Tag Archive | Salesforce

A Way to Track Membership Dates in Salesforce using Cross-Object Workflow

Mar1

I have a confession. One of my fears when I left Fight Colorectal Cancer to join Convio is that I would lose my hands-on experience in Salesforce. That I would get too much distance from the day-to-day of actually using Salesforce/Common Ground at an organization. Crazy. Truth is, every day I’m faced with a new and interesting challenge to solve.

Our application, Common Ground, doesn’t have any membership functionality (yet). So when an organization wants to track membership, they need to either install another 3rd party app or add custom functionality to their Salesforce instance. Recently two different organizations wanted to track on a contact/account records the date when membership will expire based on when a membership payment was last received. The first wanted the date to be exactly one year later, the other wanted the date to be the last day of the month a year later.

In both cases, I didn’t want to advise creating any new custom objects or record types since it would make it harder for our team to provide support later. I came up with a rather simple solution that uses the brand new in Salesforce Spring ’12 cross-object workflow field update feature and just a couple of custom fields.

Start with a custom date field on the account object (ex: Membership Expiration) and a custom formula date field on the Contact that simply pulls the value from the account custom field.

We will use a cross-object workflow field update to fill in the field on the account based on the close date of an opportunity, which will then automatically be duplicated on all contacts in the account. Lost you yet? Don’t worry, it’s easier than it may sound.

Rather than create a new record type, I just added a new picklist value to the Common Ground Transaction Type field to indicate that it’s a Membership payment. We just need something in the opportunity to differentiate a membership payment from other gifts since we only want our workflow rule to fire for membership payments.

Now, the workflow rule. In this sample case, the rule will fire when the Transaction Type equals Membership and will be evaluated when the record is created or edited and didn’t meet the criteria before.

Now the fun part. Set a Field Update and tell it to update the custom date field you created on the Account. New in Spring ’12!

Select the custom date field you already created, and have it fill in a formula to set the date. In this case, this will calculate the last day of the month a year later.

DATE(YEAR(CloseDate)+1,MONTH(CloseDate)+1,1)-1

At first I was figuring out which months had 30, 31 or 28 days and figuring out how to account for leap years, etc. Then it dawned on me…just set it to the first day of the following month and then roll back a day. Tada! I love when the tricky problems are solved by simple solutions.

If you want the date to be exactly a year later, then use:

DATE(YEAR(CloseDate)+1,MONTH(CloseDate),DAY(CloseDate))

And there you have it. Update a date field from opportunity to account to contact with a single workflow rule and a couple of custom fields! (The Last Membership date field below is just a roll-up summary field)

First month on the new job

Jan29

Back in September, as I posted that I was leaving Fight Colorectal Cancer to join Convio, I had a picture in my head of what my new job would be like. I’m happy to say that the reality is turning out to be better than I was imagining back then. I love my job. I love the people I’m working with now just as much as I did before. I don’t love sitting on a Windows PC all day, but I’m getting used to it. Outlook 2007 isn’t that bad.

First, let’s move the elephant aside. The people directly responsible for hiring me had no idea when they hired me. Everyone except for the folks at the very top found out on the same day, which was 2 weeks after I started. I have no idea what it means or how it will shake out. I can’t talk about it. I’ll delete any comment that even mentions it (reread the sentence that begins with “I can’t talk…”). From now until I’m told otherwise, it’s business as usual so moving on…

I was originally hired last year for the role/title of Senior Implementation Specialist on the Common Ground Programs team. After spending time with my Manager and flushing it all out, we agreed that the title didn’t quite fit. “Implementation” implies that I’ll only be working with Common Ground clients when they’re first getting started, and that couldn’t be further from reality.

Most clients don’t approach Common Ground the way I did at Fight Colorectal Cancer: knowing Salesforce and its ecosystem first. Most clients buy Common Ground as a stand-alone product that just happens to run on the Salesforce platform. It’s like getting this big, new house with all these empty rooms. Convio has put all its attention into the kitchen and bathrooms and added a heavily customized bedroom or two on to the garage. Folks can live quite comfortably that way. But look at all they’re missing out if they never touch the den, living room or the extra bedrooms on the 2nd floor? If they know nothing about the ground their house is built on? That’s where I come in. I look for the pain points (and opportunities) that clients are having on the Salesforce platform and help alleviate them. Not consulting, although I do handle a few support tickets and am working on some projects with clients directly, but systemically so it benefits the most clients at one time. It’s a bit of training, a bit of documentation, a bit of reworking processes, a bit of liaison and bridge-building internally and externally.

I still get to play a role in the larger Salesforce/nonprofit community. The big difference is that instead of bringing knowledge and connection back to one organization, I’m bringing it back to all organizations on Common Ground.

