Best Practices Archives

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As an organization we like to provide as much useful and relevant information to the nonprofit community we serve. If you frequent our blog you will notice we provide information on every topic we can think of. Anything that we think the nonprofit community will find helpful you can bet we will do our best to provide it through our content. It just so happens that when the blogging hat lands on my head we are usually near the annual “event” known as Dreamforce. Here are a few tips and tricks to make your Dreamforce experience exceptional.

June 9, 2015

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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.

May 26, 2015

Best Practices

At Cloud for Good, we have our own version of what is called a M & M Conference in the healthcare industry (Morbidity and Mortality Conference- a tradition where physicians and nurses from within their specialty (such as pediatrics) will meet – confidentially and very respectfully – to discuss cases in which the patients had a very serious or sometimes fatal outcome.) but we call ours “Post-Project Evaluations.” We like to think of it as a “postpartum” discussion (meaning the “baby” – your project – has been delivered). After a project has been completed, we meet as a team to discuss the outcomes. Everyone associated with the project, which includes the Account Executive, Consultant(s), Project Manager, and management, attends the meeting.

April 28, 2015

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As a solo administrator, you’re a lone wolf, but it’s a big, dangerous world out there. The time to get smarter about managing your organization’s data has arrived. Here are a few tips to get you started.

April 21, 2015

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As your organization grows and evolves, so too do the influences on your Salesforce organization such as change of staff for administration, change of leadership within the organization, change of business processes, change of customers and/or partners and changes in technology. Each of these influences can impact the growth and evolution of your Salesforce organization in very subtle and gradual ways, but more often than not, the impact is in very rapid and hastened ways that can harm your Salesforce story.

April 14, 2015

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Salesforce fields are so important to a successful implementation, yet you may completely forget to really think critically about these “building blocks” of your CRM. A good analogy is this awesome lego model of the University of Colorado (your entire Salesforce instance) and an individual lego piece (one field). Miss a few fields? The history building may fall to pieces if you’re not careful. Fields organize and display your data and prompt your users to input the right data in the right spot.

April 9, 2015

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Nothing sinks a new implementation faster than bad data. Users will quickly lose faith in the tool as well as those leading the implementation effort if incomplete, incorrect, or irrelevant data is present.
Read more about data best practices.

April 7, 2015

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Visual Flows are a powerful tool for any administrator on the Salesforce platform. With a drag and drop interface and a suite of possible actions, Visual Flows can let you level up in system automation without having to write a single line of code (and if you’re comfortable with a bit of Visualforce, you can take them even further). With the powers of Visual Flows and the new features that Salesforce rolled out in Winter ’15, there’s plenty of reasons to implement Visual Flows as part of your business processes. In this blog post, I’ll explore another way to extend your Visual Flows by using Custom Settings.

March 31, 2015

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What are your Salesforce Spring Resolutions? Haven’t had time to put them together yet? Not to worry, the Cloud for Good team is here to help. We’ve put together a list of our top 10 resolutions for nonprofit Salesforce administrators. Let us know what we’re missing!

March 24, 2015

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Best Practices