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Blog Case Study

School Program Tracking Case Study: Lean, Web-Integrated, and Maintainable

This past summer, Bigger Boat started our partnership with EarthGen. EarthGen is an organization that helps Washington schools form collaborative groups to make the school more energy efficient, environmentally friendly, and a healthier place to learn. With over 400 participating schools, EarthGen impacts the day-to-day learning environment of 78,000 students across the state. Our previous…

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Blog

Custom Metadata Types for easier deployments

You can now use Custom Metadata Types to define and store your own metadata settings — and you can deploy these between orgs! Previously you had to use Custom Objects or Custom Settings, which don’t bring data over when you deploy them. Using Custom Metadata makes managing your deployments easier and lets you think about…

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Blog

Tracking Complicated Human Services Client-Relationships in Salesforce

We recently collaborated with an organization who does highly-effective therapeutic work with at-risk children in the Seattle area. Children served by this organization often have a complex web of caregivers, relatives, foster parents, siblings, half-siblings, case workers, and other significant people in their lives. These children frequently change living situations. It is critical for this organization…

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Blog

Top Qualities of a Great Client-Side Project Lead

The foundation of a successful Salesforce implementation project is a great project team, and key to that project team is a great client-side project lead. That’s not us, and it’s not necessarily the client’s internal Salesforce administrator, either! (Though it can be the same person. We’ve covered in depth before why you definitely need an admin,…

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Administrator Blog

You don’t have to be a Coder to be a NPSP Contributor

On October 22nd and 23rd, almost 60 passionate folks gathered in Seattle (and a handful more, remotely) for the latest Nonprofit Starter Pack Community Sprint. We came together to spend two full days focused on making the Nonprofit Starter Pack even more awesome — and nothing else. A few weeks before the event, a friend from…

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Administrator Blog

How to: updating Campaign Member status via Process Builder and Flow

Note: this post assumes a basic working knowledge of Salesforce Flows and Process Builder. If you want to learn more about these, we recommend the Trailhead module on Flows and the Trailhead module on Process Builder. Have you ever wanted to know which of your invited guests to an event actually donated and which ones did…

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Blog User Adoption

What the Lightning Experience Announcement Means for Nonprofits

There’s been a lot of excitement this week about the new Lightning Experience. Lightning Experience is the next generation of the desktop user interface (UI) for Salesforce. Eventually, it will match feature-for-feature to Salesforce Classic (the current UI you’re used to) and then some! There’s a ton of really awesome, beautiful stuff in this release…

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Blog

Our favorite blogs for nonprofit Salesforce administrators

There are so many people involved in the Salesforce world and many of them are blogging about their experiences and their ideas. We have put together a list of a few of our favorite Salesforce blogs, some nonprofit-focused and some not. We hope you enjoy reading them and if you have some of your favorites,…

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Blog Misc

Nonprofit Starter Pack v3: What a year!

Just over a year ago, version 3 of the Nonprofit Starter Pack was launched. It was a pivotal release for several reasons. This release added a more flexible architecture and a new preferred account model, called the Household account model. It also added new features such as seasonal addresses and streamlined settings. The v3 release…

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Blog

Highlights of Four Force for Change Grants

The Salesforce Foundation recently announced their 2015 Force for Change grant program. This grant program focuses on “increasing social impact through the innovative use of Salesforce technologies.” In the past, these grants have helped nonprofit and higher ed organizations accelerate and/or scale their work in Salesforce. The grant program is part of their pioneering 1/1/1 model…