❄️ Salesforce Winter ’26: Smarter Nonprofit Cloud, Easier Admin Experience

📢What is a Release?

Three times a year, Salesforce delivers new features and enhancements to customers in a Salesforce release. 

Our highlights: The Salesforce Winter ’26 release brings meaningful improvements across Nonprofit Cloud while also giving admins new tools to make their day-to-day smoother. The result is a platform that’s more connected, more automated, and easier to manage.

🌍 Nonprofit Cloud Enhancements

Nonprofit Cloud sees a major boost in this release.

• 🙋 Volunteer Management
  Volunteer Management is now easier to set up with Salesforce Go, a mobile-friendly tool that helps staff quickly configure and manage volunteer needs on the go. Automation also makes it simpler to launch initiatives and match volunteers to the right roles.

• 📂 Program and Case Management
  Program and Case Management streamline intake and service delivery, and now integrate directly with Data Cloud using prebuilt bundles. These bundles are essentially ready-made packages that pull together program, case, or grantmaking data in one place, so it can be analyzed or reported on without complicated setup.

• 📊 Outcome Management
  Outcome Management also connects to Data Cloud, helping nonprofits measure and share results more easily.

• 💝 Fundraising
  Fundraising teams will notice practical improvements:

  • 📝 The Gift Entry Grid is more flexible for entering donations.

  • 💵 Enhanced tools make it easier to record gift values and thank donors appropriately.

  • 🔎 The new Philanthropic Research app serves as a central hub where staff can gather and share donor research, helping fundraising teams work together more efficiently.

• 🎁 Grantmaking
  Grantmaking also gains efficiency with its own Data Cloud bundle, reducing manual setup and helping staff track awards, payments, and outcomes in one place for reporting.

• 🤖 External Agents
  Nonprofits can also build external agents (automated helpers that interact with the system) that leverage the Nonprofit Cloud data mode. To support this, Salesforce has introduced a new Digital Agent user type, which comes with the right level of permissions and access already built in, so these agents can operate smoothly without extra admin work.

⚙️ Admin Experience Upgrades

Admins will appreciate updates aimed squarely at efficiency.

• 🔄 Multi-column list view sorting (up to five fields) and field-name quick-jumping make navigating data faster.

• 📜 Field History Tracking has a new, clearer interface that highlights limits and tracked fields all in one place.

• 📈 Dashboards now allow benchmark lines so managers can easily measure performance against goals.

• 🔐 Permission set licenses are now automatically unassigned when you remove a permission set or group, making user access simpler to manage.

💡 Why It Matters

Winter ’26 is a win for both nonprofit teams and the admins who support them.

• 🌟 Nonprofits benefit from smarter, more connected tools that strengthen fundraising, grantmaking, and program delivery.

• ⏳ Admins gain time back with improved visibility and automation.

Together, these updates mean organizations can spend less energy managing systems and more energy advancing their mission.

This release is now fully in all Salesforce orgs. Keep in mind that while some features are fully enabled upon release, others need to be enabled by an admin or are limited to certain clouds and editions. Click here for the full release notes on the Salesforce website: Winter ‘26 release