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Coaching your Nonprofit Salesforce Administrator: Our Philosophy

At Bigger Boat Consulting, we believe an empowered Salesforce admin is the cornerstone of a successful system. You may already know that an admin is critical for Salesforce adoption and in-house ownership of your system, but how do you actually ensure they’re ready once your implementation ends? Let’s talk about the value of admin coaching.…

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How to get a Raiser’s Edge Migration done efficiently, fast, and focused

Bigger Boat was able to help us assess what our needs were and get us on a path to success. We had a very short timetable for moving data from Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce. With Bigger Boat’s strong team, excellent project management, and agility we were able to get our minimal viable product (MVP) completed…

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Guide: Staffing the Team for Success with Salesforce

Salesforce has the potential to make a huge, positive impact on your nonprofit. But in order to get the most out of Salesforce, it’s critical to have the right internal team in place, from before the implementation project even starts until long after the project is complete. What do we mean by the “right internal…

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Investing in Nonprofit Measurement and Learning

Investing in a Salesforce administrator is a key factor for an organization to be successful with Salesforce. But what about someone who is also thinking strategically about how the organization is measuring their work and learning from the data? Lauren Shaughnessy serves in exactly that role for Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco. As Director…

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Blog Case Study

Anatomy of a successful Salesforce project: Enhabit

The competence and demeanor of our Bigger Boat team were absolutely critical to the project. They would really listen. The were never disagreeable but could tell us what would and would not work. Their process provided structure while being flexible to our changing needs. Mid-way through the project we introduced a new business development component.…

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The Power of Investing in Your Team: A Salesforce Staffing Benchmark Study

Today’s guest post is by Matt Eldridge. Matt served as IslandWood’s Senior Vice President. IslandWood’s mission is to inspire lifelong environmental and community stewardship. They do this through events and programs at several facilities, including their flagship 250-acre outdoor learning center on Bainbridge Island in Washington. IslandWood uses Salesforce to help their team manage events,…

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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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Understanding what you’re getting into with Salesforce

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…

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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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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?…