Donation

A Donation in Salesforce represents a single contribution from a donor to a nonprofit organization. In the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), Donations are stored on the standard Opportunity object, with Type = "Donation" and configurable Stage values (Prospecting, Pledged, Posted, Paid, Closed Won) reflecting the donation lifecycle. In the modern Nonprofit Cloud, Donations are represented through the standard Gift Transaction object, separating them cleanly from the sales-pipeline Opportunity model. Each Donation captures the donor (linked through Account, Contact, or Account-Soft-Credit), the Amount, the Close Date (gift date), payment method, designation (which fund or program receives the gift), associated Campaign, and any matching gift, in-kind valuation, or attribution details. Donations are the operational unit of nonprofit fundraising — every dollar received maps to a Donation record, providing the queryable financial backbone for revenue reporting, donor stewardship, IRS Form 990 compliance, and grant-funder accountability.

Donations in NPSP are Opportunities with conventions layered on top — Type, Stage values, naming patterns, and roll-up summary fields on Account and Contact aggregate giving totals. NPSP's documentation, automation, and reporting all assume these conventions, so deviating (using Opportunity directly without NPSP conventions) breaks the rich nonprofit feature set. The newer Nonprofit Cloud uses the dedicated Gift Transaction object instead, separating philanthropic giving from sales-pipeline opportunities at the data-model level — a cleaner long-term architecture but requires migration from NPSP's Opportunity-based model.

Donor-attribution patterns in Donations are richer than they look. A single Donation can have a Primary Donor (typically a Contact or Household Account on the OpportunityContactRole junction with Role = Donor), one or more Soft Credits (other people who influenced or share credit for the gift, such as the spouse of a household giver or the board member who solicited the gift), an associated Foundation if the gift came through a donor-advised fund, and a Matching Gift link to the corporate match Donation that follows. Tracking these relationships accurately is essential for donor stewardship and accurate fundraiser-credit attribution.

Donation revenue recognition in NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud follows GAAP principles for nonprofit accounting: pledges (commitment to give in the future) are recognized as revenue when pledged, payments arrive as installments, and write-offs occur when uncollectible. Multi-year grants are similarly recognized in the year the grant is awarded, not when the cash arrives. Misconfigured Stage values that conflate pledge dates and payment dates are one of the most common sources of revenue-reporting errors — finance teams should treat Stage definitions as a controlled vocabulary, not a free field.