How we moved a child safety nonprofit from Excel to Salesforce NPSP

A few years ago, a call came in from Centrs Dardedze.

A nonprofit in Riga, Latvia. Around 25 people. They work with children who have survived domestic and sexual violence, and with the adults in those children’s worlds. Teachers. Schools. Individual contributors.

Their work is delicate in a way most B2B rollouts are not. The data on their desks is some of the most sensitive material a CRM will ever hold.

They had never used a CRM before. Everything ran in Excel.

The Challenge

When we walked through the operation, three things stood out.

• They had multiple stakeholder types routing work at them. Schools, teachers, contributors. Each one touched the process differently.
• They had no tracking for who was trained to do what. Access to a case file was informal. Institutional memory sat in people’s heads.
• The data itself was about children. Minors who had been through the worst thing a person can go through. You cannot leak that to the wrong reader.

On top of this, Salesforce has a dedicated NPO cloud for nonprofits, running a free package called NPSP (Nonprofit Success Pack). To access it, you go through an approval flow with Salesforce’s nonprofit team. That takes coordination. CD had nobody internally who had done that before.

The Real Issue

It was partner credentials.

Centrs Dardedze runs training programmes for the people who touch their data. Teachers get certified. Partners get certified. Every certification has an expiry date.

Before we started, no one could tell you with confidence who was currently trained. A school might send an email asking for case details, and the person replying had to trust that the requester was still certified. Trust without a record is a liability when the record is about a child.

The real problem was that credential status was in people’s heads.

The Build

We started with the NPO Success Pack as the base. Standard NPSP setup. Accounts, contacts, donations, the nonprofit basics.

Then we layered the specific processes. Carefully. One at a time. We wanted each one stable and in use before we brought the next one online, so the team was never juggling three half-finished things at once.

The four big pieces:

1. Partner Educational Credential tracking. Every certified partner gets a record. Every certification has a start date, an expiry date, and a status. When a cert is about to lapse, Salesforce sends an automated notice to the account owner and to the agent involved. No one has to remember. No one has to chase.
2. A local educational institution database with its actors. Every school, every partner, every contributor, with their relationships and roles. The landscape stopped being “who do we know” and started being “who is active, in what capacity”.
3. Protection inquiry tracking. When a case comes in, it gets logged, routed, and tracked against the actual people and institutions involved. Near real-time visibility into how many inquiries are open, who is handling them, and what stage they are at.
4. Communication automation. Forms, intake, confirmation notifications, follow-ups. The mechanical parts of the workflow stopped eating the team’s day.

The detail that matters: credential status is now the gate. If a partner’s certification has lapsed, the record says so, and access to sensitive material reflects it. The question “can this person see this case?” went from a conversation to a query.

The Outcome

Centrs Dardedze now runs on Salesforce Sales Cloud with NPSP on top, tied into their Microsoft 365 stack.

For the first time, the organisation can answer plain operational questions in near real-time:

• How many open inquiries do we have this week?
• Which partners are currently certified?
• Whose certification lapses in the next 30 days?

Automated expiry notifications do the credential chasing. The manual tracking work is gone. Institutional memory is in the system, which means it survives holidays, sick days, and turnover.

The Part We Tell Other Clients

The interesting lesson here had nothing to do with Salesforce.

It was that a nonprofit with 25 people and a nonprofit with 2,500 people have the same structural problem. When the data is sensitive, the access rules have to live in the system. If the rule lives in a person’s head, the rule leaks.

The CRM is a tool. The actual work was writing the operating procedure down and letting software enforce it.

For an organisation looking after children, that is the whole job.

– Jeff.