My title now? Senior Client Success Specialist, Common Ground. Much better.

Early first impressions of Salesforce Spring ’12

Dec17

Disclaimer: I am a Salesforce MVP and a soon-to-be employee of Convio, a Salesforce partner. Even though I have some insider knowledge through the Salesforce MVP program, I am not using any of that information in this post. The critical opinions and speculation I express below are entirely my own based solely on own experience.

It’s not even winter yet and we can poke around and see what’s coming in Salesforce’s next release, Spring ’12. I got my pre-release org yesterday and spent a few minutes exploring it. At this point, we’re flying a bit blind since the “Discover Spring ’12″ link in the corner leads to a “not found” page.

The newly revamped Salesforce Ideas is a good place to begin to explore what’s new. It has tagged ideas that are “Coming in the next release.” These are user-submitted and voted up ideas. Some are huge. And disappointing. Note that not all new things in Spring ’12 come from the Idea Exchange. There are some other things I’ve noticed right away which I’ll get to at the end.

Update: Thanks to @aognenoff for pointing out that the release notes are in the Help & Training section. Sure enough.

Continue reading →

Salesforce, Dreamforce & Nonprofits: It always comes back to the data model

Sep5

I’m back from Dreamforce 2011, trying to process everything I saw and learned.

On a personal level, this was the best Dreamforce yet. I was honored to be selected as a Salesforce MVP last March. This gave me some Dreamforce perks starting with a fantastic MVP-only Introduction to Object Oriented Programming class on Monday before the conference began.

This class was a reduced version of the full 5-day course. I’ve always had a fear of learning Apex/code. I’m not as adverse to it now. The class was structured with lessons, followed by 20 minutes or so to complete an exercise. Unlike the hands-on sessions at Dreamforce itself, the solutions weren’t handed out step-by-step like a recipe. You were expected to use what was taught to write some basic, simple lines of code that when executed didn’t produce errors and showed the desired result. I surprised myself at how quickly I picked up the concepts. During one lesson, not only did I get working code but I did it in a way that the instructor said was “elegant.” Yay me! I never want to be a developer. I just want to understand enough Apex to do simple tasks and recognize when and why something is not behaving correctly. This class was a step in the right direction and I highly encourage folks to check it out next year.

Dreamforce can be a circus. So much going on at one time. So many people (45,000 give or take this year). The Salesforce Foundation has continually struggled with how to make Dreamforce meaningful for the nonprofits who attend. This year, the Nonprofit/Foundation sessions and exhibitors were all on the lower level of the nearby Marriott Marquis. If this was my first Dreamforce, I would probably think it was fabulous idea. For me attending my 4th Dreamforce, I was disappointed that it felt a little second class.

I enjoyed presenting on Tuesday morning on the topic of Nonprofits & the AppExchange. I think it went well considering how much we rattled off in an hour without using a lot of visuals or demos.

The Salesforce Nonprofit community has become a bit fractured in the past few years. When I started in 2006, there was essentially one nonprofit experience on Salesforce. A nonprofit either used the nonprofit template or they went off on their own to custom development on the basic Enterprise edition. Now, I’ve been told that approximately 40% of active Salesforce nonprofits are using the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP). That means that approximately 60% are using other applications such as Convio Common Ground or Luminate, the old template, Affinaquest, Outreach Suite or any number of combinations. It’s no longer variations on a single theme. Each direction is very different, using a different data model (see below for lots more on that) and approach. As a result of all that diversity among nonprofits, the nonprofit track sessions at Dreamforce tend to be high level and program/strategy-driven. I’d love to see sessions that take deeper dives into not just what nonprofits are doing on Salesforce, but exactly how they’re doing it. It’s hard for me to relate to case studies without understanding a bit more about what happened behind the curtain. Maybe that’s just me.

So how is it always about the data model?

Follow along with me. Salesforce was originally just a business-to-business tool. A company sales person connected with an individual at another company in order to close a deal with the company. The relationship wasn’t about the individual. If the person at the company left, the deal would remain with the company. The account is, and remains, the center of the Salesforce universe. Nonprofits typically work in a mixed environment where it has a relationship with companies, but often the relationship is solely with an individual having nothing to do with where they work.

I strongly believe that if you are going to be successful on Salesforce you must understand and appreciate the Account/Contact relationship. It doesn’t matter which application you use, or how your implementation partner has configured your customizations. I happen to think the Account/Contact model makes perfect sense, but I know it’s frustrating for new nonprofits on the platform who don’t understand why they have what they think are two records with the same information.

