The Inherent Risk of Remaining on Salesforce NPSP: A Call to Action for Nonprofits
Executive Summary
Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) has been a trusted CRM foundation for Nonprofits for over a decade. However, with Salesforce’s strategic investment shifting toward Nonprofit Cloud (NPC), organizations continuing on NPSP face mounting operational, technical, and strategic risks. While NPSP remains supported, its active development has ceased, and the feature gap with NPC is rapidly expanding. Nonprofit leaders should act now to develop a migration strategy and conduct a comprehensive risk assessment to safeguard their mission impact and long-term Salesforce investment.
The Emerging Risk Landscape
Feature Gap Expansion: As Salesforce concentrates innovation efforts on NPC, the capabilities of NPSP increasingly lag behind. Critical new features around program and case management, grantmaking, fundraising, or outcomes management are not being retrofitted to NPSP, creating an ever-widening performance and value gap.
Operational Vulnerabilities: While NPSP remains technically supported, compatibility risks grow with each new Salesforce platform or third-party app release. Future maintenance costs, patchwork customizations, and troubleshooting complexities are likely to rise sharply.
Strategic Misalignment: Organizations on NPSP risk falling behind sector best practices. New grant funders and partners expect Nonprofits to demonstrate modern CRM capabilities — including analytics, outcome tracking, and AI-readiness — that NPC is designed to deliver.
Why Immediate Action is Needed
Waiting until NPSP support becomes insufficient could force Nonprofits into rushed, costly migrations under unfavorable timelines and resource availability. Proactive planning ensures leadership maintains control over timing, budgeting, resource allocation, and change management, minimizing disruption and protecting donor, program, and operational data integrity.
Recommended Actions for Nonprofits
1. Conduct a Current State Risk Assessment
Analyze your Salesforce Org's technical debt, customizations, and dependency risks.
Evaluate gaps between current NPSP capabilities and strategic business needs.
Understand your current Salesforce feature backlog items.
2. Build a Migration Readiness Plan
Identify migration strategies to minimize risk and cost.
Map business processes to NPC’s native functionality for simplification and improvement.
Review your Salesforce license subscription, as some paid NPSP features –such as case management– are included in NPC.
3. Engage Stakeholders Early
Create organizational buy-in by presenting clear risk, cost, and opportunity projections.
Plan for change management, admin & user retraining, and transition roadmaps.
Conclusion
Nonprofit organizations cannot afford to ignore the growing risks associated with continuing on Salesforce NPSP. A migration to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is not just a technical project—it is a strategic imperative to ensure sustainability, innovation readiness, and mission success. Leadership teams should prioritize a readiness assessment and migration planning effort in 2025 to understand risks and a possible migration strategy and roadmap.
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