Category

Data Management

Mar 23
0

Spring Cleaning for Your Salesforce Instance with the FieldTrip App

By | CRM & Salesforce, Data Management, Operations and Development

Spring cleaning doesn’t just mean rearranging your storage closet anymore – it means cleaning out your work life too.  Emptying your inbox, reinvigorating your website, and yes– decluttering your Salesforce instance– are all part of your spring cleaning routine. Streamlining your instance is easy and mess-free with the Field Trip app, free on the app exchange.

Field Trip is an easy to install, easy to use app that allows you to run reports of your records, effectively cleaning out unused fields. The FieldTrip analyses measure which fields your organization fills out consistently, and which ones are usually left blank. Armed with this valuable information, you can delete any field that goes unused from your objects, or focus on  filling them out.

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Dec 04
0

MapAnything: Using Geo-Analytics to Boost Your Donations

By | Data Management, Donor Tracking and Management, Salesforce News and App Reviews, Volunteer Management

MapAnywhereMapAnything is an incredibly powerful and robust geo-analytics tool available to Salesforce users. It’s a visual tool that is ideal for marketing and development, with clear applications for team and business management. While MapAnything wasn’t specifically designed for nonprofits, it’s a very translatable utility. We’re big fans, and we want to tell you why.

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Aug 03
0

Salesforce Tip: Email Many Contacts at Once

By | Data Management, Nonprofit Tech

Have you ever looked at a list of Salesforce contacts and wished you could email some of them without having to create a campaign or a special view?  Have you ever been frustrated that the NPSP’s Affiliated Contacts structure removes the one useful part of Salesforce emailing (the ability to find other contacts with the same Account)?  Do you often need to email all Contacts affiliated with an Account?

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May 26
0

Working with Federal Poverty Guidelines in Salesforce (part 2 of 2)

By | CRM & Salesforce, Data Management, Salesforce News and App Reviews

In Part 1, we focused on providing an overview of the Federal Poverty Guidelines package for Salesforce, and how to install and use it.  In this part, we’re going much more technical, including instructions on how to “DIY” a solution if you’re not using the NPSP3 with Households.

This section is much more of a video tutorial, and below the videos are all of the components you’ll need to get started. Don’t worry – we’ll explain it all to you and we’ve saved you the trouble of typing it out.

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May 02
0

Four Salesforce Mantras to Live By

By | Data Management, Operations and Development

Now that spring has (almost) sprung in Boston, it’s time to look back at the first half of 2015! Have you stuck to any of those New Year’s resolutions you so faithfully made? Per usual, mine involved more exercise and perhaps some mediation in my daily routine. Unfortunately, I’ve come up a little short for my personal goals (hey, it’s only May), but luckily, here at 501Partners, we’re right on track. We’ve been flexing our Salesforce muscles in Bootcamp trainings and, as part of our Bootcamp 101 session, we’ve been focusing on a few Salesforce mantras to live by. So take a deep breath and repeat after me:

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Apr 08
0

NPO Frameworks Part 2: Nonprofit Technology Design Solutions

By | Data Management, Nonprofit Resources, Operations and Development

What is this series about again?

We’re talking about systems design for NPOs. Answering the question: How should we think about operational improvements in nonprofits, given that there are so many moving parts?

In the first post in the series, we explored three ways to consider, at a high level, what it takes to capture and assess data for impact measurement. We identified the biggest categories of moving parts, and how they inform each other.  In later series, we’ll dissect some the details.  In this series, I want to stay higher-level and talk about designing solutions in general.

To recap the first post: Nonprofits are like any other organization. They have a reason for existing, they want to know if they’re doing what they think they’re doing, and their operations are the activities that support the reason for existing.  That’s all formalized in a logic model, and results in a nice structure from which to enter into the operational considerations of data capture, efficiency, assessment and improvement.

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Apr 01
0

NPO Frameworks Part 1: Capture and Assess Data for Impact Measurement

By | Case Management, Data Management, Operations and Development

Have you asked yourself: How should we think about operational improvements in our organization, given that there are so many moving parts? Over the next 3 weeks I’ll be looking at how to capture and assess data, implement operational improvements to help your project succeed and, perhaps most importantly, I’ll wrap up with how to engage your internal stakeholders to keep your project on track.

My colleague Stefanie Archer came up with the Hierarchy of Nonprofit Operations as a result of our work with a wide range of NPOs.  Riffing on Maslow’s Hierarchy, Stefanie’s Hierarchy argues that nonprofits – indeed, all organizations – go through the same progression with their operational practices. This post presents three different ways to read this model and interpret it when considering any systems improvement activity.

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Jan 16
0

Getting to Know Salesforce Files

By | Data Management, Salesforce News and App Reviews

Salesforce Files is a Chatter feature that allows for document collaboration between team members in an easy, efficient way. As Salesforce itself says, Files “reinvents file sharing for the enterprise, placing documents, videos, or presentations into the center of sales, service, and marketing processes.” The feature is very handy because it automatically updates the file (in all its locations) with new versions when ever you replace it, but keeps track of older versions, too.

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Feb 18
0
data practices - spreadsheet

3 Principles to legitimize your Data Practices

By | CRM & Salesforce, Data Management, Information Technology, Nonprofit Management
data practices - spreadsheet

Image courtesy of ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Have you ever wondered why your staff is using Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs to track data when you have a perfectly good central database for that purpose?

We see this problem over and over. If data is warehoused in disparate files, its value is seriously diminished. Plus, overall efficiency suffers whenever you actually try to use the data

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