You also have to appreciate the notion of account ownership. A salesperson in a business doesn’t typically have access to all the accounts and deals in the business. A salesperson builds a relationship with the individual at the company they are trying to woo. A nonprofit typically has a very different ownership/sharing model. A development director wants access to all individuals to target his/her fundraising efforts. Office staff batch enters donations where that person then technically “owns” those opportunities because they created the account & contact, but they aren’t directly responsible for the “deal” or its sales process. A nonprofit Salesforce administrator has to learn to approach sharing rules with a very different mindset than their commercial counterparts. Frankly, I’d love to see a Dreamforce nonprofit track session targeted to administrators specifically on sharing models and the implications of different decisions. It’s complex and widely misunderstood. I’ve seen too many nonprofits just make everyone an Adminstrator or turn everything to “Modify All” rather than really understand what it all means.

Now Salesforce comes along with their big Social strategy. The opening day keynote was all about the Social Enterprise. The idea is that a salesperson can use social media to get to the know the individuals who make decisions about deals. They can use social media to monitor what is being said about their company and provide direct support. I think the new Chatter Now and Chatter Custom Groups will be welcome additions to a nonprofit’s Salesforce org. Before, you could only use Chatter to collaborate with people who shared your email address domain. Now you can bring in outside contacts to Chatter. So that means in-Salesforce collaboration with Board members, or key volunteers, or your organization’s largest donors. Lots of possibilities.

Unfortunately, once again I think nonprofits need to be prepared to flip the data model around. We’ve already successfully flipped around the salesperson-connects-to-organization-through-a-contact model before social media was part of the picture. Wrap your head around this: the Salesforce social enterprise sales model is about a salesperson’s one-to-one relationship with the key contacts at a business. Not organization-to-contact unless it’s about service/support or brand monitoring. How is that a challenge? Think about it. At a nonprofit, do we really care that the development staff member who batch entered those donations so they’re now the “owner” of the account is connected on Facebook to the donor? Maybe. Probably not. A nonprofit cares about how the donor is connected to the organization and those people who are influential to the organization’s mission, staff or not. Are they fans of our Facebook page? How are they connected to other key donors? Are they friends with people who are influential about our issues?

The Salesforce social enterprise push will be wonderful for development directors who want to connect to foundations and corporate sponsors. That most typically aligns with the standard Salesforce Account/Contact model. I don’t see the new social media features as they are being demo’ed as being particularly valuable to the nonprofit using the Starter Pack to engage as an organization with individual donors. I think Radian6 will be very interesting for nonprofits, provided the organization can afford it. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet.

Hopefully, the amazing developers, vendors and partners in our nonprofit community will create applications and integrations that close those gaps just as they did before. I can’t wait.

An update on my quest for project management bliss

Jul11

Over a year ago, I wrote a post expressing my frustration in evaluating project management apps for my organization.

I’ve been wanting to write a follow-up post for a while. I had hoped I could write something glowing about the tool we carefully chose.

Not quite.

Continue reading →

Setting up an easy welcome series in Salesforce

Apr28

Now that our rebranding is off the ground, we've finally implemented something in Salesforce I've wanted to do for a long time…a welcome series of emails to new contacts.

Until recently, when someone registered through our website without donating or taking action, they got very little initial feedback from us. They just started hearing from us when we sent out email enewsletters, appeals or action alerts. Our goal is to build relationships with our constituents, not to build lists. We have a lot of information on our website that may be harder for a new visitor to find. We have services they may be interested in and not know about.

Fight_colorectal_cancer-4

Our strategy: We want to send new non-donor contacts a series of 3 short emails. One a general welcome, one highlighting our research work, one highlighting our advocacy work. Spaced a week apart.

Using email templates and workflow rules, this is super easy to set up in Salesforce. I'm surprised how many nonprofits I talk to using Salesforce don't realize how easy this is. Just click and go. Here's how (note: this tutorial assumes that you have administration rights in Salesforce for all objects mentioned):

1. Set up your email templates

Okay, a little programming knowledge may be needed. If you have never designed an HTML email before, then stop and review this fantastic presentation from Sean Powell and Shana Masterson at #NTC11 on the right way to deal with code for email. Do it now. I'll wait.

Now that you know how to code email, create the HTML. I prefer to do this in Adobe Dreamweaver. If it's new code that's never been emailed before, I highly recommend you use Email on Acid to test first. Make sure that what looks good in your email application looks right in all the others. I've tried a number of email testing services. Email on Acid is by far my favorite and very reasonably priced.

After the email template passes browser tests, you can paste it into Salesforce. Setup -> Administration Setup -> Communication Templates -> Email Templates. 

Personalize to taste. Truth be told, it takes me more time to make the text version look good than it does to deal with the HTML.

Custom_email_template_welcome_

Do one for each of the emails you plan to send. The emails we've written/designed are all pretty short and light, very focused on a patient/general public audience. Each have a bit of a low-pressure call-to-action and of course, a donate link at the bottom.

