I regularly hear people claim that NPSP is "on its way out," or "already dead," or "Salesforce is going to stop supporting it." None of those things are true.
Could they become true soon, quickly, or without any notice? Yes, they could.
But Salesforce could also decide at any moment to stop developing, kill, or completely change Nonprofit Cloud. Right now I don't think they are going to. But my point is that they could. Salesforce is a giant corporate capitalist enterprise. It fundamentally exists only to make money. If it isn't making money on nonprofits, or through the Industries model, or whatever, it will change what it is doing. And Salesforce is run by people, who can change their mind, or their business vision, or, for that matter, can change jobs. So if the people in leadership were to decide they didn't want to be in the nonprofit market at all, the company could exit it on a dime. If those people decided that the nonprofit price point should double, there is nothing tangible to stop that from happening. (And for the sake of future-proofing this article, I should probably also note that Salesforce could change the names of these and other products at any time.)
Where was I...? Oh, right.
Don't Listen to the Fear
The Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) is not going anywhere. It's stable. It works very well for what it does. Thousands of organizations have it installed and use it every single day. Even if Salesforce wanted to kill it quickly, they could not. There would be a very long tail of organizations still using the product. Besides, Salesforce has repeatedly said that they intend to continue to support NPSP.
Sure, we could decide not to believe them. But so far I see no reason to be quite that cynical. Those of you who know me know that I'm plenty cynical. I'm just not that cynical. I'm sticking, for now, with "Trust, but verify." Support for NPSP will continue, even though further development of it as a product will not.
NPSP is Like Cars
Let's face it, development of NPSP stopped a long time ago. Long before New Nonprofit Cloud was dreamed up. There haven't been significant new features in the core NPSP offering since Enhanced Recurring Donations, Customizable Rollups, and Engagement Plans and Levels, all of which are more than six years in the past. And some of those were just upgrades to existing functionality in the first place. But just because there hasn't been much development doesn't mean NPSP is somehow outdated. I would argue that development of NPSP slowed and basically stopped because it reached the point that it was meeting the truly common and shared needs of nonprofits. NPSP takes Salesforce, reconfigures the B2B data model to make it work for tracking individual constituents and their households ("B2C," in the lingo), gives us relationship tracking between people, relationships tracking to multiple organizations, and powerful flexible donation rollups. That's basically the common set of CRM needs for nonprofits.
Everything else that Salesforce.org used to publish was for a subset of the market—for good reasons! The Program Management Module only works for the program model of certain kinds of organizations. Outbound Funds is great, but only if your organization needs to track...well...outbound funds. Etcetera. And I think this is OK. NPSP reached the point where it was doing what we needed and Salesforce.org realized that when they made new "products" it made sense for them to be optional add-ons, not additional bloat of the core product.
Here's my analogy: What's fundamentally changed about cars in more than half a century? Basically they're boxes with four wheels that burn gas to move people around. We invented automatic gearboxes, seatbelts, brigher headlights, cruise control, fancy radar for lane keeping and collision avoidance, and backup cameras. But my great-great-grandparents would have no trouble recognizing today's cars and even taking them out for a spin. Even electric cars are just not that fundamentally different. [I can say this with confidence: I own one. It's great. But when you get down to it, it's just a car.]
So I think the future for NPSP looks a lot like the last decade or so:
It works great.
It's stable.
It runs on a state-of-the-art platform that you can customize to the nth degree.
There are a zillion organizations (and people) using it.
And there is an amazing community of practitioners that work with it and welcome new people to its use, teaching, coaching, and training them.
I still think NPSP is the right choice for 95% of nonprofit organizations that are thinking about implementing Salesforce at this moment. And those that are already on NPSP should not be expecting to migrate off any time soon.
On a Wild Ride
Does any of this mean that the future for NPSP won't be a bit of a ride? No, of course not! Just as two years ago Salesforce pulled the rug out from under all of us by announcing that NPSP would be replaced with NPC, which would be an entirely new system and migration would require a complete org swap, there could be surprises in store for all of us. I'm just trying to remind you that this was always the case.
This is where I believe in the power of the Salesforce Community, particularly the Nonprofit Community. We are scrappy, and determined, and smart. If NPSP stops looking viable, then we'll come up with alternatives, whether it's re-creating the core functions through a community-supported free alternative, or building tools, templates, and workbooks for migration. If we come up with some Must Have feature that NPSP lacks and Salesforce is never going to provide, we'll build it and find a way to release it through Open Source Commons, or UnofficialSF, or somewhere else.