While it’s hard to believe it’s been nearly one year since my Winter ’18 post highlighting some of my favorite elements of the latest Salesforce release, it’s officially time for the next edition of my top Winter ’19 lightning features for nonprofits. This brief list, ranging from user interface tweaks to improved efficiencies, helps to carve out ways that you can not only get your work done faster and more efficiently, but spend the time you need in areas that matters most — your mission.
Without further ado, here’s a brief list of my personal favorites, in no particular order:
Comfy or Compact?
You decide. Salesforce has granted users the flexibility to dictate how much unused white space they’d like to see on record pages. Want to eliminate scrolling? Select Compact from the Lightning Experience display density settings (under your Personal Icon on the top-right). Need some breathing room between your fields? Choose Cozy to spread your fields out a bit more. The choice is yours.
List-View Sharing
Previously, the ability to share list-view was limited in Lightning to only Private (yourself) and Public (visible to anyone). Now, with this release, you have the ability to select your Sharing Settings for the list-view, and identify a group of individuals that should have visibility. Now you can clean up the unnecessary clutter of seeing everyone’s list-views and get to the list-view you need much easier.
List-View Search
Attempting to cull through a long list of Contacts or Gifts to find one specific record? Now you have the ability to search through your list-views to get to the record you need that much faster. Time-saving unlocked. Bonus – you can also search through reports in the same way!
Draft Chatter Posts
Do you have a tendency to do too many things at once? As most nonprofit professionals can attest, there’s no shortage of work to be done, so oftentimes you might begin a chatter post, for example, get distracted and lose what you were working on. Enter Chatter Post Drafts. Once you enable draft posts under Chatter settings, Chatter will automatically save your unpublished feed posts. That’s a big win for preventing any rework!
Field References
Ever make a field several months ago and forget its purpose or where it’s actually utilized? Check out the “Where is this Used?” button on your custom fields to see where it’s referenced. This might include a page layout, email template, field set, validation rule, even reports. Before you delete a field, reference this resource and you’ll gain a lot more clarity on the intentions/goal for the field.
Email Open & Bounce Tracking
Do you find yourself wondering if your email actually made it to its destination or was opened when sending it to a donor from Salesforce? A tracking status for your emails can now be utilized for each email activity, including not tracked, opened or unopened. A First Opened and Last Opened field can also be added to the email message layout. You’ll also see a warning if an email has bounced with an added call to action to update it. That’s a lot of new information to gain about your outgoing emails that was not accessible previously!
There you have it. Be the updates simple user interface tweaks, search capabilities or enhanced tracking, this list is just a small slice of the many updates provided in the Winter ’19 release. Be sure to check out the full Winter ’19 Release Notes and the roadmap for a full picture of this edition’s updates.
Are there additional Winter ’18 Lightning features that you think other nonprofits should know about? Feel free to leave your tips and tricks in the comments below.
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