Salesforce Summer ’25 Release: New Tools for Smoother Nonprofit Operations

The Salesforce Summer ’25 release brings exciting new capabilities to Nonprofit Cloud (NPC), including the long-anticipated Volunteer Management! This major new addition will be a boost to every organization relying on volunteers to meet their mission. 

And while that’s big news, the release is even bigger! From streamlining benefit disbursements to simplifying gift entry and adding Agentforce for program tasks, this release is full of updates designed to help nonprofits work more efficiently and effectively. 

The Galvin Nonprofit team pulled together a few of our favorite features to help you make the most of everything new. Taking advantage of them means spending less time on manual tasks and more time making an impact.

Grantmaking

Grantmaking in NPC is a connected solution supporting the full grant lifecycle—from setting strategy to reporting outcomes. Whether you’re creating program goals, tracking grantee progress, or reporting results to stakeholders, everything you need is in one place. And the new enhancements in Summer ’25 make even more productivity possible.

Disbursement Scheduler

Life just got a little easier for grant managers. Now, instead of manually loading individual grant disbursements, Salesforce can do the work for you. Grantmaking offers a configurable flow template to automate the process across the grant’s timeline. Create a flow action on the Funding Award object and add it to the page layout. You can easily set the number of disbursements, amounts, intervals, payment method, and more. Preview and edit the disbursements before scheduling them with a simple click. You can even allocate them to a specific budget. The new feature makes grant disbursements faster and more accurate without losing flexibility. 

Requirements Wizard

If you can automate disbursements, why not funding requirements? Summer ’25 lets you do that too. The new wizard streamlines setting up requirements like monthly progress updates, financial statements, and quarterly outcome reports. You can also indicate if the requirements must be met before a disbursement is released. Setting the wizard up is the same process as the disbursement scheduler. 

Progress Report Template Creation

When setting up the requirements for a progress report, you can also standardize the format using action plan templates. Add a funding award requirement section to the template. Edit which fields and columns you want included and publish. The predefined templates ensure consistent formatting across all grantee reports. 

Programs Suite

Programs Suite helps nonprofits manage the full scope of their work—from big-picture planning to on-the-ground service delivery. It brings together the tools needed to define program models, align services to strategy, monitor performance, and share progress. The Salesforce Summer ’25 release introduces several enhancements for managing benefit disbursements and program tasks, including a pilot project for Agentforce.

Benefit Disbursement from Participant

This one is a simple but powerful productivity boost. Previously, logging benefits required switching to a separate program or benefit record. Now, the pre-built “Disburse Participant Benefits” flow lets you handle everything directly from the participant record. Just create the action and add the flow to the Account, Case, or Contact pages. Log disbursements and take notes simultaneously, all in one place. 

Field Sets on Ad Hoc Bulk Disbursements

Logging additional disbursement details used to be a clunky process, leading many users to skip entering valuable information for tracking and reporting benefits. Now you can configure the Ad Hoc Disbursement Workflow with custom fields to streamline data entry. Collecting benefit-specific information for bulk disbursements just got much easier, so users no longer need to choose between saving time or saving data. 

Bulk Disbursements for Scheduled Benefits

One size fits all rarely works when it comes to people’s needs. That’s why requiring benefit disbursements to either be scheduled or ad hoc caused frustration for users. Why not the flexibility for both? Summer ’25 resolves this issue by allowing users to log ad hoc benefits even with scheduled sessions already underway. Rather than throwing an error, the platform issues a warning to check for existing enrollments to avoid creating duplicate disbursements.

Track In-Progress Assessments

When you run out of time or need to switch tasks in the middle of an assessment, now you can save your progress and come back later. Just enable Discovery Framework’s Save for Later feature (now recommended by Salesforce over using Dynamic Assessment). Place the Assessment component on the relevant record layouts, including Program Enrollment, and you’re set. The enhancement comes with assessment progress filters—not started, in progress, completed, expired—to let you find assessments quickly. You can also hit “View” on a completed assessment to see all the details in the same format they were captured, rather than having to filter through individual questions to find an answer. 

Track Assessment History

Salesforce improved assessment tracking even more by allowing users to compare assessment scores over time. Now nonprofits can visually see assessment scores, for multiple assessments simultaneously, using a line graph. To activate this feature, add the Flexcard named “DiscoveryFrameworkAssessmentHistory” to the Assessment record page. Then add score fields to applicable assessments. In addition to giving a quick, clear way to monitor progress or spot issues with participants, it also removes assessment subjectivity.

Track Internal Referrals

Previously, NPC included two referral types: inbound and outbound. That created confusion when a case manager needed to refer someone to a different program offered within the same organization. To eliminate the issue, the Summer ’25 release includes a new picklist with “Internal” as a third referral option type.