2. Add contact fields for monitoring

Unfortunately, unlike other email sent on-the-fly through Salesforce, there's no activity record left on contact records when a workflow rule sends an email. So I created 3 date fields on the contact record to show that the welcome email was sent. The fields will be automatically updated by the workflow rule. This will also help us see if they do engage with us more (donate, call, take action, etc.) and correlate that to the communications we've sent.

Welcome_contact_fields

3. Create Workflow Rules with time triggers

Here's where the fun begins.

Setup -> Create -> Workflow Rules & Approval -> Workflow Rules

First, define the criteria that will trigger the email. Since this is based new contacts and not a change in a field value, I have it set to only evaluate when the contact is created. 

For us, the criteria is based on the following:
  1. Lead Source: when a contact is converted from a lead (web-to-lead form from the website), the lead source is automatically inserted on the contact. So the rule first looks for one of the appropriate lead sources to show that it came from the website.
  2. Donor Status: Lifetime Hard Credit Count (a Convio Common Ground field) = null covers that since the communication wasn't aimed at donors.
  3. I have criteria that also makes sure the email field exists and that it's opt-in. I have a feeling the rule would just fail otherwise, but it didn't hurt to throw it in.
Then it's just a matter of setting the rule to do what needs to be done. Update the date fields by using a formula that simply sets those fields to TODAY(). All clicks, no code.

Time_triggers-1

It's that easy.

Additional Notes

Think about who you want the email to come from. I decided to have the emails come from the organization's main email account rather than me:

From_address

To change/setup organization-wide addresses, Setup -> Administration Setup -> Email Administration -> Organization-wide Addresses.

You may want to monitor your time-based workflows to make sure the future emails are going to go out as you expect, especially when the workflow rules first start. To do that, visit Setup -> Administration Setup -> Monitoring -> Time-Based Workflow. Just hit "Search" to show all scheduled outgoing emails.

Are you using workflow rules in Salesforce to better communicate with your constituents? Would love to hear about it!

Ridiculously easy YTD comparison reports in Salesforce

Jan2

Happy New Year!

Ever struggle with a problem for months, if not years, and then when the solution comes it’s so painfully simple that you have a bruise on the side of your head from where you keep slapping yourself?

The problem: 

Salesforce reporting is great when you want to look at the whole of a period of time. This fiscal year. Last month. Last year. Yesterday. 12/25/2010. It can also compare. This year vs last year. This month vs last month. Yesterday vs today.

What it doesn’t do out of the box is look at a fraction of a duration compared to the same fraction in a previous time period. April-May 2010 vs April-May 2009. December 31st this year vs December 31 last year. This fiscal year up to this date vs last fiscal year up to the same date last year.

We have our go-to report that gives us a picture of all income in a nice matrix separated by fiscal year over a 3 year period. Every organization tracks different types of income. This is just what we track.

Matrix

The period of time is set by the interval on the report.

Interval

There is no way out of the box in reporting to compare 7/1/2008-12/31/2008 vs 7/1/2009-12/31/2009 vs. 7/1/2010-12/31/2010. So when we run this report we see the results of the entire fiscal year 2009 and 2010 and only up to where we are now in 2011. When we want to see how we’re tracking vs the same point in previous years, we end up running new reports with new Time Frames and then comparing. 

Ugh. 

I’ve Googled for a better answer. Asked around in Dreamforce and at user group meetings. I even asked in the Challenge Us group in the Dreamforce app.

The answers I received were usually something around rollup summary fields. Essentially I was advised to create a rollup summary field that has the date ranges I want and then report on that field. You can’t do relative fields in rollup summary fields, so instead of a simple TODAY() formula it would have to involve the actual date baked in to the formula. Need a new report tomorrow, then edit the field with tomorrow’s date.

Makes sense, but not practical. I needed a solution that any user who knows how to edit and run reports can use and modify as needed. I am the only one who can edit formula fields, with good reason.

The stupidly easy solution:

It does involve formula fields, but the difference is it’s set once and it’s done. No need to edit the field later when a report is run.

First field you’ll need is a formula number field on Opportunities. I called it “Close Month.” Note: there is already a Close Month field in reports, but that is only there for groupings. You can’t actually pull a number from it. If you think that will be confusing for users, name yours something else.

The formula: MONTH(CloseDate)

That’s it. This will just return the month as a whole number. So a donation with a close date of January 23rd will return 1 in this field. A donation on March 5th will return 3, and so on.  Make the field visible on profiles but don’t add it to layouts.

The second field is also a formula number field called “Close Day.” I think you can guess what the formula is.

