Blog

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

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

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!

May 19, 2015

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.

May 12, 2015

Moves management is the process of moving a prospective donor from cultivation to solicitation. Learn how your Salesforce database can provide an essential backbone for your moves management program.

May 5, 2015

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

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

The #NPForce chat will provide a chance to network and grow your knowledge of how nonprofit organizations are using Salesforce. Join us on April 23rd.

April 15, 2015

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

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

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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