Pitfalls and Best Practices: How to Keep Your Salesforce Project From Being Doomed

By | CRM & Salesforce, Salesforce shortcuts and tips

Participants from our popular Salesforce Bootcamp for Nonprofits trainings will be familiar with an exercise we run called “Pitfalls and Best Practices.” In this exercise, we hand out sheets of paper to every participant, each piece with a different scenario on it. The students then must interpret the situation and use an anecdote to illustrate why it is or isn’t a good thing. We will often pass on particularly noteworthy stories at other Bootcamps, with names redacted of course!

A selection of these “Pitfalls and Best Practices” are offered below. So, you can either give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back, or shudder at the mistakes you have made (or maybe just barely avoided).

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Click & Pledge Update: Is Your Domain Secure?

By | 501Partners News, Nonprofit Resources, Salesforce shortcuts and tips

Click & Pledge, the online donation portal, has recently notified its users of a domain security update. Our clients asked us to advise them on how to respond to this. Fortunately, the solution is relatively straightforward.

Like Salesforce, Click and Pledge is aware that it is passing on extremely confidential information like credit card numbers, names, and emails. Their email is a demonstration of their commitment to following the latest protocols in ensuring that the information remains confidential.

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Salesforce Encryption Update: What You Need To Know

By | Salesforce News and App Reviews

Salesforce has begun updating its security encryption standards, which potentially impacts any third party software that makes a real-time connection into Salesforce. Everything on the internet will be forced to be TLS1.1 compliant in 2018, but Salesforce has decided to go a year early. In order to ensure that your Salesforce will continue to work as smoothly and efficiently as always, we are recommending three actions: test your browser, update Outlook for Salesforce, and use third party compliant software. The full blog post lists the software that we have found compliant, and details our recommendations.

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Meeting Your Mission & Ours: Introducing Bootcamp PLUS Trainings

By | CRM & Salesforce, Nonprofit Resources, Our Services

Like all of our clients, 501Partners is a mission-driven organization. We do the work we do because we want to support the vital services that nonprofits perform. And how do we do this? 501Partners provides nonprofits with tools to track outcomes and plan for the future in an informed way.

Salesforce is our primary tool of choice to help accomplish this goal. For the last four years we have had the privilege of working with over 165 organizations, all with diverse missions. Whether it be job readiness, eliminating the achievement gap, disability rights, promoting citizenship, health services access, or homelessness prevention and legal reform — we believe Salesforce is the most powerful and flexible data tool available that will meet your nonprofit’s data needs.

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New Name, New Features: The Nonprofit Success Pack

By | CRM & Salesforce

The Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack has been rebranded and renamed to the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. Along with the renaming, Salesforce.org has released two new features, Engagement Plans and Levels. We are really excited about these two new features, primarily because we can see the value they add to the NPSP, and to nonprofits organizations.

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Play in the Sandbox for (Salesforce) Safety

By | CRM & Salesforce, Data Management

USE A SANDBOX TO AVOID COSTLY MISTAKES

Did you ever have one of those moments where you wished that your life had an “Undo” button?  Of course you did! Maybe it was when you did something stupid, or when you crumpled a fender trying to squeeze into a parking place. Clients often assume that Salesforce has one too, and they blunder ahead without fear. The bad news is that Salesforce does NOT have an Undo button. Why not? As an online platform, it really can’t: once a command is sent to the server in Seattle or Atlanta or Kuala Lumpur, one cannot retrieve it.

However, Salesforce does have something that’s just as good as an Undo button: it’s called a Sandbox. A Sandbox allows you to test out changes to your Salesforce without affecting your data. Once you get the Sandbox working, you can reproduce it in your organization’s Salesforce account (called Production) and Voila! You’ve created your own Salesforce Undo button.

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Think Like Einstein: Unlock Salesforce’s Capacity

By | CRM & Salesforce, Data Management

When I was a kid, one of the scientific-sounding myths that stuck with me was that the average human “only” employs 10% of their brain, while geniuses like Albert Einstein utilize up to 20%. If your organization is using Salesforce only as a development tool, you are only tapping into a very small percentage – perhaps only 10% – of your Salesforce capacity.

It is easy to forget that Salesforce is primarily a CRM (Constituent Relationship Manager). So many nonprofit users focus exclusively on its formidable suite of tools for tracking all types of financial transactions.

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Starting from the Finish Line: Structuring Your Salesforce Instance

By | CRM & Salesforce, Data Management

Using Salesforce successfully and efficiently long term depends on starting with a sturdy and adaptable structure. By strategically basing your Salesforce on your business processes, you can ensure proper and reliable data reporting and open a window into a high-level understanding of nonprofit organizational program outcomes, trends, financial benchmarks, and more. Building your Salesforce correctly requires capturing data with an eye to reporting on it, helping you achieve your nonprofit organization’s service and fundraising goals, and offering insights for organizational planning.

At 501Partners, we approach our clients’ Salesforce structure with the mantra, “Plan the beginning with the end in mind.” We are sharing five of our “pro tips” to structure your instance correctly at the beginning, so you spend less time adjusting your reports, and get what is most valuable out of it in the end. 

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The Cloud Doesn’t Always Have Your Back: Backing Up Your Salesforce Instance

By | CRM & Salesforce, Data Management

Effective Salesforce use is often as much about habits as it is about technology. Here’s a habit every time-strapped, cash-conservative nonprofit organization should develop sooner rather than later: backing up your work.

True story: when I was in graduate school, I had a big paper due to the end of the semester. Like most students, I waited untill the night before it was due. For hours, I sat typing away. As I  reached the final page, the lights in my apartment flickered. Power outage. The lights came back on, but you can guess what happened to my paper. I hadn’t saved any part of it along the way, so I paid the price of of re-typing the whole thing.

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Using Excel for Nonprofit Data Migration

By | CRM & Salesforce, Salesforce shortcuts and tips

Thomas Edison famously said that “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.”  If he’d been a Salesforce user, he would have said, “Data upload is 99% preparation and 1% migration.” Data migration is the task of transferring large amounts of data into Salesforce from another platform. To accomplish this you will typically use Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet program that allows you to create “common-separated value” or CSV files.  In this blog we will review some of the commonly used tools that are built into Excel to make it easier to prepare your data BEFORE you mass-migrate it into Salesforce, ensuring that the data you migrate is as accurate as possible.  After all, you don’t need to be a genius to know the expression, “Garbage in, garbage out”!

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