As Champion Sponsors for Nonprofit Dreamin’, we want to convey a round of applause and appreciation to the many members of the event team for volunteering their time & effort to launching this inaugural #Ohana community event. Our morning started bright and early with a welcome keynote by none other than Melissa Hill Dees, NGO Community Group Leader, Dreamforce speaker, Lightning Champion, SFDO Sprinter, and Amplify Board member. The welcome inspired thought leaders to follow through and actualize their dreams, like the Nonprofit Dreamin’ Team did within just 5 months – to put together this wild idea to create and launch a collaborative community event. Kudos to the entire Nonprofit Dreamin’ team!
Sessions kicked off promptly at 9:30 AM – with multiple stages for the audience to pick & choose their track of sessions *Having a hard time picking a session – read our blog on the 5 Sessions we’re excited to see at Nonprofit Dreamin’
Hosting one of the first sessions of the event was Team DemandBlue’s Arturo Ordoqui, for Salesforce Labs All-Stars: 5 Free Tools Your Nonprofits Can Use Today. Presented by the brilliant duo, Lara Kimberly and Skye Tyler, the session was showcased on Salesforce – no PPT, nada. The power of Salesforce Labs drove the conversation in highlighting the five most useful and flexible tools that nonprofits can use with minimal setup and maximum return!
Record Hunter – Allows you to create a custom search and perform batch updates using screen flows! It even works across multiple record types unlike list view updates, plus they are much easier to access the records you need instead of creating and editing a list view. Total time saver and easy to use!
Universal Timeline and Time Warp - Both of these have features that allow you to visualize how related actions land on a, you guessed it, timeline. This is a great tool for looking at an account or contact record and wanting to see not just the emails and call activities, but do they have any cases, donations (closed opportunities), etc. So, you can see how the communication elements align with the related records. Great for visual folks! Which is the right tool – depends on what you need. Universal Timeline has ability to filter the related records more and control how they are displayed so closed cases v open cases are represented differently so that has my vote!
- Allows you to filter for just a subset of related records based on stage or status
- Allows you to exclude older records so only the most current or relevant records appear
- Allows you to add highlights to fields like Opportunity amount to quickly important data.
CMDT Enhanced Related list – When the standard list isn’t enhanced enough, use this tool tha
Some great use cases that were shared included splitting out the related Opportunities from a single list to 3 enhanced lists for Open, Won, and Lost (see image). Another one that was really great was using splitting our Campaign membership based on appeals, events, and volunteer opportunities.
Adding Multiple Related Records Flow template - Flows can be daunting if you’ve never worked with them, but this template makes it really easy to create a screen flow for adding multiple related records more efficiently. The demo for this walked through adding multiple Opportunity Contact Role records to an opportunity. After searching for and selecting your contacts, the flow then looped through each of them so you can quickly and easily assign the role. Definitely a lot faster and easier than going through the usual Add New and going one-by-one.
One attendee commented that this could also be helpful with the Program Management Module when adding multiple Service Delivery records.
Magic Mover - No lightning migration is complete without ditching the old Notes & Attachments related list to the improved and separate Notes and Files related records. But who has time to convert all the existing notes into the new Notes object and move the attachments to Files? This tool does that conversation for you and even allows you to filter to just convert a subset of the notes and attachments.
Demystifying Agile for Nonprofits – presented by Ines Garcia, Author, Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Professional (CSP-SM) and Salesforce MVP. Garcia’s aim was to lead the session as a clarifier for what is Agile, and we spent the next 25 minutes quickly discovering its intricacies. Starting by defining “Agile” as an iterative incremental approach to optimizing predictability and controlling risk. Breaking this down, it becomes a methodology of best practices to get from A to B, the trick is learning the best way. Garcia touched on the agile buzz word – MVP or Minimal Viable Product which is essentially all NGOs goal of reducing waste of their process of system thinking. Being agile in your systems of work means practicing continuous improvement, rapid and flexible response to change. It’s really the revolutionary way to go!
- Market Success
- Better ways of working
- Collaboration
- Employee Satisfaction
- Speed to Market
- Customer Satisfaction
- Agile Mindset
- Adaptive Leadership
Adopting an Agile mindset benefits NGOs greatly by providing them with the tools to:
Learn more agile values & principles from Ines at tiny.cc/getagile
And for information on the DevOps focus for Agile Management – DemandBlue presented our expertise at #DevOpsForce2021 – Watch On Demand here
Challenges for Solo Admins and How to Overcome Them – if you’re in a team of 1, this session was made for you! Mark Jones, #AwesomeAdmin and Trailblazer Community Lead shared his expertise for the top 5 challenges as a solo admin. Let’s dive right in:
Challenge #1: You’re on your own! Being the singular point of contact for anything Salesforce means your responsible for everything, admin and development. This is a heavy weight to bear but Jones’ notes that you’re never truly alone – not when your part of the most engaging and empowering ecosystem that is the #SalesforceOhana. We concur, with all various venues for connections, you are never truly alone with the Ohana by your side! So join in your closest Trailblazer Community Group, expand your network on Twitter, and engage with the many great blogs, YouTube channels for content and connections to your new “colleagues” in the ecosystem.
