Three Reasons You Need the Salesforce1 App on Your Phone

With the Salesforce1 app, you can have access to all of your Salesforce/PatronManager data no matter where you go. For a while, we sort of forgot to emphatically recommend it to our clients, because there are a few PatronManager-specific tasks that you can't really use it for right now -- we haven't yet built a way to sell tickets or process credit card donations from within that app, so we didn't really go out of our way to promote all its other amazing features. But we should! Because it's great! So here's our excited recommendation.

Here are 3 things you can do from SF1 on your phone.

1. Look up people or companies that you encounter out in the world.

Say you're at another organization's gala, and you're introduced to a few donors that are being honored that evening. You can instantly and discreetly search your own PatronManager account for those names, to see if you also have some kind of relationship with these people and know when your last interaction was. (We do a similar thing all the time at conferences, looking up potential clients and prospects that we meet casually during lunch or in a session!) It's so helpful to be able to quickly check on the context and history of your organization's relationship with someone.

of course Peggy Olson is a VIP

2. Ask your colleagues for help, or delegate responsibilities.    

Say you run into a patron at a volunteer event and she asks for your help -- she has tickets to Thursday night's show and she can't make it and would like to switch to next Friday's. You're going to accommodate her request and waive the exchange fee. You COULD log in to PatronManager/Salesforce in your phone's browser and zoom in to painstakingly process the exchange yourself -- OR, you can simply navigate to the Ticket Order record within SF1 and Chatter at your colleague, the box office rep who's working today, and ask her to process the exchange right away instead. (Or in a similar vein, say you're expecting a package to be picked up from the office, but you're not going to be in that day! When you receive a notification of the scheduled pickup time, just Chatter at your colleagues to let them know to expect the visitor.)

teamwork, dream work, etc.

3. Get notifications about important business goals.

Say you're the development director and you're running a big annual fund campaign over the summer, with a bunch of benchmark goals through the campaign. Create a report that shows cumulative giving so far, and then "subscribe" to the report and have it send you notifications as you meet each goal. (Or if you're a sales manager with reps working toward a quarterly quota, subscribe to a report of the whole team's Closed Won opportunities so you can properly celebrate when the goal is met.)

this is some pretty powerful stuff!

We all wish that we didn’t have to constantly be “at work” when we’re on the go, but let’s face it -- we all are. The Salesforce1 app lets you be more productive and produce a much higher quality of patron interaction than you would otherwise be able to do. Here's a post from PatronTech CEO Gene Carr about working on the go.

And now that you're convinced, here's a post from our friend Christian Carter with some more specifics about how to get started (and a video of him talking about this at #DF15!).

"But I *HAVE* already given!" -- Targeting in Fundraising Campaigns

Have you ever gotten an email (or letter) that sounds like this?

"If you've already given, we thank you."

"please forgive this email"

These are both real emails that we've received from arts organizations in the last few years. We get what they're trying to do here… but it's really not working.

"IF" we've already given?! Why don't you know whether or not we've given? If I have in fact made a donation to your organization this year, now I feel like it was a waste of time -- you don't even know that it happened, so it couldn't have been that valuable. And if I haven't made a donation yet, you're already indicating to me that maybe I shouldn't bother.

The good news is that PatronManager/Salesforce makes it easy to run reports that let you avoid having to use this awkward phrasing.

Let's say you want to send out an email message to your entire list asking them to contribute to the year-end fundraising campaign, but you want to make sure to send an appropriate message to each of them.

For this example, we've identified four groups of people:

• People who have already given to this exact campaign.
• People who have donated at all within the last 2-3 months.
• People who are major donors or prospects who need a more careful/deliberate solicitation plan.
• Everyone else.

So how do we turn that into targeted solicitation lists?

