The day started with Collaboration Conversations to connect peers in the networking nooks to collaborate and brainstorm innovative ideas around one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Team DemandBlue attended sessions on #1 SDG No Poverty and #4 Quality Education. Ideas and conversation flowed as NGOs spent the quick hour hearing and sharing their experiences in fighting the inequalities and seeking guidance and understanding to helping to overcome these global struggles. We thank Nonprofit Dreamin’ for facilitating the space to have these important conversations – if you’re interested in learning more here is a Trailhead Badge dedicated to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Grass Roots Mobile Survey – the Free Offline/Online Mobile App for Nonprofits – We’d equate attending this session with what it must have felt like to have been in the room when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, the attendees at this session will always remember the day they first learned about and saw the Grass Roots Mobile Survey app and experienced another demonstration of the power and collaboration of the Trailblazer Community!
- User authentication using Heroku and connecting that to a single Salesforce User license
- Client Contact Assignment to field staff through a custom junction object
- Multiple Survey Creation (custom object) and use record types to create different forms
- Page layouts for each record type are tied to how the survey is displayed in the mobile app using the metadata
- Allows field staff the ability to collect the data, save, and then click sync when they have a connection.
- Mobile ready app for the phone is available on Android and iOS
While working with Hayden Hall Darjeeling, the team of Trish Perkins, Bhim Raj Mainali and Shun Kosaka saw the overwhelming need for a digital system to collect data from and respond quickly to the women and children they served. With financial constraints limiting licensed solutions, Grass Roots Mobile was built to provide:
The app is available as part of the Salesforce.org Open Source Commons, here.
If you want to help test, market, document, or improve the Grass Roots Mobile Survey app, join the team at the upcoming Open Source Community Sprint, Feb 10 & 11
Exception Dashboards – the key to data your users can trust – presented by Yamile Pacheco Cueva, #AwesomeAdmin. The session addressed how exception reports and dashboards can help user adoption with clean data. Exception Dashboards show what’s missing and helps you fill the gap to get to zero. This matters because data quality means data assurance. Identifying gaps beforehand allows for increase in adoption, eases post migration cleanup, helps you find records without child records by cleaning up your data for overall greater adoption.
- Through Feedback
- Through FieldTrip
- Through Cross Filter
To start identifying, here are Cueva’s three ways to look for missing data:
Having a report built and scheduled periodically will enable you to quickly review and resolve data issues promptly and maintain your trusted data quality. Let’s get cleaning!
7 Salesforce Data Fields You Need to Build Your Donor Base – we heard from Anita Henestrosa, international speaker and founder of NGO Mapit30K. In the session, the audience learned these 7 key data fields for nonprofits to leverage data and effectively power their organization and donor base.
Create a custom field checkbox to interact with your new subscribers and introduce your organization
With a picklist or text, tailor your content to donor interests and see a 50% higher open rate
With a custom field in a marketing system, you can calculate your contact score – which is the interaction rate with contacts and your nonprofit – so you can know who is most engaged, and ready to get a call!
Another picklist or text can help adjust your communication based on the donor’s level. This helps you include appropriate thanks for previous support and maintains a communication flow.
In fields for campaign member status, event management tools like Eventbrite, Cvent, Fonteva, helps add your events data directly into Salesforce. Be sure to have an event integration tool like Zapier or iAutomate to avoid manual uploads.
In your date custom field, reoccurring donors can be tracked by renewal date and a trigger can be placed to ask donations at the correct time.
The recapture rate of lapsed donors is 5% with the final key field of custom date, it’s important to engage constituents before they lose interest by having timely and scheduled check-ins.
AI Applications for Nonprofits – Dr. Lisa Rau, co-founder of Fionta and leader in the nonprofit technology field presented this informative session on Artificial Intelligence and its scope for nonprofits with Einstein. Looking at the big picture of AI, to make it work you need data and not just from a quantity perspective, but quality of clean data is important create training/testing sets. From here your organization needs to identify the desired benefit to automation of AI, forecasting helps manage expectations around the functionality and prepares for cost and product enhancements to manage along your AI journey. Dr. Rau advises that documentation for Einstein AI is vast and shared her laundry list of applications best suited for Nonprofits and Educational Institutions across the various departments of work, listed here are a critical few:
Helps identify which donor/funder is most likely to give
Helps identify the specific solicitation/grant applications most likely to close
Shows Einstein Insights, a cheat sheet to relevant data around the accounts
Again, with the Einstein Insights component, this helps deal predictions based on recent activity and existing opportunity data
Call centers will benefit with the automatic speech recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Context specific recommendations for users processed by strategies and associated with data driven process flows
Let’s you sync data between Salesforce and your email and calendar
Thinking Through Rollup Scenarios with Customizable Rollups - There are several options when looking to rollup data between records including standard rollup fields, DLRS app, flows, and the legacy NPSP & user-defined rollups, but the recent evolution in NPSP to customizable rollups is not only powerful for managing fundraising related data, but also flexible and nimble to provide you with just the right records and data to rollup.
- Structure
- Field Groups – reusable filter that you can use to set the rules for the records to filter, but be careful, these are AND logic not OR
- Rollup Definition – defines where the rollup data goes (object and field), type of rollup (Smallest, First, Sum, Avg, etc), the records to evaluate (field groups), and what fields from the filtered records to use.
- Credit Types
- Operations and Field Choices
During this session, Amy Bucciferro, provided information on the various components of the NPSP customizable rollups:
- Why do I need this rollup?
- Where does the information I want live in Salesforce?
- Where do I want to see this information?
- Does this match a rollup type?
- If not, can I move some data (before/after) so it will? [and should I
Bucciferro shared her approach and though process to use when considering a rollup to solve for a problem, ask yourself these questions:
Even with all this great information, Bucciferro saved the best for last when she walked us through three real-life scenarios and how the NPSP Customizable Rollups could solve for them. The first was how to rollup donations from family foundations or donor advised funds as hard credits instead of soft credits for the contacts. Another was tracking funds received versus funds distributed using General Accounting Units. But our favorite was the one for tracking committed funds versus outstanding funds for an account. You’ll need to check out the recording when it comes out to see all the magic, but the steps involved were:
-
Create a new filter group (Committed Opportunities) with two criteria
- Opportunity stages you consider commitments such as Awarded, Posted, and Verbal Commit
- Payment records marked as Paid = False
-
Create new Customizable Rollup
- Target Object equals Account & Target field equals Outstanding Commitment (custom field)
- Operation equals Sum
- Rollup Type equals
- Opportunity -> Account (Hard Credit) – use this when you are not creating payments in advance of the payment being received
- Payment -> Account (Hard Credit) – use this if you create scheduled payment records
- Filter Group equals Committed Opportunities
- Amount Field is set to Opportunity: Remaining Balance since we are using the Opportunity -> Account (Hard Credit)
There are so many powerful uses for this feature and Bucciferro did a great job highlighting them and walking through some scenarios. To learn more about Customizable Rollups check out this Trailhead and make sure to create them in your sandbox to get the filter groups and fields right before bring them into production.
And with that we conclude our recap of an incredible 2 days of learning and community at Nonprofit Dreamin’. We hope you enjoyed our insights and encourage you to see the recorded action of all the sessions on the Nonprofit Dreamin' Youtube Channel.