Yup: DAY(CloseDate)

So that January 23rd donation will return 23 to this field, that March 5th donation will return 5. 

Then it’s a simple matter of using filter criteria in the report around those new formula fields.

Keep the Time Frame set to the same overall duration (in this case, Current and Previous 2 FY) but then filter to only show the months (or days) that you want to compare.

For example, this is the filter that compares 7/1-12/31 over the current and previous 2 years:

Closemonthcompare

Note: In Salesforce filters a comma in a filter means OR.

You could set 2 filters, one that says Close Month greater or equal than 7 and another that says Close Month less than or equal 12. But I thought it would be easier for folks to edit in one line. 

December 31st is a big day for nonprofits. Here’s the filter I created on the exact same matrix report to show us online (credit card) donations from individuals (Households) this year compared to the past 2 years for that single day:

Dec31comparie

The possibilities are endless. And best yet, it’s something users can readily use without needing their administrator to do for them each time.

If there’s an easier way to do this, I can’t imagine what it could be.

Thoughts on Chatter while the Kool-Aid flows at Dreamforce

Dec8

It’s the beginning of Day 2 at Dreamforce, the gigantic Salesforce user conference in San Francisco. Instead of joining 15,000 or so folks for the second morning keynote, I’m sitting in my hotel room watching the keynote stream on my laptop. I didn’t get much out of yesterday’s keynote. Very much “preaching to the cloud” and not a lot of meat for non-developer, non-sales folks like me. 

As the subject line says, I want to focus in this blog post on Chatter. If you are anywhere in the Salesforce orbit, for the last year Salesforce has been all about Chatter. Salesforce employees and evangelists would have you believe that Chatter can directly bring about world peace. I wish they were as excited about rollup summaries for lookup fields.

If you’re interested in Salesforce stuff and you just landed from your planet, Chatter is like Facebook in your corporate CRM/database. You can post status updates, leave comments on other people’s profile (think: wall). Activities and events within data objects can automatically leave Chatter posts. 

Chatteer

I wasn’t enthused about Chatter from the start. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great for other organizations. If an org has 5,000 employees, Chatter is a fantastic way for folks from one side of the building to keep up with what’s happening on the other side. If a company is trying to land that $500K deal, Chatter can help the sales rep gather intelligence to make it happen. The possibilities are endless. I get that. But I’m not looking for possibilities, I’m looking for solutions.

I turned Chatter on at Colorectal Cancer Coalition months ago, and the reaction from my colleagues was one big disinterested shrug. No one uses it. And I’m not pushing it until I figure out for myself exactly which, if any, pain this relieves. From time to time I will pull up a user profile to monitor what folks are doing in Salesforce since I have feeds turned on for Accounts and Opportunities, but that’s about it.

We have a couple of email listservs on Google Groups of our top-tier advocates that we’ve been interested in migrating to an online community. It had been suggested that Chatter might be a good solution, now that Salesforce is offering Chatter Free and will be introducing Chatter.com for broader deployment next year. These new offerings bring Chatter outside an org without additional cost. 

A few months ago, Salesforce built a Dreamforce app for attendees. There’s a big Chatter component to it. Being the type that doesn’t need to be asked twice to be social online, and given that I want to get a handle on what Chatter is really like, I dove in. I followed people. I left status updates. I posted on-topic comments in Groups and posted to profiles. I got the mobile app. In fact, the app includes “Chattalytics” which shows the top 50 influencers out of 15,000 or so folks in the Dreamforce app. Look who’s currently sitting at #34. 

Influencer

So I have a much better picture of Chatter than I did before.

My thoughts, keeping in mind that Salesforce is evolving this frequently:

It’s fun. Think about what you love about Twitter or Facebook, and it’s mostly all here. It’s real-time and easy and personal. There are folks who have come up to meet me here at Dreamforce that I “met” first in Chatter. I’m definitely having a better experience at Dreamforce this year thanks to Chatter. I can see how our top volunteers can use this to connect and collaborate with each other. Unfortunately, that’s where my praise ends. For now.

It’s a fire hose. Once you follow someone, you get everything in your feed. Yes, there are filters on the sidebar which help somewhat. If I follow John Smith, I will get on my feed every post that anyone else leaves on John Smith’s profile, regardless of whether I follow those folks or not. Imagine if you follow a celebrity on Twitter and your feed contains every @mention sent about him/her. Yikes.

It’s awkward to navigate. While everything flows to the home feed, there’s only room for maybe 3 updates at a time on the screen regardless of browser size or monitor resolution. I have a large monitor at home, but my main chatter feed doesn’t expand to fill my browser window. It doesn’t auto-update. I have to keep clicking “Show Older” and I haven’t figured out how to search for a specific update that appeared on my profile at some point. I find myself clicking between “Home” “Profile” “Chatter” and “Groups,” all which look similar but have different content. I’m very comfortable in these interfaces. But in Chatter I often find myself turned around. There are desktop and mobile Chatter tools that probably make this a bit easier. The UI needs serious attention before I would dream of rolling this out beyond our staffers.

