A colleague of mine (Lisa Glass) recently began using encrypted fields in Salesforce. It turns out they are fairly simple to use. Encrypted fields need to be requested through the “Feature Activations Team” at Salesforce. You can just open a Support Ticket and put in a request for this. As per the documentation, this feature is available to all Enterprise and Unlimited edition accounts, which means all NPO’s should be able to access this.

How it works:

• It creates a new field type in your instance called “Text (Encrypted)”. This is fairly similar to a regular text field, except that the data is encrypted.
• In order to see data within an encrypted field, the user’s profile must have the “View Encrypted Data” option checked off
• Any user that does not have this permission in their profile will see a value such as “***-**-****” when they view the encrypted field. (Note: You can specify whether you want the Mask to be either a “X” or a “*”. You can also leave a portion of a field unencrypted, such as the last 4 digits of an SSN.

Limitations:

• Max length of 175 characters. (You can’t really use this to encrypt case notes.)
• Field value can not be Unique, External ID, or have a Default Value
• Can not search, filter, roll-up, query, or use the field value in a Formula
• Can not use in workflows and assignments

Overall, this is a very powerful feature and you should consider leveraging it in your instance if your are storing any sensitive data such as Social Security Number, Credit Card Number, Medical Info, etc.

There is a lot more information on best practices and usage examples within Salesforce Help.