Case study: environmental org upgrades NPSP

“Ultimately we have a much cleaner Salesforce than before. The move to the account model just made so much sense for us. We knew we’d have to upgrade at some point so we decided we may as well get started.” -Natalie Chavez, Systems Associate

The Idaho Conservation League's mission is to create an informed and engaged conservation majority in Idaho. By building a robust conservation community, they hope to influence local, state and federal policies to ensure adequate protections for clean water, clean air, healthy families and Idaho's unique way of life.

To build this community, they need to have solid constituent and donor tracking in place. Salesforce users since 2008, the Idaho Conservation League has worked with Idealist Consulting for a while, first to upgrade to the Nonprofits Starter Pack (NPSP) 2.0 from a previous Groundwire instance and then more recently to help with their upgrade to the NPSP 3.0, including a conversion to the household account model.

Longtime Salesforce users ready for an upgrade

Natalie Chavez, systems associate at the Idaho Conservation League (ICL), took a webinar on the NPSP 3.0 soon after its release in 2014. She recognized what this upgrade could do for ICL. She was attracted by the possibilities around removing duplicates and managing hard and soft credits.

“Instead of hop-scotching from contact to organization to household, with NPSP 3.0 there is a more direct link of contact to household, streamlining some of the things we’ve been frustrated by in the past,” says Chavez.

The move to the household account model

The crux of the upgrade for ICL (and many organizations) was moving from the one-to-one model to the household model. “The move to the account model just made so much sense for us. We knew we’d have to upgrade at some point so we decided we may as well get started.”

Here’s an example of the difference:

One to one model:
Joe and Nancy Martin are married and one donation is attributed to Joe and one to Nancy. With the one-to-one model, these donations do not roll up to the Martin household properly.

Account model:
Now, Joe and Nancy are under the Martin household (organization object). The hard credit could go to both people rather than one or the other.

The upgrade path

To help ICL embark on its upgrade to NPSP 3.0, Idealist Consulting first created “hygiene reports” that listed items ICL needed to fix up before the upgrade could be completed. Most of this hygiene centered around the opportunity/donation records, but it also included some other areas.

For example, before the upgrade, ICL had many contacts that were associated with businesses. Businesses could give an in-kind donation or a silent auction donation, but sometimes the gift was associated with the business and sometimes with an individual contact at the business. ICL had about 600 of these records to clean up, a process that relied on ICL staff looking at each record’s notes and making judgment calls along the way. Idealist Consulting not only provided guidance on best Salesforce practices but also helped refine data cleanup as NPSP 3.0 was implemented in a sandbox before it was launched into production.

“Ultimately we have a much cleaner Salesforce than before and this was a very valuable exercise for us to better understand our data,” says Chavez.

User adoption is easier when improvements are obvious

At this point, ICL has had some time to play with their new system and submitted several rounds of questions to Idealist Consulting on items like reports that were addressed through training sessions. In the very beginning, the switch to the household model was a little tricky to conceptualize, but ICL quickly saw that this model facilitated the donation process and attributions much better. “Now we don’t have to worry so much about which member in an organization a donation should be attributed to,” says Chavez.

In addition, via this upgrade, ICL was able to adopt best practices that had been pushed to the back burner previously. A huge amount of data cleanup was required for memberships and donation records, which helped the organization implement better practices and discipline for future data entry. Now they can trust their data, a situation that lays a solid foundation for future campaigns.