Participant Management with Agentforce

Salesforce introduced Agentforce in beta to NPC with its Spring ’25 release. Tobias Ward, a principal consultant with Galvin’s Nonprofit Practice, detailed ways nonprofits are already “Turning AI into Action” in a recent blog article. Now, with the latest release, Salesforce is launching an Agentforce pilot to address many of the administrative tasks that slow program management down. Let the AI assistant create benefit disbursements, update goals, and create tasks. 

Fundraising

NPC’s Fundraising toolkit supports every stage of a donor campaign, whether you’re focused on securing major gifts from a few key supporters or managing a broad base of smaller contributions. It’s built to flex across different fundraising models while keeping operations running smoothly behind the scenes. The Summer ’25 release introduces greater efficiency and accuracy to the gift entry process, helping teams spend less time on data entry and more time building donor relationships. 

Gift Entry Grid

Have a stack of donations on your desk that you want to process quickly? The new Gift Entry Grid allows you to do just that, all from one screen. Simply use your keyboard to tab through entries and add data to the table. You can view up to 100 records at a time. Save your work and pick up where you left off. The new user interface also includes custom field mapping to the Account and Gift Transaction objects. The flexibility allows users to bulk process donations or manage a single entry. Go to Setup and access Gift Entry in Fundraising to enable the Gift Entry Grid. We think you’re really going to like the speed and accuracy this feature supports. Plus, Salesforce has already committed to additional enhancements in the Winter ’26 release.

Volunteer Management

One of the most exciting aspects of Salesforce's Summer '25 release is the introduction of Volunteer Management—and for good reason. Volunteers play a vital role in meeting nonprofit missions, with 68% relying on them to deliver services. Volunteer Management’s set of tools and features are designed to help nonprofit teams recruit, engage, and report on volunteers in a streamlined, comprehensive way. Even better, NPC and Education Cloud Enterprise Editions (and above) now include Volunteer Management at no additional cost to users. 

The following are some exciting things included in this release of Volunteer Management:

Comprehensive Data Model

Volunteer Management’s data model is the foundation for recruiting volunteers, organizing their involvement, and reporting impact. To access, toggle on Volunteer Management in the settings within Setup, and add the appropriate permission sets. The data model comes ready with optional and recommended objects for managing volunteers, scheduling and assignments, volunteer information, applications, and action plans. 

When using the data model, here are a few of the things your team can do: 

• Create volunteer initiatives
• Build job positions for volunteer roles
• Add volunteering locations
• Develop shifts for different job positions
• Create job position assignments for volunteers and track hours
• Establish job and volunteer qualifications for various roles
• Connect program management benefits and volunteering to assess how volunteers impact service delivery
• Capture volunteer information, including program participation and donations managed in Fundraising
• Add volunteer availability based on location, operating hours, or timing
• Generate application forms and log information ranging from simple questions to complex vetting processes 
• Enable Stage Management to check and validate defined steps in a volunteer’s experience, like applying, interviewing, and job training

There’s a ton nonprofits can do right now, with more to come this fall, including an app, tab sets, and recurring shift automations. 

Experience Cloud Readiness

The Volunteer Management tools provide everything your nonprofit needs to manage volunteers, but why not let them drive their own experience? Creating an Experience Cloud portal gives volunteers the opportunity to discover roles and opportunities, apply for positions, set up a profile, sign up for shifts, and track hours—all without ever needing the help of a busy volunteer manager. 

Additional Upgrades

Beyond the major features, Summer ’25 includes several other smart usability improvements that make everyday admin work a little smoother. Here are a few standouts: 

Permission Set Summary

Making updates to permission sets used to involve clicking through multiple setup pages, so even simple changes took time. Now, the enhanced Permission Set Summary view lets you update user, object, field, and custom permissions all in one place. Just open the permission set, click “View Summary,” and make changes using the available tabs. In the words of our team, “Having to scroll through the entire object list and open every single one for updates is a very specific type of frustration we will not miss!”

Action Plans

The updated Action Plans Lightning component makes it easier to manage tasks without extra clicks. Users can now view and update individual Action Plan tasks directly from the component, eliminating the need to open the full Action Plan record. This streamlined experience saves time and helps teams stay focused as they work through task lists. 

Actionable Relationship Center

This release expands the capabilities of the Actionable Relationship Center by allowing users to visualize many-to-one relationships within the graph view. Previously limited to one-to-one and one-to-many relationships, this enhancement offers a more complete picture of relationship networks, helping users better understand and manage connections.

There’s More to Explore

That’s a wrap on the highlights, but there’s plenty more packed into the Salesforce Summer ’25 release. Ready to dig deeper into what’s new? These resources are a great place to start: 

• Summer ‘25 Release Notes – offers a high-level overview of what’s included in the latest release.
• Summer ’25 Release in a Box – a digital resource for Admins, Business Users, Developers, Community Groups, and more. 
• Summer ’25 Release Overview Deck – this visual companion to the release notes walks you through many of the major enhancements in Summer ’25 and serves as an aid for getting others up to speed.

Curious about how a feature could work for your organization? Let’s chat. Galvin can help you explore use cases, configure solutions, and train your team so you get the most out of every new release.

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