Here's how we did it:

• Start from an Accounts & Contacts report
• Make sure it has the two obvious contact filters on it that we're always going to use for email campaigns: "Email not equal to [blank]" and "Email Status equals Confirmed Opt-In"
• Exclude people who have already given to this exact campaign -- add a cross filter for "Contacts without Donations, where Primary Campaign Source equals Year-End Campaign 2015"
• Exclude people who have given within the last 2 months add a cross filter for "Contacts without Donations where Close Date is greater than 9/1/2015)

This is what we have so far:

• The last filter we want to add is one that will exclude people who are major donors or prospects -- this piece is more likely to vary based on the specific practices of your organization. (You might filter on a "Major Donor" field on the Contact or Account object directly… or on a different campaign where you're collecting prospects… or on people who have given any donations of a certain high amount… or perhaps against WealthEngine data… and so on.)

Now that all those filters are in place, we have our "Everyone Else" group, and we're ready to send them our main general solicitation email for this campaign.

And the great part is that we've also made it easy to send a targeted message to each of the other three groups, if we feel it's appropriate. We'll just take one of those filters at a time, "flip" it to give us the opposite result, keep the other filters there… and probably add a new filter to exclude everyone we just sent to, for good measure.

Here's an example of what you might say to someone who already gave this year, but who you want to make sure is aware of the current campaign:

this is why

(You might even want to explicitly suggest that they tell their friends!)

Obviously this same concept works for print mailings, not just email (you'll just filter on mailing address information instead of the email fields).

And this whole concept holds true for ticket sales too, not just fundraising! In our experience, most organizations already usually try to follow this approach in their marketing efforts, running reports to exclude current ticket-holders from emails advertising that particular show -- so this is just an encouragement to think about your fundraising campaigns in the same way.

Recommended App: AAKonsult Campaign Status

Arguably the best thing about working on the Salesforce platform is that it is in fact a platform and that we are part of an international community of users, administrators, developers and innovators.

Sometimes the best solution to a problem requires getting some help from that community.

We’ll feature some apps from the Salesforce AppExchange (and beyond) that we love, on a regular basis.

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AAkonsult Campaign Status

The Campaign object in Salesforce is a flexible and vital tool for tracking marketing and fundraising efforts for non-profits. It’s been around since the early days of Salesforce, and as such, there are some quirky things about the metadata behind the object.

One of the most perplexing things about using Campaigns is figuring out how to customize the Campaign Member Status field on the Campaign’s partner object, the Campaign Member -- the field that lets you track if/how people have responded to your campaign.

By default, the Status field ships with a few generic values -- Sent, and Responded. It’s expected that you probably have more or different values that you want to track, so like all fields in Salesforce, you can customize the picklist values. But unlike all other fields in Salesforce, if you go to add them by going to Setup | Customize | Campaign Members | Fields, you will find no “New” button.

The only way to add custom values to the Status field is to go to a specific campaign and click “Advanced Setup.”

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Should be called "Not So Advanced Setup"

That's where you can add new custom member statuses, but weirdly, you can’t apply those values to all future Campaigns. They have to be added individually each time. It’s really odd!

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A little too custom

Enter AAkonsult's  Campaign Status app. This free app (which takes just a few minutes to install and configure) lets you create customized default statuses for your organization and lets you apply those defaults to all future campaigns. Or, if you have different types of campaigns that are suited to their own set of defaults, this app lets you have a different set of defaults for each Campaign Type.

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Telemarketing specific defaults -- that's more like it!

I’m so happy this app exists because it makes it easier for organizations to adopt Campaigns in Salesforce, and makes it more likely that their Campaign Member Status values are relevant and accurate.

Checklist: What to do when someone leaves

Sometimes people leave your company or organization, because they got a great new job somewhere else, or it's just time to move on, for whatever reason. And sometimes that person has a LOT of history in Salesforce or PatronManager. When our (now-former) coworker Lily left the company after almost 11 years, we realized we didn't exactly have a comprehensive checklist in place for how to handle deactivating a user with that much history and so many automatic things set up… so it was time to create one.

