Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack for NGO Donor Management Training Course

Course overview

NGO fundraising teams often hold donor histories, grant commitments, programme interests and communication records across spreadsheets, inboxes and disconnected databases. This makes it difficult to identify a household’s full giving relationship, prevent duplicate contacts, produce reliable donor reports, or give fundraisers timely follow-up lists. Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) provides a structured donor-management model, but its value depends on staff being able to configure and use accounts, contacts, opportunities, recurring donations, campaigns and reports consistently.

This five-day course teaches participants to use Salesforce NPSP for practical NGO donor-management work. Participants learn the NPSP household account model, contact and relationship management, donation opportunity records, recurring donations, soft credits, campaign attribution, donor segmentation, task management, data import controls, and fundraising reporting. They practise translating common NGO fundraising processes into Salesforce fields, record types, page layouts, validation rules and reports that staff can use without undermining data quality.

Teaching combines instructor demonstrations in Salesforce Lightning Experience with guided configuration labs, realistic NGO donor scenarios and peer review of reporting outputs. Participants build a donor-management workspace for a fictional NGO, including household and organisation donor records, gift and pledge workflows, campaign tracking, a donor data-quality procedure, and management dashboards. They leave with a documented Salesforce NPSP configuration blueprint and donor-reporting pack that can be adapted to their own organisation.

The course suits fundraising operations staff, CRM administrators, development officers and NGO managers who need to establish or improve donor-management practice in Salesforce NPSP. It is especially useful for organisations moving from spreadsheets or preparing to standardise fundraising data across programmes, country offices or supporter teams.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Configure NPSP household accounts, organisation accounts and contact relationships for NGO donor records
• Create donation opportunity processes for one-off gifts, pledges, in-kind gifts and grant commitments
• Set up recurring donation schedules and use soft credits to represent shared giving recognition
• Design campaign structures that attribute donations to appeals, events and acquisition activities
• Apply duplicate-management, validation and required-field controls to protect donor data quality
• Import donor and gift data using a mapped Data Import Wizard template and reconciliation checks
• Build donor segmentation reports using filters, cross-filters, report types and summary fields
• Produce a donor-management configuration blueprint and executive fundraising dashboard

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Fundraising Operations Managers — who need consistent donor processes, usable pipeline data and reliable team reporting
• Salesforce Administrators — who configure NPSP objects and must translate fundraising requirements into maintainable settings
• Development Officers — who manage donor portfolios, pledges and stewardship follow-up in Salesforce
• CRM and Database Officers — who own data migration, duplicate prevention and donor-record quality
• NGO Programme and Partnerships Managers — who need visibility of institutional donors, grant commitments and relationship history
• Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Officers — who prepare donor and campaign data for management decisions and funding reports

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable using a web-based business application, entering and editing records, filtering lists, and working with basic spreadsheet columns and rows. Familiarity with NGO fundraising terms such as donor, pledge, restricted gift, campaign and grant is helpful, but no prior Salesforce administration experience is required. This is a foundation-to-intermediate course: complete beginners should expect a guided introduction to Salesforce navigation before progressing to configuration and reporting exercises. Participants do not need to know Salesforce code, APIs, SOQL, Apex, or advanced data-migration tools.

Training methodology

The course is delivered through live instructor-led Salesforce Lightning sessions, followed by guided labs in a training environment configured for a fictional NGO. Participants work through donor household, institutional donor, pledge, recurring-gift and campaign scenarios rather than generic CRM examples. Small groups review data-quality decisions and compare report designs for fundraising managers. Each day closes with an applied task that extends the same NGO configuration. On day five, participants consolidate their work into a configuration blueprint, reporting pack and practical implementation actions for their own donor-management context.

Course outline

Day 1: NPSP donor data foundation

• Salesforce Lightning navigation for fundraising and CRM users
• NPSP architecture and the nonprofit data model
• Household accounts and individual donor record structures
• Organisation accounts for corporate and institutional donors
• Contacts, affiliations and relationship records
• Record ownership, sharing considerations and fundraiser portfolios
• Donor data standards for names, addresses, consent and identifiers

Workshop: Participants configure household, organisation and contact records for a fictional NGO and produce a donor-record data standard.

Day 2: Gifts, pledges and recurring income

• Donation opportunities and nonprofit fundraising stages
• One-off gifts, pledges, grants and in-kind donation records
• Opportunity record types, page layouts and required fields
• Payment schedules and pledge instalment tracking
• Recurring Donations in NPSP and schedule management
• Soft credits for family, employer and peer-to-peer giving
• Task, activity and stewardship follow-up workflows

Workshop: Participants build a gift-to-stewardship workflow covering a major-donor pledge, instalments, soft credits and follow-up tasks.

Day 3: Campaigns and donor engagement

• Salesforce campaign hierarchy design for appeals and events
• Campaign member statuses and engagement tracking
• Primary campaign source attribution on donation opportunities
• Campaign influence approaches and attribution limitations
• Donor segmentation using list views and report filters
• Email consent fields and communication preference management
• Fundraiser portfolio views and next-action queues

Workshop: Participants design a campaign hierarchy for an emergency appeal and produce segmented follow-up lists for fundraisers.

Day 4: Data quality, migration and controls

• Donor data migration planning and field mapping
• Salesforce Data Import Wizard preparation and use
• Duplicate management rules and matching strategies
• Validation rules for gift, contact and campaign data
• Data cleansing checks for households and organisation donors
• Import reconciliation using exception reports and record counts
• Roles, permissions and least-privilege access for donor information

Workshop: Participants map and import a sample donor file, investigate exceptions and produce a migration reconciliation checklist.

Day 5: Fundraising reporting and implementation planning

• Salesforce report types for contacts, opportunities and campaigns
• Donor pipeline reports by stage, owner and expected close date
• Recurring income, pledge balance and instalment reporting
• Campaign income and response analysis
• Donor retention and lapsed-donor segmentation methods
• Salesforce dashboards for fundraising leadership
• NPSP configuration documentation and implementation roadmap

Workshop: Participants create a management dashboard and complete a donor-management configuration blueprint with a 90-day implementation plan.

Tools & standards covered

Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, Salesforce Lightning Experience, Salesforce Data Import Wizard, Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions