesforce Administrator to use Trailhead? Absolutely not! The training modules are a great way for any Salesforce user to learn about the platform, expand upon their existing knowledge of the system, and come up with new ideas to leverage the power of the NPSP. The Nonprofit Starter Pack is a flexible platform that has out-of-the-box functionality, and tons of customization potential, which makes it powerful but also indicates a steep learning curve.
Nonprofits in the Salesforce environment have quite an arsenal of resources to pull from for support, guidance, and community through the Power of Us Hub. There is also an ever-expanding pool of online videos and tutorials on the Salesforce Foundation’s YouTube channel. Trailhead is certainly not the only training resource out there for nonprofits, but it provides a unique and accessible hands-on experience. And since you can track progress as you go through the training, it’s perfect for a group of users to go through together and stay accountable to learning the system. Salesforce is a vast ecosystem, and nonprofits now have another tool to help focus in on the support and training they need most.
Do you require more extensive training, or need help customizing your instance of the NPSP?