Some of these steps are designed to keep things from breaking; others are just intended as "discovery" so you're not leaving any black holes of information scattered around. For example, if you're hiring a replacement for the person who's leaving, that new person will probably need the same (or similar) suite of reports that the old person used to get … so we should make sure to find them all.

(Before we go on: Remember, we are never ever going to reassign an old user account to a new person, right? Right?)

1. Freeze the User.
Freezing is a relatively new Salesforce Feature (Winter '14) and it's a great shortcut to locking an exiting employee out of the account before you have a chance to run through all the other steps of a checklist. A Frozen user can't log in anymore but the license isn't freed up until you get around to deactivating them. (Freezing is even more useful in a "terminated without notice" scenario but it's helpful even in a planned-for situation.)

2. Find Hidden Reports.
If the person is leaving amicably (as Lily is), it might be a good idea to ask her to go into the "My Personal Custom Reports" folder and throw away the garbage, and re-save publicly anything useful. If you forgot to do that, you used to have to live with the fact that those reports were out of reach forever -- but as of Summer 15, things are a little easier.

3. Reschedule Scheduled Reports & Dashboards.
Go to Setup | Jobs | Scheduled Jobs, and create a new view to find just the jobs "submitted by" your departing user. Then you can click through to each one, click through to the Scheduling screen, and then modify as needed to remove the User from receiving them. You'll also need to move on to the next step and change the running user if anyone else is set up to receive them.

we miss you, lily!

4. Change Running User on Dashboards.
If you try to run a dashboard "as" a deactivated user, you get this:

we miss you, eric!

Click Edit and then change the "View Dashboard As" setting to some other user.

5. Change Ownership of Chatter Groups.
Only the owner can delete a group and only people with crazy high-level permissions can change things about groups that they don't own… so you might as well.

• Create a report that shows Chatter Groups and their owners.
• Someone with Modify All Data should go to each Group the user owns and change the owner to someone else:

theater!

6. Reassign or Stop Workflow Tasks and Email Alerts.
You can see alllllll workflow tasks by going to Setup | Create | Workflow & Approvals | Tasks

• Create a new list view on that page showing just the tasks that are assigned to the deactivated user. (For some reason, the "Assigned To" filter only seems to work if you enter the User's ID -- not their name.)
• Anyway, find the tasks and then evaluate what's going on with the workflow they belong to -- can you stop the workflow rule entirely, or do you need to change the Assignee to someone else?

7. Check Approval Processes, Queue Ownership, Assignment Rules, and Data Export.
Does your departing user play a role in any of these kinds of business process? Lily did not have any of these things so we just checked each of them in Setup and then moved on.

8. Change Ownership of Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities/Donations?

If you're using PatronPortal (in PatronManager) or any other sort of Portal functionality (in Salesforce more generally), you should run a report to find all the Accounts and Contacts that your departing user is the Owner of, and change the Owner to someone else, using DemandTools or another data manipulation tool if necessary. (For whatever reason, Portals really don't like Portal Users to be owned by users without a Role, or by users who are inactive -- the Portal User gets an error when they try to log in if that's the case.)

9. Reassign Company Primary Contact?
On the off-chance the the person leaving was actually the person who set up Salesforce in the first place, it wouldn't hurt to check the Company Information page under Company Profile in Setup and make sure they're not listed as the Primary Contact with Salesforce.

10. Mark their CONTACT Record as "Gone"
If you have Contact records for your employees and not just users (and we'll probably write a post someday about why that's a good idea), make sure to update the departing person's Contact record as well.

we miss you, piper!

11. Stay Connected!
Assuming there's no bad blood between you, you probably want to stay in touch with the person who's leaving after they move on. Remind them on their way out that if they were part of the Success Community or Power of Us HUB, and if the new company that they're moving to also uses Salesforce, they should reach out to someone to get those accounts merged when they're up and running in their new job.