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Building iteratively: How to build a Salesforce system your nonprofit will actually love

“Why did your last implementation fail?” we asked. “Well, we got exactly what we asked for…” the program director said, “and it wasn’t what we needed.” Clients with existing systems often come to us for help getting it right. We like to start with the above question: “Why did the last implementation fail?” We’ve heard…

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Blog Case Study

Highlights from Salesforce.org’s Program Management Webinar with BRIDGE Housing

BRIDGE Housing provides housing, programs, and services to residents in 90 apartment communities across California, Oregon, and Washington. Bigger Boat helped BRIDGE Housing move their program tracking from Excel spreadsheets and paper files to Salesforce. Salesforce.org recently hosted a webinar with BRIDGE Housing. If you are in housing or human services, the webinar lets you…

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Four Reasons Salesforce Implementations Fail

Over the years, many organizations that started their Salesforce journey before we arrived on the scene have reached out to us for help. Some organizations need just an enhancement or two to keep their systems running smoothly. Some want to push into new horizons and build out new functionality. But others are disappointed. In Salesforce.…

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Getting Started with Salesforce Console for Nonprofits

Console makes it easy to quickly navigate through lots of records, enter case notes, reconcile donations, and more. Console users can move more efficiently through Salesforce than is really possible in the standard interface. This means that console can turn your users into superstars at Salesforce and superstars at their jobs! In console, records can…

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Blog Case Study

Data Collection in the Field with the Nature Conservancy

Five and a half million ducks, geese, swans, and shorebirds migrate through California’s Central Valley each year, but they are struggling. In the Central Valley, 95% of shorebird habitat has been lost to development, leaving just 5% to support the entire population on their journey. The Nature Conservancy has taken an innovative approach to solving…

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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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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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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 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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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…