It’s all or nothing. Chatter is either on or off. If you enable email notifications for follow up comments (on by default), you get bombarded with email messages on every post you leave a comment. There are some updates from some people that I want to know in email if there’s follow up. There are other updates that I highly regret that I posted anything in the first place. I want more granular control as both an administrator and an end user.

It’s too branded to Salesforce. Yes, we can stick a logo in the upper left hand corner. But if I’m going to build a home for our active volunteers to collaborate with each other around our cause, it has to be entirely from/about us. No Salesforce language at the bottom of every email. We need our own colors and fonts. We’ll see what happens when Chatter.com is fully up and running next year, but this might be a deal-breaker for me in rolling this out to our volunteers.

It needs to get over itself and be where the people are. As much as I enjoy the Dreamforce app, it’s yet another username and login I have to manage. For folks who live in their Salesforce orgs, it’s probably fine. But if this is going to go viral, it has to be baked in to where folks are already communicating. And it has to be easy for me, as a non-coding admin, to deploy this for my org where the people are (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) without limiting them to just that network. Folks who care about us also care about 1000 other things and other organizations. They aren’t just on Facebook, or just on Twitter. But if they’re there, we want to be there too without dividing ourselves into separate networks. We can make a white-label silo social network right now. We don’t need Chatter for that.

I’m looking forward to revisiting this post over the next year or so to see how my opinions evolve. What do you think? What about the Chatter Kool-Aid am I still missing?

My top 5 Salesforce/Common Ground administrator tips (as presented at the Convio Summit)

Oct29

I just got back from 3 fabulous days in Baltimore at the Convio Summit user conference.

This year, there were enough nonprofit organizations already on Common Ground to warrant a session or two aimed at users, rather than just to sell existing Convio clients to the application as was found at previous Summits. 

I am so excited about the direction Convio is taking with Common Ground. They understand what nonprofits of all shapes and sizes need and want in a database, and I think they're making really intelligent decisions about how to implement it in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Victoria Miller from Trisomy 18 Foundation and I presented a session on Tuesday afternoon we called Getting Maximum Bang out of Your Common Ground Bucks. 

Victoria and I designed the session together, and I presented the content for most of it. Trisomy 18 Foundation is a very small organization that looks much larger than it is, mostly thanks to Victoria's efforts. She's an amazing woman who was a pleasure to work with. Our session was aimed squarely at the nonprofit recently launched on Common Ground, which at this point is most folks currently on Common Ground. Our persona for the attendee in our session: The implementation partner just left, and now the nonprofit is trying to live with this tool day-to-day. 

I wanted to show them just how easy it is to do little things that make a big difference, so they could save their consultant resources for the big stuff. And we did as much as we could live, using a vanilla demo version of Common Ground, to show attendees exactly where and how to do what I was talking about. I figured that at 4:15 pm folks have had enough PowerPoint for the day. I'd say half the room fit our target perfectly, which helped make the session successful. I was grateful the other half were consultants or Convio employees who also positively participated in the discussion, which was more of an open exchange than a lecture. Victoria and I even demonstrated how you can take an everyday engagement strategy and turn it into a process in Common Ground. The feedback I got after the session was incredible, and I enjoyed every second of it. 

Part of my presentation was a slide that I framed as "Judi's top 5 things every Common Ground administrator should know or do that your implementation partner or Convio may have forgotten to tell you." I was asked afterwards to post this content on the private Convio Common Ground community forum, which I will do. But I thought it might make a good post here too. Nothing huge or mind-blowing here. The "if I knew then…" stuff that a seasoned Salesforce admin will think is no-brainer…but this wasn't a session for seasoned Salesforce admins, and I'm mostly self-taught in this world.

Please feel free to add your own tips in the comments.

1. Turn on the Weekly Backup

Setup -> Administration Setup -> Data Management -> Data Export

Schedule_data_export_salesforc

There are other tools for backing up Salesforce data that are far more robust. But this is simple, included with Salesforce, and doesn't require special software to read/use the data. You get an email once a week with a link to download a .zip file. That file is only available for 48 hours. When decompressed, the folder is a .csv of every object in the Salesforce instance. You can get this export weekly or monthly. If you want a backup more frequently than that, you'll have to use another tool.

In addition to all the standard best practice reasons for having a backup, I sometimes use these spreadsheets to help me understand the data that's in our Salesforce. I find it's much easier to open an object file .csv in Excel and figure out/remind myself what requires a Salesforce ID, what's a checkbox, etc. than to poke around in the interface or export on demand.

