Summer ‘16 is a treasure trove of great stuff. Don’t take our word for it — definitely make the time to dig into the full release notes! But before you go, here are our quick picks for the things that will make nonprofit admins’ lives awesome on June 4 or 11.
Global Picklists have been a hit on the Idea Exchange for NINE YEARS. With this release, they finally come to your Production org without any extra effort to join a pilot program. They’re still calling it a “beta”, but they’re there to be used. You can now define custom global “Picklists,” which are actually sets of values that can be used in custom picklist fields on any object. Finally, keep your picklist options consistent across objects that refer to the same piece of info: a product family picklist might appear on Opportunities and Cases, for instance, or a set of outcomes areas might appear on Programs and Campaigns. You can find them in the setup tree under Build> Create> Picklists.
Restricted Picklists popped up in Spring ‘16, but they’re back with version 2.0 in Summer ‘16! Now you can deactivate old/outdated values, leaving your legacy data intact but keeping fresh data spic and span. This is available for Global Picklists and restricted custom picklists.
Sandbox to Sandbox Clone is still just a pilot, but I’m really excited about it anyway. As part of this pilot, you can now create a sandbox by cloning another existing sandbox; you don’t have to create new sandboxes based on your production org! Great for multi-stage projects where you might want to pause development in one sandbox and then pick up development in another before deploying to production. (Still feeling a bit unsure of sandboxes and deployments? Do the Change Set Development badge on Trailhead! Feeling solid? Level up to the Application Lifecycle and Development badge!
Process Builder finally sees one of its major gaps filled in the Summer ‘16 release. Now, after a record meets the criteria in a node and peels off to execute that node’s actions, you can decide if you want the record to stop processing or continue evaluating at the next node, so the actions are cumulative. Do you hear the angels singing? 
Enhanced email brings the power of a full standard object to Emails in your Salesforce org. Fire automation, add custom fields, create page layouts and more. There are still some limitations (no Record Types, for instance), but this seems to be the beginning of email getting some long-overdue love — definitely something to track over the next few releases!
Custom Consoles. As a nonprofit admin, you may have seen Service Cloud console demos, longed for the modern, hyper-efficient, multi-tab interface, and then silently (or maybe not-so-silently) lamented the gigantic price tag. No longer! The new Salesforce Lightning editions that came earlier in May include custom consoles for full license holders (not Force.com App licenses, aka “Platform” licenses). This includes the 10 granted licenses and any further full licenses your org has purchased. If you’ve never seen a console, or haven’t seen one in its full modern Lightning Experience glory, take a peek at a demo our own Christian Carter put together. You can see lots more screenshots and a walk-through on his full post, and a video overview of consoles from Salesforce docs.
Now go forth and explore in your pre-release org or preview sandbox!