May 11
0

Salesforce for Your Nonprofit? 7 Things to Consider

By | CRM & Salesforce

Tens of thousands of nonprofits of all sizes are making the switch to Salesforce, for very good reason.  For our small and midsized clients, the price and flexibility simply can’t be beat.  The Salesforce Foundation provides a grant to ensure that your first 10 licenses are free, and subsequent licenses are available at very affordable prices.  The creators of the Nonprofit Starter Pack (also free to use) have thought through the majority of what any nonprofit needs to use Salesforce as a development and fundraising platform, and dozens of companies make integrated online fundraising a possibility.  Thousands of firms provide software to enhance and extend your Salesforce experience, and thousands more consulting firms can help you make the most of the system.

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May 07
0

App Review: AAKonsult Campaign Status

By | Attendance Tracking, Event Management, Salesforce News and App Reviews, Volunteer Management

Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 5.41.33 PMCampaigns are a super useful tool in Salesforce, especially for nonprofit organizations looking to track their marketing and fundraising efforts, attendance to events or even programmatic offerings. However, creating and using a campaign is just the beginning.

The whole point of creating a campaign is to track its impact and how do we do that? With tracking its Campaign Members and Campaign Member Responses! Standardizing Campaign Member Status’s or responses is key to consistently measuring the impact of the types of campaigns you hold.

But did you ever notice that there are only two default Campaign Member Status values available to you?

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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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Jan 07
0

Real Life Heroes: Company One Theatre

By | Client Spotlight
It’s time for our first Real Life Heroes post of the New Year! For this week’s installment, we’ve chosen Company One Theatre. Not your average theater company, Company One’s mission is to “change the face of Boston theatre by uniting the city’s diverse communities through innovative, socially provocative performance and developing civically engaged artists.” It’s a pretty great mission, if you ask us!

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Dec 22
0
npsp nonprofit starter pack from salesforce

What is the NPSP Again???

By | CRM & Salesforce

When we talk about the NPSP, what do we mean? It’s a common acronym in the Dictionary of Salesforce, but is it so common outside of that context? We’re not sure it is. That’s why we’re here today to tell you exactly what is meant when we refer to your organization’s NPSP, or Nonprofit Starter Pack.

Salesforce designed the NPSP knowing that its most common features were useful to nonprofits, but maybe needed a little bit of tweaking to be considered efficient and effective. Working on top of the Salesforce Enterprise Edition, the Nonprofit Starter Pack helps organizations manage donors, donor memberships and affiliations. It also allows for the creation of Household accounts and household giving, and incorporates recurring payments and gifts.

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