If your organization uses Salesforce, chances are, you received an email this morning from Salesforce informing you that they are making some changes to their HTTPS security certificates. If you’re unsure what this means, we’re here to help! Keep reading for a brief overview of the changes and what to do about them.
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.
To upgrade your Salesforce to NPSP 3.0:
Here at 501Partners, we receive a lot of questions about which mass marketing tools are best based on how they integrate with Salesforce. We’ve decided to take a quick look at the options, starting with Campaign Monitor, to give some insight on how we answer this question. All in all, it depends on which organization is asking the question, as everything we recommend is based on needs, wants, existing processes, users, and much more – all of which are unique to individual organizations. This post will simply be a brief overview to Campaign Monitor, but more information can be found here.
Even though Salesforce’s Winter ’15 update has barely begun its roll-out, we’ll be turning our attention to February’s Spring ’15 offering for the purposes of this blog. Yesterday, Salesforce notified administrators that the Spring ’15 version will include a Maps feature. Included in the email were directions for opting out of this service, which might be the preferred way of dealing with this change for some organizations. Here, we will describe the nature of the change and provide you with instructions for turning off the Maps feature:
Recently, Salesforce announced that it would be disabling SSL (Secure Socket Layer) 3.0 due to a security vulnerability published by Google’s researchers. This is likely not something that will affect your Salesforce instance significantly, but we wanted to keep everyone up to date on the changes. Before we go any further, here is the statement from Salesforce about why this disabling is occurring:
“At Salesforce, trust is our #1 value, and we take the protection of our customers’ data very seriously. On October 15, Google researchers published details on a security vulnerability (CVE-2014-3566) that affects the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) 3.0 encryption protocol, also known as “POODLE,” which may allow a man-in-the-middle attack to extract data from secure HTTP connections. Although the vulnerability is somewhat difficult to exploit, to further protect customers, we will be disabling SSL 3.0 to fully address this issue.”
Here’s what this change means: Once Salesforce disables SSL 3.0 encryption, all channels which connect to Salesforce will need to use TLS 1.0 Encryption (or higher). There are three channels that connect to Salesforce via encryption:
Image courtesy of cooldesign / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
If you’re involved with a nonprofit organization in any way, you know that event management is one of the key day-to-day processes. There absolutely has to be an efficient and uniform way to contextualize and manage the data that is inevitably attached to whatever event you are putting on. For our clients, they need a way to get this data into Salesforce in a seamless and accurate way, and they often need it to happen with few manual steps.
There are dozens of ways to push this data to Salesforce and, in general, they depend on the technical sophistication of the organization. When weighing these options, there are a few questions that must be asked, whether by the organization itself or by an outside consultant like 501Partners. First, does the organization have a technical staff? Do they outsource? The two technical constraints that need to be understood by both the organization itself and any outside consultants are the budget and the internal capacity for maintenance. Without knowing these factors, it is hard to make a recommendation.
When it comes to online donation platform solutions for Salesforce, three big names come to mind. There are plenty of others beyond these three, but they often have less capacity to integrate with Salesforce and will not be as effective for your organization without this capability. Click & Pledge, Form Assembly + Paypal and Soapbox are reviewed in detail below by our excellent Salesforce consultant, Bill. Ultimately, the decision of which online giving platform to choose will be yours, but here are our thoughts on the matter:
What do Salesforce and the human body have in common? And why are we about to compare 501Partners to your primary care physician? The answer is simple: Implementing and maintaining a Salesforce instance at your nonprofit requires a lot of moving parts; kind of like maintaining your health requires multiple systems, organs and cells to organize and cooperate. What the human body does is amazing, and we think Salesforce is pretty amazing, too. Sometimes, though, such powerful tools are complex and require some explaining to understand their complexity. Kind of like that anatomy class we all had to take in high school.
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