This morning I was in Salesforce creating some new Dashboard views. Lately, I’ve become addicted to the Dashboard. I’m having so much fun creating all different ways of looking at our data.
Warning…the rest of this post won’t make a lot of sense unless you’re familiar with Salesforce.
In the process of creating a dashboard component, I realized that about 150 donations this fiscal year were not allocated to the right fund (a custom field on our opportunities/donation object).
We use the Opportunity Contact Role object to link individuals to donations. I also found a bunch of donations (200 give or take) where the contact role was properly set to “Donor” but the Primary flag was not checked. Without that primary flag, any report that looks for “Primary Contact” (so a report run on Donations alone without the contact role object) would not find an individual name attached to the donation. It’s a bit of a bother to use both the primary flag and set that primary donor to “Donor” but it works well when we do.
Without CRMFusion’s Demand Tools, my choices to correct these problems would have been:
- Individually edit each donation record in the browser. Ugh. No. Way.
- Use the Salesforce provided data loader to download all the donation records, fix the fields using Excel and re-upload the corrections. Do able. But no.
The reality? In Demand Tools I used the “Mass Change” module to:
Find the opportunity records where the donation name contains the fund and change the “Fund” field to the correct value. We have strict naming rules on our donation records so every donation to that fund had it in the name. Easy.
Find all opportunity contact role records where Primary = false and Role = donor and change them so Primary = true.
Each change literally took 30 seconds to effect hundreds of records, and you get a restore file in case you make a mistake.
When I’ve attended nonprofit Salesforce user group meetings, I’m always surprised at the number of organizations that don’t know about this great tool…or the fact that the company matches the Salesforce nonprofit grant!
It’s a Windows-only desktop application, but it runs just fine in VMWare Fusion or Parallels.
Judi Sohn 
2 responses to “Much love for CRMFusion”
Thanks for this write-up – our implementor and our local NPower Salesforce guru have both recommended Demand Tools, but this is a great use case scenario.
How is it licensed with the grant match? Does one need to license it for the number of active licenses that you have in the instance, or do you only need one license if the actual application is being used only by one user (the administrator)?
Even easier than that, Thomas. Download and start using the demo and then just drop them an email and let them know you’re a nonprofit with the SF grant. They’ll activate your account for 1000 users. Yes, that’s right, 1000 users. In other words, as many folks in your organization can use it as you want/need. Although at C3, I’m the only one who uses it.