Challenge #2: You have to do everything! Technical capacity becomes a great stressor for Solo Admins who are expected to be responsible for administration, development and analytics for their organizations. This becomes a major stretch on capacity to accomplish specific tasks, as small one’s pile on top of your bigger tasks. The solution becomes finding ways to manage your time constraints. Jones’ recommends setting aside focused time for the bigger tasks first, seeking volunteers for extra assistance and empowering your end users to harbor more responsibility.
Challenge #3: Overworked, Underpaid? Due to the previous two challenges, it’s very likely that Solo Admins will find themselves overworked and underpaid. Fret not, Jones advises to campaign to be contracted for what you actually work on and to advise your organizations to recruit more teammates to spread the workload.
Challenge #4: We Need Training Too! Jones acknowledges that all Salesforce professionals get stuck form time-to-time but for Solo Admins this feels like hanging off a 40-foot cliff. The solution becomes to build a sturdy, strong foundation for learning & training going forward. This means committing time for your own development, continuing building up your certifications and establishing a good group of contacts to rely on within the Salesforce Ecosystem.
Challenge #5: Lastly, the usual challenges that are faced as an admin, as a Solo Admin you have to still tackle user adoption, data integrity and access to Salesforce but you can make your siloed role easier by adopting tools and apps to help keep track of data, help with accuracy and overall clean up the operational side of things to help you stay focused on keeping your Org in a good place – both technically and from a data standpoint.
All in all, Jones relayed spot-on solutions for Solo Admins to implement – and in case you ever need an extra hand – know that Team DemandBlue has your back!
Be sure to check out Mark Jones’ Salesforce blog for more tips & tricks www.ragamuffinadmin.com
Salesforce’s New Grants Management Solution: Outbound Funds Module – Presented by Maura Hackett, Shari Colson and Nell O’Connell
With the 2020 introduction of Salesforce’s Outbound Funds Module (OFM), a lot of questions arose around the details of this new product for grants management solutions. The team of presenters rallied to provide answers to how NGOs can leverage this new and powerful product. To start OFM is a community-built solution that can run on its own or in parallel with your NPSP and is maintained by Salesforce.org.
In it you’ll find Funding Programs, which record captures the overall details of program, including amount of funds available, due date, etc. also allows for hierarchy of funding programs by years.
- Requirements for letter of intents, agreements, etc.
- Disbursements with ability to relate to General Accounting Units (GAU)
- Can use GAUs to also track the funding source for the program of funds that are coming in and also track debits and credits for the programming
Funding Requests are the application from the organization or individual that tracks the amount requested/awarded, and also captures related records such as:
- Requirements for letter of intents, agreements, etc.
- Disbursements with ability to relate to General Accounting Units (GAU)
- Streamlining of visibility across the organizations.
- Straightforward for team to use and configure, especially alongside inbound funds.
- Provides consistency in process for managing different programs.
- Transparency across the organization.
- Help move away from legacy spreadsheets
- Remove dependency on people
- At an NGO friendly cost/price
Make Screen Flows More User-Friendly with Unofficial SF Resources – Allen Moy, accidental Salesforce admin of over 7 years, tackles the question of how admins can make their SF flows smoother without “official” training. Salesforce Flow is a tool to create user-facing forms that help speed up your data inputs while protecting data integrity.
Moy advises adding UnofficialSF to supercharge your flows with improved user interface functions. In his demo, it was identified that the advantages of extended flow are:
- Allows all items to be displayed at once in a list; with items being deleted automatically moved from the left/right boxes.
- Screen actions mimic the standard functionality of Salesforce multi-select picklists
- Flows within each box keep everything on the screen at once
- Component includes built-in coding to help prevent duplicate records
Check out Moy’s recommended flow sources & learn more
How to Advocate for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Ecosystem – DEI concluded our Day 1 Recap in what was a powerful panel discussion that inspired and empowered the audience to step into action and stand up for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion!
The session started by showcasing several eye-opening statistics of the current demographics of the entire Salesforce ecosystem. Collected from the Open-Source Community Sprint Survey, the results displayed low percentiles in diversity, as shown on left chart. This data has NEVER been collected on a scale like this and it matters greatly to count and visualize the number to the gap – the gap that continues to blatantly occur in gender and race. It’s time to take actionable steps to close the gap!
The conversation moved to a virtual roundtable to make space and amplify voices in our Salesforce ecosystem, actively working towards tackling these challenges of DEI. It was incredible to hear the journeys of these powerful Women in Tech, each showcasing powerful vulnerability and leadership in this space:
Join in and be part of the coalition of Open-Source Commons which provides the space and resources for us all to work toward a better future, together.
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