Many of the biggest hurdles organizations face when implementing Salesforce are not about technology at all. In fact, they are much more about the approach the organization takes towards the process overall. Our friend Sam Dorman has created an excellent Getting Ready Playbook that’s available for download and is also part of the Salesforc.org’s Power of…
At Dreamforce a group of us pulled together a panel to share our collective experience building and scaling Salesforce applications for the nonprofit sector. This post is a collaborative effort with Alex Bernadotte from Beyond 12, Zach Goldstein from Health Leads, Tiffany Eng from Capital Impact Partners, and Jesse Maddex from the Salesforce Foundation. The…
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…
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…
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?…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…