May 2015

Adding it Up: Understanding Roll-Up Summary Fields

Roll-up summaries are a powerful tool within Salesforce to help you analyze your data without running a summary report. They can give you data specific to the contact or household you are viewing, providing a snapshot of related donations so you can get a sense of the donor’s engagement with your organization at a glance. Standard roll-up summary fields summarize all or some related records into a calculated field on a master object. The field can display a count, sum, maximum, or minimum value from the related records, operating on numeric, currency, or date fields. You can create roll-up summaries of Opportunities on Account records, or on any master object summarizing a field from its detail records.

Tracking In-Kind Gifts in Salesforce

Let’s say you’re already tracking donations in Salesforce, and everything is going smoothly. But now a donor wants to make an in-kind gift to your organization. You’re excited about the gift, but not sure how to record it in Salesforce. How should you track the gift so you can honor the donor’s generosity, acknowledge them appropriately in your annual report, and send them an accurate tax receipt? You’ve got some options, of course!

Navigating NGO Connect Batch Upload

Though we’d all love for all vendors to have seamless integrations with Salesforce, the truth is some of the vendors nonprofits works with do not. When this is the case you’re faced with inserting data created by your vendors into your Salesforce environment. Examples of these types of files could be checks deposited to your organization’s bank account, lists of donors that were gathered at an event or in the field where there was no internet connection or a list of names and emails received from a sponsored event.