Dreamforce 26 Recap for Nonprofits
The books are closed on my 19th Dreamforce, and while Marc Benioff always says during the keynote that this one is the best, this year, I tend to agree. From the expo floor, to the keynote, to the hundreds of conversations I had with clients, partners, and peers, here are some of the biggest takeaways for nonprofits coming out of one of the world’s best conferences.
Nonprofit Cloud is Back and Better Than Ever
Released only three and a half years ago, and poorly renamed Agentforce for Nonprofit last year, Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) continues to innovate. I had a chance to sit with NPC product leaders and review the lengthy and deep upcoming roadmap (safe harbor). We also talked through all the decision points or blockers around migrating from Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). This year the conversation shifted from the “why” of migration to the “when” (and still a little of “how much does it cost”) which was good to see. So much functionality has been delivered over the last few releases, and now with open sourced accelerators (plus some of our own internal ones) the move is getting easier and easier.
AIforce & Claudeforce
Speaking of renaming, Headless 360 is now AIforce (try not to read that as Alf). The message is that all of your workflows, security, data, and governance no longer have to be tied to a Salesforce front end. Agentic work can now happen on many different surfaces from inside a chat to done through a bot like Slackbot. Nonprofits can now securely leverage everything in their Salesforce instances, through a series of MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that can bring the work to the user wherever they are. With Claudeforce for example, you can work with all your Salesforce data using Claude from Anthropic as the intelligent front-end, providing real time access and a fresh interface to all your fundraising, donor, grant, and program data. I expect ChatGPT from OpenAI won’t be far behind in a partnership if that is your AI tool of choice.
We will be sharing a lot of upcoming information on the Agentic Workflow for Nonprofits, so sign up for our newsletter and bookmark our events page to learn more.
Digital Agentic Labor
Another theme this year was highlighted by all-new agents that have gone from answering questions to actually doing the work. The release of Coworker and an updated Slackbot give nonprofits digital assistants who work in Salesforce and Slack, creating fundraising records, pulling lists of major donors, or just providing daily overviews of work that needs to get done. Some of our nonprofit clients are already starting to see the multiplying effect of using agents to increase the productivity of the entire organization.
Product Bundles & the New P10
One of the biggest changes coming to the world of nonprofits using Salesforce is the new product bundles. Salesforce is attempting to cut down on the large numbers of confusing SKUs and complexity in the purchasing process by grouping Salesforce, Slack, Tableau, Support, and Marketing into easy-to-digest bundled offerings. These new bundles will replace the decade old licences of Enterprise, Unlimited, and Agentforce 1 with Core, Advanced, and Max which all include at least a taste of the other product offerings (above). The most exciting news is that the new Power of Us 10 (P10) grant licenses will start at Core which includes everything but Premier Success. This will give nonprofits a much better starting point to their digital transformation and help drive their missions forward with the best tools.
There will also be some new purchasing options coming soon, so if your organization is looking for help traversing the winding roads of Salesforce bundles, we are here to help (reach out to Arkus here).
The Nonprofit Community is Strong
My last takeaway from Dreamforce this year was just how strong the nonprofit community has become. Beyond all the talk of AI and the fast-paced evolution of technology there were real people having real conversations in person, sharing ideas, roadmaps, issues, and helping their peers. For all the worry of what AI will or will not do to our society, it was very clear that you will never be able to simply vibe code a community. People still matter the most and conversations are the #1 app of all time. The Salesforce nonprofit community is stronger than ever and we are proud to have been a part of it for over 16 years.
Let’s keep the conversation going over @jasonMAtwood on X or JasonMAtwood on LinkedIn or use the Contact Us form. Hope to see you next year at Dreamforce 27, which will be on September 21-23rd, also marking my 20th Dreamforce.
NOTE: This blog post was 100% written by me, on a plane, with no AI and no wifi (Thanks Delta)
