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Blog Process

Making the team

We’re ready to dive into the project! Of course we want to hear all about your data. We want to learn about your programs and the specific fields you are hoping to bring over into Salesforce. We love to see the reports that would make your funders happy. But before all of that, we need…

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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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Blog

Designating a Salesforce administrator is crucial to your success

As nonprofit Salesforce consultants, we ALWAYS recommend that organizations have a designated database administrator. In fact, we feel so strongly about it that we don’t start a project unless the organization commits to finding (and allowing time for) someone to fulfill that role. Here’s why: How much time should you allocate for your Salesforce administrator?…

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Best Practices Blog User Adoption

Why you need an elevator pitch for your CRM project

We often will walk into an organization’s large meeting room for a project kick-off meeting to discover that the people in the room fall into two camps. CRM Veterans:  They’ve used a CRM before and it’s been a relatively positive experience. They know that this will (mostly) impact their lives in a (mostly) good way.…

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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 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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Blog

Implementing performance measurement systems

The following post is an excerpt from David Hunter’s excellent book Working Hard–and Working Well, a “roll–up–your–sleeves” companion to Leap of Reason by Mario Morino. We have consistently found we can build more effective Salesforce systems for organizations that have a clear vision for the outcomes they want to achieve. This excerpt includes important tactics to employ when driving user adoption…

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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…