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About NPPatch

What Is NPPatch?

NPPatch is a long-term, community-owned successor to the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). It brings the full NPSP feature set — plus the Program Management Module — under a single namespace that the nonprofit community can install, extend, and maintain independently. The original NPSP was distributed as six Salesforce-controlled packages. The code was open source, but Salesforce decided what got merged and when new versions shipped. NPPatch changes the governance: the community decides what gets built, what gets fixed, and when it ships.

Where things stand

NPPatch is currently in beta. It’s not ready for production orgs, but it is real, installable, and actively evolving. The install.nppatch.com installer will set you up with a demo configuration and sample data in a Developer Edition org in about 30 minutes. Since launch, the project has consolidated all six NPSP packages and PMM into one namespace, replaced the legacy Visualforce settings experience with a native Lightning interface, modernized the Relationships Viewer and Manage Household pages, documented every custom field, and removed a substantial amount of legacy code that no longer serves the community.

Around 50 volunteers have joined the beta contributor group. Monthly community calls are open to everyone, and smaller working groups are forming around testing, documentation, and architecture. Public discussion happens on the NPPatch forum.

The most important early milestones are establishing an independent governance model and stabilizing the existing feature set. That means making deliberate choices about package architecture, naming, and other decisions that become difficult or impossible to revisit after a production release. New features will come, but a stable base comes first.

What’s in a Name?

If you’ve spent time in Seattle, you might know what a P-Patch is. If you’ve spent time in the Salesforce nonprofit ecosystem, you almost certainly know what NPSP is. NPPatch lives at the intersection of both — and the name is no accident.

The P-Patch Story

In 1970, a University of Washington student named Darlyn Rundberg had a simple idea: she asked her neighbors, the Picardo family — Italian immigrants who ran a small truck farm in the Wedgwood neighborhood — if she could use a corner of their land for a community garden. They said yes.

That single act of neighborly generosity became the seed of something much larger. By 1973, the City of Seattle had acquired the Picardo farm and established the P-Patch Community Gardening Program, named with a “P” to honor the family who made it all possible. What started as one garden is now a network of over 90 community gardens spanning more than 30 acres across the city, tended by thousands of households.

A P-Patch isn’t a commercial farm. It isn’t owned by any one person. It’s a piece of shared ground where neighbors show up, tend their own plots, share what they grow, and take care of the common spaces together. Gardeners donate tens of thousands of pounds of fresh produce to local food banks every year. New gardeners learn from experienced ones. The soil gets richer over time because people keep showing up to work it.

The P-Patch program has survived budget crises, development pressure, and decades of change in the city around it — not because of any single institution, but because the community that depends on it keeps choosing to sustain it.

The NPSP Story

The Nonprofit Success Pack has a similar origin story, even if the soil is digital.

In 2008, the Salesforce Foundation (later Salesforce.org) partnered with the nonprofit Salesforce community to launch the Nonprofit Starter Pack — an open-source project to make the Salesforce platform actually work the way nonprofits needed it to. It started as six separately installed managed packages that handled the basics: constituent management, household relationships, affiliations, and fundraising.

But what made NPSP remarkable was never just the code. It was the community around it. From the beginning, NPSP was shaped by the people who used it. Nonprofit administrators, consultants, developers, and partners came together at Community Sprints — collaborative working sessions where people contributed code, documentation, reports, best practices, and ideas. You didn’t need to be a developer to make NPSP better. As one Sprint attendee put it, knowing firsthand what’s working, what confuses users, and what features are needed is exactly what the builders need to hear. That knowledge is its own kind of contribution.

Over the years, the community contributed major features like matching gifts, grant management, and campaign-member functionality. Volunteers wrote significant portions of the documentation. A Community Advisory Board helped guide priorities. The Power of Us Hub connected thousands of nonprofit professionals who helped each other solve problems every day. In 2016, the product was renamed the Nonprofit Success Pack to reflect how far it had grown beyond a “starter” kit — it had become the foundation tens of thousands of organizations relied on.

NPSP was always described as open source, and in an important sense it was: the code was publicly available under a BSD-3 license, hosted on GitHub, and open to contributions. But there was a tension at the heart of it. Salesforce controlled the distribution mechanism. The packages were managed packages, which meant Salesforce decided what got merged and when updates shipped. The community could submit pull requests, but the release process was Salesforce’s to control. The openness was real in spirit but limited in practice.

When Salesforce announced the end of active innovation on NPSP in favor of Nonprofit Cloud, that tension came to a head. Thousands of organizations — many of them small nonprofits with limited budgets — were left weighing their options. Some moved to Nonprofit Cloud. But others felt pushed toward a product they weren’t sure was right for them, not because they thought it was better, but because they thought it was their only path forward.

Why NPPatch Exists

NPPatch exists because we don’t think it should be the only path forward.

We’ve taken the open-source NPSP codebase — all six original packages — and consolidated it into a single repository. We’re distributing it as a second-generation, namespaced, unlocked package. That distinction matters: the source code is visible and auditable, and the community can continue to fix bugs, build features, and ship updates on its own terms — without Salesforce’s involvement or approval. The namespace preserves a clean upgrade path so that improvements can flow to everyone who wants them as version upgrades, while the unlocked model ensures that the community — not a corporate product team — controls what gets built and when it ships.

This isn’t a fork born out of frustration with Salesforce. We’re genuinely excited about much of what’s being built in Nonprofit Cloud. But we believe every organization should choose its path based on what actually fits — what the product does, what it costs to implement and maintain, and what kind of support exists around it. Not based on the fear that the alternative is disappearing.

Communal Growth

The name NPPatch carries all of these threads:

np is for nonprofit — the mission at the center of everything.

patch is for Seattle’s P-Patch program — a model of what happens when a community takes collective ownership of shared ground and keeps showing up to tend it.

patch is also a word that means something specific in software — a fix, an improvement, a way of keeping something running and making it better over time. That’s exactly what this project does for the NPSP codebase.

And if you put NPPatch next to NPSP, the family resemblance is right there. This isn’t a replacement that pretends the original never existed. It’s a continuation, carried forward by the community that always made it what it was.

The Picardo family didn’t plan to start a citywide movement when they said yes to a neighbor’s request in 1970. The early NPSP contributors didn’t know they were building something that would serve tens of thousands of organizations when they gathered for those first Developer Sprints. Both things grew because people kept showing up, kept tending the ground, and kept sharing what they grew.

That’s what we’re inviting you to do with NPPatch. Bring your plot. Grow something. Share what works. The garden is open.

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