2. Get Users to Grant Administrator Access

Ask your users to visit Setup -> My Personal Information -> Grant Administrator Access and put in a date some time in the future that you don't have to worry about it for a few years. Then you can login as them from the Manage Users section:

Active_users_salesforce

Why would you want to do this? No, administrators don't want to peek at anyone's data. We don't care. I logged in as Carlea just yesterday as she was getting an error in an application that I had to figure out whether it was a problem with her account or her computer/browser. I couldn't recreate the error, so it was an issue on her computer. Nice time saver. I also will log in as a user in order to build my tutorials, as my administrator view can sometimes be very different and I want my screenshot-based lessons to show what they see. Finally, on some objects we have some semi-complex sharing rules to make sure certain users can edit records even if they don't own them, and logging in as a user helps me make sure that everything is where it should be.

3. Get DemandTools

When in doubt, "use DemandTools" is the answer to almost any question when it comes to massaging data in Salesforce. Best of all, the wonderful and generous folks at CRM Fusion match the Salesforce Foundation grant, so this tool is freely available to nonprofit organizations who qualify for the Salesforce grant. As a Mac user, this is the reason why I have a VMWare Fusion virtual machine so I can run Windows XP.

Here's a little demo video I found if you're not familiar with it:

4. Surf the AppExchange

Almost seemed too obvious, until I talked to new Common Ground clients who had no clue that either 1. the AppExchange existed or 2. that they could use it to get apps to run right alongside Common Ground. 

I often have to explain that Common Ground itself is on the AppExchange and the process for installing nearly any app is the same as it is to upgrade Common Ground (which folks were already familiar). Pay special attention to the free and discounted for nonprofits sections.

5. Join NPSF

Bit of a shameless plug as I've been co-moderator of the Nonprofit Salesforce Practitioners listserv for a couple of years now. As of this moment there are 1134 members representing nonprofits, consultants, vendors – even a few Salesforce.com employees. The only thing we all have in common is that it's Salesforce and nonprofits. It's a great place learn about new apps or to figure out a new way to tackle an old problem that's still relevant to nonprofits but outside of the Common Ground application.

What did I miss?

What’s new and cool in Convio Common Ground version 3

Sep25

It’s been a little over a year since I fully deployed Convio Common Ground at the Colorectal Cancer Coalition. Still no regrets. It’s a great fit for us.

A few months ago, we started using Common Ground’s GL Export utility to align Salesforce/Common Ground data with QuickBooks. Finally.

Donation_posting_manager_sales

I don’t have the resources to hire anyone or purchase a tool to automate a sync between Salesforce/Common Ground and Quickbooks, so it’s a manual download file/upload into QuickBooks process for now. But it’s not difficult to manage…once we got everything mapped correctly, that is. We only move data from Common Ground to QuickBooks. Not the other way around. Common Ground’s utility makes it possible by marking and locking posted donations. Duplications can’t happen. A donation can’t be edited after-the-fact in Common Ground once posted, which would throw everything off. 

Posteddonation

Only an administrator can reverse a donation, where it can be backed out of QuickBooks and then re-posted correctly. Here’s what you get when you try to edit on a posted transaction in Common Ground.

Donationerror

Syncing Common Ground to QuickBooks began for us in late June, and I have no idea how we managed before. What used to be hours and hours a month of my time meticulously reconciling double-entered transactions is now about 10-15 minutes of time in Common Ground to run the utility. What used to be hours and hours and hours and hours of time on our office manager’s part of double entry and reconciling is down to just entry in Common Ground, imports into QuickBooks and then batching deposits.

But that’s kind of old news in Common Ground. On to the new…Common Ground 3, which was released to users this past week. 

From an administrator’s perspective, this was the easiest upgrade yet. You simply install the package as you would any other from the AppExchange. Then you run an upgrade utility which does the rest. Last time, you then had to make a whole bunch of other changes…changing page layouts, adding buttons, resetting this and that. This time, the upgrade utility completed in all of 49 seconds and reported no errors. Afterwards, thanks to new upgrades from Salesforce aimed at developers like Convio, there was minimal configuration. I’ve had a few glitches here and there since (see below). But for the most part it was a smooth process.

Batch gift entry – Here’s the new features added according the release announcement:
  • Add donations of most record types
  • Add stock gifts including assets
  • Create pledges and add pledge installments
  • Associate a donation with an open major gift or pledge
  • Add multiple designations on a gift
  • Select designations and campaigns by typing in the first few characters
  • Include custom donation fields
  • View household data and add/edit contacts in a household
  • Create and edit donation contact roles
  • Search contacts by ID
  • Convert a lead to a contact

Pretty cool, huh? You set up the batch with the fields that you need, including any constants that are consistent across all entries:

 

Batchentry

Then you enter gifts in a single screen at one time.

