Embrace Innovation: Salesforce Winter '26 Benefits for Nonprofits: An Expanded Look
Aug 27, 2025
This article was written by Matthio Lim, Salesforce Consultant.
The Salesforce Winter '26 release is scheduled to be released starting September 6, 2025. Wow, this latest edition brings even more exciting features that promise to revolutionize how nonprofit organizations operate. Beyond the initial glimpse, a deeper dive reveals cutting-edge technology designed to boost efficiency, streamline operations, and enhance your impact across all key areas.
Nonprofit Cloud: Smarter, Faster, More Impactful with AI & Core Enhancements
Nonprofit Cloud is getting a significant upgrade with Einstein Generative AI, offering powerful integrations to help your team work smarter:
Quickly Summarize Programs: Effortlessly generate concise summaries of your programs and their benefits, making reporting and communication a breeze.
Catch Up on Notes (Beta): Spend less time sifting through notes and more time on your mission, as Einstein helps you quickly get up to speed.
Streamline Grant Applications: Generate specialized versions of grant applications tailored for board review, saving valuable time and ensuring clarity.
Summarize Funding Awards (Beta): Get instant summaries of funding awards, helping you keep track of crucial financial details.
Beyond AI, several core enhancements further strengthen Nonprofit Cloud:
Accounting Subledger Integration: A new version of Accounting Subledger seamlessly consolidates your CRM and accounting data, offering a clearer understanding of fund allocation and reporting.
Person Accounts and Party Relationship Groups: This feature revolutionizes how you record people and their relationships, allowing individuals to be represented as both individuals and organizations, and enabling you to link individuals, organizations, and relationships across your nonprofit.
Life Events & Actionable Relationship Centre: Leverage tools from other clouds to understand and visualize your constituents' milestones, life updates, and their personal and professional networks.
Timeline: Get a simple chronological view of your fundraising and service delivery operations at a micro level, enabling your team to quickly understand the relationship you have with someone.
Revolutionizing Fundraising with Automation and Insights
The Winter '26 release provides significant advancements for fundraising teams, streamlining operations and boosting efficiency:
Bulk Source Code Creation: Increase campaign management efficiency by generating multiple outreach source codes simultaneously in a tabular format, ensuring consistent formatting and reducing manual errors.
Automated Address Sync: For constituents with multiple addresses, the system now automatically syncs the mailing address on person accounts with the primary contact point address, ensuring your outreach is always accurate.
Custom Donor Briefs: Easily prepare for donor meetings by creating customized donor brief templates directly from donor profiles, using document generation powered by Omniflow, and share them with board members and stakeholders.
Enhanced Pledge and Soft Credit Management: Accurately track committed recurring revenue and booked pledges with enhanced forecasting. Easily attribute influence by assigning full, partial, or amount-based soft credits to individuals on gift commitments.
External ID for Gift Entry: Improve donor matching accuracy and speed up data entry by using a customer-configured external ID to search for and match donors, leveraging third-party donor IDs.
Streamlined Tax Receipt and Reporting: Easily manage the tax receipt status on gift transactions included in acknowledgment batches and generate reports of donors for mailing acknowledgments or tax receipts.
Direct Gift Entry from Account Page: Quickly enter gifts directly from a donor's account page in Fundraising Operations, Fundraising Strategy, and Donor Engagement apps.
Fundraising Strategy Dashboard: Analyze key metrics for both mass-market and high-touch fundraising strategies, providing actionable insights to refine campaigns and donor engagement tactics.
Streamlined Program Management & Case Management
Managing complex programs and cases becomes simpler with these new updates:
Provider Management Data Model and Search: Capture key third-party details like provider names, facilities, staff, specialties, and hours in one place. Build a network and identify providers based on specific constituent needs with a fully configurable Provider Search.
Enhanced Program Management: Utilize Action Plans for more efficient program management, leverage Field-Level Security to restrict access to sensitive information, and use Chronological Program Views for a comprehensive overview of activities and benefits.
Enhanced Case Management: Dynamic Assessments for Account, Contact, and Case objects guide teams through structured flows. Care Plan Template Previews allow you to check templates before publishing, and the all-new Care Plan Summary View lets you see everything in one place. Referral Flow Setup is also easier with new components and the ability to merge Party Relationship Groups through a simplified UI.
Accelerated Grantmaking Processes
Grant managers will find significant improvements to their workflows:
Streamlined Application Review: The new Application Review screen consolidates submissions and assessment processes onto one page, making it more efficient for users to view and complete reviews.
Manage Progress Reports: More effectively manage grantee progress reports by creating, publishing, and reviewing them through the Grantmaking portal in Nonprofit Cloud.
Assign Reviewers and Flow-Based Forms: Grant managers can now assign reviewers to evaluate applications within the Application Review Workspace, and Nonprofit Cloud supports a variety of forms (grant applications, progress reports, reviewer feedback) that can be built with flows.
Platform-Wide Enhancements for Admins and Users
The Winter '26 release also brings several platform-wide improvements that benefit all Salesforce users, including nonprofits:
Improved User Management: Easily see how CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) access is granted with Object Access Details in Object Manager. The new "Access Granted By" feature provides detailed visibility into how individual permissions are assigned, simplifying troubleshooting. Enhanced User List Views offer improved sorting, filtering, and inline edits.
Enhanced Custom Report Types (Beta): Gain greater flexibility in report creation with the ability to include up to 1000 fields, including lookup fields, within the Lightning Experience Style Report Type editor.
Flow Builder Improvements: Benefit from enhancements to the Create Records Element and Choice Lookup Component. New in-app guidance provides tips for efficient flow design, and a dedicated Errors and Warning Pane simplifies troubleshooting. Expanded email options are also available.
Duplicate Prospect Records: Streamline your data by finding and merging duplicate prospect records, ensuring cleaner and more accurate donor and constituent information.
Modernized List Views: Experience improved performance and access the latest Lightning features with the transition to Salesforce's newest framework for List Views. Dropdown menus now display up to 100 lists and allow for searching.
Industry Common Features: Continue to benefit from powerful features like AI Accelerator for customized prediction insights, the Scoring Framework for workflow efficiency, Business Rules Engine for simplifying complex rules, and Context Service for easier definition activation and input mapping. CSV Data Management and Data Processing Engine also see enhancements for more efficient data handling and transformation.
The Winter '26 release is a testament to Salesforce's unwavering commitment to empowering nonprofits with advanced, integrated tools. By embracing these comprehensive innovations, your organization can achieve unprecedented efficiency, make more informed, data-driven decisions, and ultimately, amplify your impact on the communities you serve. Stay tuned for more updates and resources to help you make the most of these exciting new features!
About the Organization
Belmar Consulting is an award-winning Salesforce implementation partner, who works with various organizations and enables them to succeed in their digital transformation journey. We combine our intimate knowledge of the public sector and the nonprofit industry with Salesforce to create and implement innovative solutions for our clients. Belmar’s dedication to delivering successful client projects means our clients are more effective in their role to fulfill their organizational missions.
