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Operations and Development

Team members assembling puzzle pieces to create a whole

Understanding What ‘Operational Capacity’ Means for Your Salesforce Project (Part 2 of 2): Managing Salesforce Throughout Its Lifecycle

By | 501Partners News, CRM & Salesforce, Data Management, Good Governance, Nonprofit Management, Nonprofit Resources, Nonprofit Tech, Operations and Development

In our previous post, we introduced the idea of the organizational capacity model and the graph of decision variability over time that helps illustrate the idea. In this post, we take the same graph but break it down differently, to reflect a project’s lifecycle.

The first takeaway in this series is that knowing your current organizational capacity can help you align the type of Salesforce projects you pursue for optimal success. You can read about that in more detail here.

Takeaway Two: Your technology enforces your organization’s business processes, which puts a burden on your organization at the same time it offers efficiency gains.

Graph displaying decision variability over time
Everybody wants technology that fits them perfectly—technology that helps them do their work faster and better while alleviating pain points. When you adopt an enterprise system such as Salesforce, you have access to a powerful platform that can be made to automate just about any business process you can think of. In our ebook on the Data Maturity Model, we explain why that should be approached with some understanding of what your organization can support. In this post, we want to further explore the lifecycle of a Salesforce customization, and illustrate both the types of skills you may want to look for outside of your organization, and the tasks your organization should be prepared to take on for a healthy, well-maintained custom project.

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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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Mastering Click and Pledge Memberships with Salesforce

By | CRM & Salesforce, Donor Tracking and Management, Nonprofit Resources, Operations and Development

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In a prior blog post about “How to Handle Memberships in the Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack,” we shared how to manually enter memberships into Salesforce, but what do you do if you have online memberships? Click & Pledge (C&P) a popular online donation tool that integrates excellently with Salesforce, can handle all of your online membership needs. 

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Express Grants: Training Reimbursement for Nonprofits from the Workforce Training Fund

By | 501Partners News, Nonprofit Resources, Operations and Development
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010816-IMG_3106As a non-profit executive, you know that your most vital asset is your employees. In a time where you face constant challenges in technology and funding, training is essential for maintaining the effectiveness of this critical resource. Rarely does an opportunity to enhance your employee’s skills and expertise crucial to your organization present itself in as easy and generous manner as it does with the Workforce Training Fund.

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5 Things We Love About the SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud App

By | Nonprofit Tech, Operations and Development, Salesforce News and App Reviews
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Last month, Salesforce announced the launch of SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud app (Chrome extension for Gmail, iOS and Android Apps). We’ve test driven the Chrome extension and love what we’ve seen. If your organization uses GMail, here are five huge benefits to installing the app.

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Salesforce Tip: Entering Non-Standard Donations

By | Donor Database, Operations and Development, Volunteer Management

Not all the donations your organization relies upon come in the form of cash, check or credit card.  In-kind donations can be essential, whether they come in the form of donated office equipment or auction items to raise money at an event.  Donors will often declare the value of their item, but you may want to track and report on these donations differently than cash.

To facilitate reporting, we recommend creating a distinct record type for In-Kind Donations on the Opportunity object.  Include a custom field called “Estimated Value” so that you can reserve the “Amount” field for monetary donations.

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4 Reasons to love the new Click and Pledge Events App

By | Event Management, Operations and Development

As consultants, we have to maintain a critical view of technologies and tools. It is the best way to ensure that we can provide unbiased and highest quality recommendations to our clients, who, deserve no less. But when a technology is moving in the right direction, we owe its owner a tip of the hat and give credit where credit is due.

After sitting in on a demo of upcoming changes to the Click and Pledge Event Management App, I can definitely say that it is a prime example of a technology that is moving in the right direction. Here are 4 reasons why the new Click and Pledge Event Management App is going to be AWESOME!

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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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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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