Batch

Unfortunately, something went a little screwy with our upgrade and while we can successfully enter gifts and commit them, which should create the actual donation transactions…it’s not working. The donations aren’t being created. Which brings me to the next great thing about Convio Common Ground: support. I opened a ticket with Convio and now someone else who knows a lot more than me is digging in code trying to figure out what went wrong while I do the rest of my job. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Duplication management – This is killer. Convio has had a duplication management utility in Common Ground for a while, but I didn’t use it that often. It was slow. It didn’t learn (if you told it that a match wasn’t a dupe, it still pulled up the same match on the next global search). Now it will remember if you mark a match as “Not duplicate.” It’s faster. And if you end up with an empty household account after merging contacts, it will delete the childless account.

You know those Windows 7 commercials…”it was my idea” Convio added a feature here and I think I can say that. I asked Convio a while back if there was a way that I could dedupe right from a contact record. While I do use utilities to search out for duplicates en masse, most of the time I trip across a duplicate during everyday activities. I do a search and 2 identical results come up. Or a staff member points a dupe out to me. I don’t want to wait while a utility searches the entire database and then I have to fish for the one I saw. I just want to quickly dedupe the entry I found and move on.

Now there’s a button on contact records:

Findduplicate

Click it and it will immediately show you potential dupes (in this case, each staff member intentionally has both an individual and staff contact record so I’m using it as an example)

Founddupe

Click “Review” and you’re taken to a screen to finalize the merge. 

Dupesreview

Yes, I still set aside time each month or so (particularly before we do a large mailing) to do mass clean-ups of our data. I typically find very little to clean up…usually it’s combining people with the same address and last name into single households. But I love this new ability to do easy stuff as we catch it. 

Only glitch here is that it refuses to merge two contacts that originally started as leads (now converted). Convio support is looking in to that as well.

Last but not least, Common Ground has made some improvements to their new segmentation features. This was introduced in a previous version of Common Ground, but it works much better now.

Let’s say you want to send communication to everyone in your database who has made a donation (maybe even within a certain dollar range) this calendar year to one of two specific purposes and is an individual (as opposed to a corporate/company contact). You want to be able to email those that can get your communication via email, and if they don’t want email (or haven’t provided an email address) and can get regular mail, send it  via snail mail instead and then track the results as a total campaign.

Without Common Ground, this kind of reporting/campaign can be a pain to set up and manage.

Convio has built out a tool that makes segmenting like this easy, and they keep improving on it. 

Segmenting

You define the parent campaign, then appeals are set up as sub-campaigns, and each sub-campaign/appeal has its segment definitions.

Segmentingcriteria

You can build criteria that’s simple or ridiculously complex. Each segment you build can be assigned a priority, so in the end you’re not sending the same letter to John Smith because he’s a Board Member but then another to him in the same appeal because he’s a donor. His status as a Board Member may mean he gets that letter, even if he qualifies for the other one. The possibilities are endless.

Once you build a segment, you can use it again or edit and move around priorities, then update it which repopulates the campaign members with the new results.

The biggest challenge I have now is that we’re using Campaigns so much for so many different purposes that I’m now having to get more diligent on using record types and campaign member record types to help sort the different uses and we’re using more efficient/accurate page layouts (email recipients, fundraising appeals, donors, webinar attendees, etc.) 

Finally, I’m looking forward to the Convio Summit in Baltimore, October 25-27. This year there should hopefully be many more Common Ground users at the Summit to connect to than in the past. Victoria Miller from the Trisomy 18 Foundation and I are presenting a session on Tuesday afternoon: Getting Maximum Bang out of your Common Ground Bucks. 

 This isn’t going to be a session where we bombard folks with case studies or lots and lots of features and tips. We’re both from small organizations, after all. Instead, Victoria and I are designing a session where folks can take the big, scary world of Salesforce/Common Ground and figure out how to translate an organization’s individual strategy and needs to real-world implementation in Common Ground…without always having to use a developer or consultant. Sure, there are times where you have to call in outside help. I certainly have. But there’s a lot things that Common Ground can do right out of the box in a point & click interface that most new administrators in smaller orgs either don’t know about…are intimidated by…or they’re overwhelmed with the options…or a combination of all of the above. Just because you can do something in Common Ground, doesn’t mean you should. I hope by the end of this session, we can all start to tell the difference. It’s not as scary as it looks. :-)  We want this to be more of an open and active exchange of ideas than a panel-and-their-PowerPoint session.

If you’re going to the Summit, please find me and say hi!