Salesforce Certification: Nonprofit Cloud Consultant

At Oktana, we are committed to Pledge 1%, an initiative founded by Salesforce that encourages companies to give back to their local communities. We’ve also worked with several nonprofit organizations for years, helping them integrate with Salesforce products.

What is Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

Salesforce believes business should improve the state of the world, so shortly after the company was founded, they created a foundation now known as Salesforce.org. Over the years, Salesforce.org has directed effort to enable nonprofits and educational institutions with Salesforce solutions to meet their needs.

When Salesforce.org first moved down this path, they launched the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) which provided a basic set of functionality that made Salesforce more nonprofit “friendly.” With the Nonprofit Starter Pack, nonprofits could migrate their data and customize Salesforce to manage fundraising, donation management and satisfy a variety of other nonprofit use cases. In 2018, they took it to the next level and launched Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.

Over the past few years, we have helped nonprofit organizations do everything from build full apps to implement custom communities. In 2020, we were accepted into the Salesforce.org Partner Program, a program many nonprofits rely on to integrate Salesforce products.

Part of the process of becoming a Salesforce.org partner required becoming certified on the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. We spoke with two members of our team, Lucas and Nery, on what it took to earn this consultant-level certification. They both happen to work in our Paraguay office and are passionate about giving back – throughout the COVID-19 pandemic Nery has 3D-printed face masks.

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Certification

The Basics

• Being a Salesforce Certified Administrator is a prerequisite.
• The certification enables you to design and implement solutions that are maintainable, scalable, and meet nonprofit business requirements.
• Both Lucas and Nery agreed it takes approximately 3 to 4 months to prepare for the exam.

Nery, who is a developer, suggests you change your mindset from Admin to Cloud, grasping the bigger picture. Considering you already have your Admin knowledge as a base, you primarily need to focus your study on the nonprofit-specific functionality of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. He recommends reviewing the permissions and import/export rules because this can be confusing at first. 

Lucas offers additional advice. As a QA engineer, he considers it important to understand very well the table of triggers that work with the Success Package. For each of the packages Salesforce offers, there are external roadmaps that help you learn the specifics and give you detailed information that can help you pass the exam. This certification doesn’t need code, it is only about managing the platform efficiently and effectively.

They both agree this certification greatly helps when working with a nonprofit organization. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud provides very practical solutions to manage grants, organize volunteer hours, implement forms that can be integrated into volunteer communities and many other functionalities.

How Nonprofits use Salesforce

We recently helped a nonprofit organization build a community platform focused on empowering breast cancer patients with resources for diagnosis, treatment and recovery. The goal of the platform was to guide patients along their journey, facilitating connection between individual patients and health providers. Built on Salesforce, you can read the complete story.

Should you become a Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Consultant?

If you are already a Salesforce Certified Administrator, the Nonprofit Cloud Consultant certification will provide a more specialized Salesforce career path. If you are interested in working with nonprofit organizations, you should definitely consider this path. 

Here is a list of some resources that will help you out:

• Trailhead Nonprofit Cloud Consultant
• Training & Certification Guide
• Video: Introduction to Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud

If you are part of our team, Oktana will provide you with some extra resources to help you successfully pass the exam and continue to develop your career with Salesforce. If you’re interested in joining our team, check out Oktana Careers.