We may just be getting settled into the crisp comfort of autumn’s (fall’s) embrace, but the time has come yet again to prepare for winter and the seasonal Salesforce updates it brings. The Winter ‘23 release is loaded with features sure to ease the nonprofit user experience and enhance instances across the sector.
There’s a lot for nonprofits to love in this latest release, so let’s dive into my top five.
1. Strengthened Security
Salesforce has improved the security of Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) settings by restricting access to admins only. These improvements continue to be a top priority for users in the nonprofit space in a post-Blackbaud breach world.
In addition to improved NPSP security, Salesforce has announced plans to auto-enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for direct logins during the first half of 2023. While MFA is by no means a brand-new feature to Salesforce, it has not been required for orgs to implement. By the end of 2023, this will no longer be the case and MFA will become a requirement across all Salesforce orgs.
We recommend enabling MFA as soon as possible to avoid disruptions to your users.
2. Recurring Donations Enhancements
The enhancements made to recurring donations in the latest release are sure to add heightened configurability and customization for nonprofit organizations.
The big-ticket item here is that Recurring Donations that happen outside of Salesforce’s gift processing tool, Elevate, have been added to Gift Entry. Users can now enter batches of Recurring Donations simply by allowing Read and Edit access to the Allow Recurring Donations field on the NPSP Data Import Batches object.
A new ability for donors to manage recurring donations in the Experience Cloud Donor Portal has also been added, providing nonprofit organizations with greater flexibility regarding their fundraising. Some of these new features include the ability to create allocations for recurring donations and the ability to pause them as well. You can learn more in the Add Experience Cloud Components to Your Donor Portal section of the NPSP release documentation.
Several new settings have been enabled that filter Recurring Donation Batch jobs based on the number of days since related child Opportunities were modified. Recurring Donations Lightning Web Components and Apex classes were also updated to add more visibility. This means that nonprofit users now have more insight into the processed payment amount and frequency data.
Finally, Apex classes were updated once more to stop the method to get Recurring Donation records and return an empty list if the RD2 Feature is not enabled. While subtle, this update will greatly assist nonprofit users in culling donation records with ease.
3. Usability Upgrades
Get excited: users can now process full refunds in NPSP! This has long been a point of frustration for nonprofit users and is sure to be one of the biggest release highlights for users within the space. To learn more, navigate to the “Set Up Refunds” section in the Configure Opportunity Payments article.
A new Contact Duplicate Rules matching option for Batch Data Import was also added in the Winter ’23 Release. This import runs all active duplicate rules for the Contacts object that are managed in Setup > Duplicate Management.
4. Added Accessibility
Salesforce took steps to ensure NPSP is accessible to even more global users with the addition of Brazilian Portuguese support. With greater support comes the need for greater security as well, so both Contact Merge and Customizable Rollups received requisite security improvements.
The Experience Cloud Donor Portal was the recipient of enhanced support by way of Multiple Currencies in the Donation History and Giving Summary components.
Lastly, an issue was fixed where encrypted fields block push upgrades to the NPSP Summer ’22 release (NPSP 3.217).
5. Future Features & Closed Issues
A partial refund feature will be released in the near future, as evidenced by the addition of new support fields to the Payments object.
There were a significant number of issues closed related to Gift Entry issues in the Winter ’23 release. These issues pertained to errors if Account1 is Donor Type to update open Household Opportunity, field permission errors persisting after correcting the field level permission, an inability to Access Gift Entry Form or Create/Edit/Clone Templates when Lightning Web Security is enabled, and more. For a full list of closed issues, see the Nonprofit Success Pack Winter ’23 Release Notes.
Summary
As always, remember that it’s best practice to test new release features and any new enhancement in a sandbox environment first. Each Salesforce release is made possible by ideas submitted by users through the Salesforce IdeaExchange. You and your organization can make a difference by engaging in the IdeaExchange!