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Administrator Blog Tech Talk

Salesforce Winter ‘18 Release Highlights: My Top 5

If you logged into a sandbox on a preview instance today, you were greeted by a friendly Yeti Astro. Even though it’s only barely beginning to feel like fall today in the Pacific Northwest, welcome to Winter ‘18! The Winter release is always a big one, given that it always drops very close to Dreamforce…

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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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Administrator Blog

Reports and dashboards and graphs…oh my!

This summer the Salesforce Foundation provided a number of new reports and dashboards for the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP). If you haven’t look at them or considered installing them, you should. There are 5 new dashboards and 47 new reports. I’d like to highlight a few of my favorites. But take a look, there are…

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Administrator Best Practices Blog User Adoption

Six easy ways to optimize Salesforce for your nonprofit

Merriam Webster defines Optimization as an act, process, or methodology of making something as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible. I don’t know of any CRM system that is perfect but we should always strive to make our system as fully functional and effective as possible. Here are six things that you can do…

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Administrator Best Practices Blog User Adoption

Should you disable Quick Create for better Salesforce data integrity?

What is Quick Create?  Quick Create is the “new” button that appears in lookup windows or the Quick Create section in the sidebar on Account, Contact, Opportunity, or Lead tabs in Salesforce.   In the picture below, I was adding XYC Corporation to Dewey Duck’s contact record.  In the Lookup panel, I found that XYC didn’t…

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Administrator Best Practices Blog Misc

Four tips to maintain an effective Salesforce backup

What would happen if a new workflow rule or trigger ran amok on your Salesforce data without it being noticed for weeks? Or if a well meaning intern accidentally wreaks havoc while doing data cleanup? Would you be protected? The good news is that Salesforce backs up your data. The bad news is that their…

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Administrator Best Practices Blog Misc User Adoption

Why every Salesforce user needs their own license

Nonprofits who use Salesforce benefit from a generous grant: Each 501(c)3 gets 10 free licenses that provide access to features that cost business users thousands of dollars each year. Organizations with more than 10 users get a steep discount — about 75% off the regular price — for additional licenses. But even with that discount,…

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Administrator Best Practices Blog

It’s Your Data: Have Some Integrity

Our data isn’t very good, people don’t trust it. I’m always cleaning data. When will it end? Why do organizations get to the point where they don’t trust or can’t act on their data?  Often the reason is poor data quality and integrity.   How does that happen?  There are a lot of reasons but the…

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Administrator Best Practices Blog User Adoption

From the trenches: Salesforce user adoption tips and tactics

We are pleased to have Nicholas Merriam share his user adoption tips for a Salesforce implementation he oversaw while at Building Changes in 2011. Now Operations Director for Vittana, Nicholas is using some of these same techniques at his new organization. The Challenge Prior to implementing a centralized database, Building Changes used five databases and…