All Posts By

Allan Huntley

Sep 22
0

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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Sep 06
0

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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Aug 10
0

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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Jul 22
0

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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Jun 13
0

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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Jun 03
0

Case Management in NPSP: A Hidden Gem

By | Case Management

The case management functions of Salesforce are a hidden gem. These functions make any case manager’s work easier, more efficient and certainly more effective. The case management function offers a one-stop ability to track a client’s entire interaction with the organization. It is used for recording interactions between case management staff and program participants. Nonprofits that operate call centers, drop in centers, shelters, and client services use this convenient tool for tracking client engagement and progress throughout the lifetime of the client’s interaction with the organization.

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Apr 11
0

New Federal Poverty Guidelines Data Released, Free Salesforce App Updated

By | CRM & Salesforce, Salesforce News and App Reviews

Updated for 2017

501Partners works with many organizations that need to know if their program participants are above or below the Federal Poverty Line. We created the Federal Poverty Guidelines for the NPSP App as an extension of the Nonprofit Starter Pack 3’s Household Account model to help nonprofits keep track of this information without having to look up the information in the federal tables or manually compute a percentage.   Read More

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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Mar 03
0

Salesforce Email Alert Explained: Identity Confirmation Change with Spring ‘16 Release

By | Salesforce News and App Reviews

Screen Shot 2016-03-03 at 3.17.27 PMIf you received an email from Salesforce with the title “Identity Confirmation Change with Spring ‘16 Release,” you may wonder if it will affect you and the other Salesforce users in your organization. The answer is: this security upgrade requires a small amount of effort to remind Salesforce that you are a trusted user, but it isn’t too much work on your end.

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Feb 24
0

Managing Grants In Salesforce is A Snap with Nonprofit Starter Pack 3.0

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

NPSP_Salesforce1

Salesforce just made grants management a whole lot easier. Salesforce.org (formerly the Salesforce Foundation) has added grants management fields to the most recent edition of the Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP), enabling greater efficiency of time and effort for managing your external grants. If you are a nonprofit or foundation, this is exciting news for your development director!

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