Category

CRM & Salesforce

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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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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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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Feb 03
0

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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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 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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