NPSP 3 Keeps Washington Hiking

Washington Trails Association (WTA) is one of our favorite clients. While they are busy protecting hiking trails and wildlands and promoting hiking in Washington State, they are equally busy making sure their systems supporting that work are top-notch.

In the midst of a huge custom volunteer management system rebuild, an online supporter dashboard remodel, and, well, taking care of thousands of miles of trails in the heart of Cascadia, they also took on upgrading their Nonprofit Starter Pack instance to version 3.

And the upgrade wins for WTA have been all that they hoped for:

• They love the cleaner schema now that they don’t have to use the custom household object. Maintaining data, reporting, etc. is all much easier and cleaner now. WTA’s Aaron Brackney says, “We were really in trouble with 100,000+ contacts in the same “Individual” account in the old model. Household Accounts really helped here.”
• They love the push upgrades! NPSP just keeps getting better automagically
• The SmartyStreets integration is awesome! Although their mailhouse provides address correction when they do bulk mailings, it was a manual process for the WTA staff to get those corrected addresses into their database from the mailhouse spreadsheet. Thankfully that manual data entry is now a thing of the past.
• Now, when WTA staff enter an opportunity for a campaign member, the campaign member’s status is automatically updated ― hallelujah! This is a feature that’s been on the WTA team’s wish list for a while and was just added at the most recent NPSP developer sprint here in Seattle.

Bottom line: WTA is saving staff time and effort with the NPSP 3 upgrade, and they have a higher degree of confidence in their data integrity.

And what’s very exciting for us, as a consulting practice that likes to teach fishing skills as much as we like to deliver the fish, is that the WTA team was able to manage much of the upgrade themselves! We did a Salesforce inventory for them in advance of the migration, helped worked through a couple of Apex errors, and handled a little code retro-fitting, but otherwise, we coached from the sidelines while our client team accomplished most of the heavy lifting themselves. Hurray!

Looking for some help with your upgrade to NPSP 3? Learn more at percolatorconsulting.com. And check out the Upgrade How-To webinar recording to learn more about upgrading to NPSP 3.