Salesforce Spring Cleaning, Part 3: Data Cleanup

It's officially springtime here in New York… so it's time for some spring cleaning!

As the admin of your PatronManager account, you're probably pretty busy most of the time, creating reports, refining processes, answering questions for your users… there's plenty to do. Outside of those day-to-day things, though, there are lots of other tasks that don't need your constant attention but still shouldn't be forgotten about forever. In this series of three posts, we'll make some suggestions for tasks you might include in a quarterly cleanup of your Salesforce account.

Data cleanup

Time for some more decluttering! Last week we talked about how to clean up templates and reports in your account; this week we'll move on to cleaning up your data itself. Bad data is worse than no data, so you'll want to make sure you're giving these things attention as part of your quarterly checklist.

1) Deduping!

If you've got your users following best practices at least MOST of the time (searching for accounts/contacts before creating new ones, and regularly qualifying ticket orders/donations/signups if you're using PatronManager), you might have some duplicate records that snuck their way in to your account, but you probably don't have tons and tons of them.

Still, it only takes one or two encounters with duplicate data for your users to feel confused and disgruntled. You might be hearing complaints from your colleagues who are more directly involved in data entry or reporting.

A good way to start understanding the scope of your (possible) problem is by running a report -- a simple All Contacts report, grouped by Full Name or by Email and then sorted by Record Count descending will let you just spot check to get an overall sense of the quality of your data. Any grouping that has more than one record is worth investigating as a possible dupe. You might notice hundreds and hundreds of problem records right away, or you might just catch one or two.

i think we have a problem

From there, you can decide how to address the problem. Merge the one or two dupes that you found and move on, or call in the big guns and use a tool that will help you tackle a larger set. We use DemandTools when we're helping our clients; you might prefer something a little more lightweight like Cloudingo if you're doing this yourself.

2) Field audit!

Look, we're pretty sure about this one: You have fields that aren't being used enough to justify their existence. Account, Contact, and Opportunity/Donation tend to be the worst offenders. Either you created a bunch of fields a long time ago with the best of intentions but they turned out not to actually be important to your business, or you created one-time-use fields specifically to get through a particular project, but never actually nuked the field after you were done using it.

Time to clean those up!

The Field Trip app is the fastest and easiest way to identify these fields where you don't have good usable data. This tool can be used to analyze your entire database or just certain segments of it, and it will tell you what percentage of records have values in each field for that object.

field trip!

Then call a meeting with your colleagues and get their buy-in about proceeding with the cleanup. One good way to ease people into the idea of parting with a field they might think is still important: Start by removing it from page layouts, then hide it with field-level security. Give your colleagues some time to get used to not having the field around, and if you can get through til the next quarter without ever needing the field, go ahead and get rid of it. (This is basically this "outbox" concept, just with fields instead of stuff in your home!)

We've called this series of posts "spring cleaning," but make it a habit! Each quarter, take a day or two to run through all the items in each of these three posts. (In fact, go right now and schedule this in your calendar for each quarter! You'll thank yourself later when your Salesforce account is sparklingly clean and organized.)

Salesforce Spring Cleaning, Part 2: Decluttering

It's not quite astronomical spring here in New York yet, but it is meteorological spring… so it's time for some spring cleaning!

As the admin of your PatronManager account, you're probably pretty busy most of the time, creating reports, refining processes, answering questions for your users… there's plenty to do. Outside of those day-to-day things, though, there are lots of other tasks that don't need your constant attention but still shouldn't be forgotten about forever. In this series of three posts, we'll make some suggestions for tasks you might include in a quarterly cleanup of your Salesforce account. (Here's a link to part 1.)

Decluttering

Once you've been using your PatronManager/Salesforce account for a while, it's likely that you'll have accumulated a bunch of clutter -- things that live on beyond their usefulness. Spending a few minutes deleting old records, files, reports, or apps can help make sure that you and your users are able to find the things that actually matter.  

alli: "i 'marie kondo'ed' my sock drawer last weekend!" (and yes, I have three pairs of cloud socks)

1) Email Templates

Maybe you created some templates for a big fundraising campaign last summer, but the project is over now and you'll never need to send that exact message again. Or maybe a few colleagues were collaborating on a draft, and ended up saving multiple copies as different "versions."

You can choose to delete these old templates entirely (you'll still have all the records where the template was actually used!); or, if you think there might be some value in referring back to them later (maybe you'll want to crib some language for next year's fundraising campaign), you can "archive" them by creating a new folder called something like Archived Templates and letting them live there, separate from places that users might look for an active template in the future.

neither eric nor emily work here anymore

2) Reports

Did you know that you can run reports ABOUT reports? You can! And you can include columns like Folder, Report Type, Created By, and, our favorite, "Last Run [date/time]". That means it's SUPER EASY to run a quick report and see exactly which reports in your account are gathering dust.

Think about how much time you and your users will save when you can see that the report you need already exists and isn’t hidden in the clutter of your reports from 5 years ago!

Once you've run your Reports-report and confirmed the criteria for the reports you're ready to purge, go to Setup | Data Management | Mass Delete Records | Mass Delete Reports and use the criteria fields there to go ahead and clear that clutter.

"not THAT stupid, pt. 1"

3) Installed apps

Go to Setup | Installed Packages and see what's in the list there. Are you actively using everything that's listed there? That's important to know… especially if you're paying for them! Have you let free trials expire? Did someone else install apps that you don’t even know exist?

While you're at it, if you're a PatronManager client, you might take this opportunity to browse through our Recommend Apps in the PatronManager Help tab to see what's new or if you can find a better solution than you might currently be using.

there are at least 4 apps that shouldn't be here any more

PS: The list of Installed Packages is infuriatingly always a mess because you can’t sort or filter it in any way. Vote up this idea to fix that!

(On to part 3!)

Salesforce Spring Cleaning, Part 1: Automation

It's not quite astronomical spring here in New York yet, but it is meteorological spring… so it's time for some spring cleaning!

As the admin of your PatronManager account, you're probably pretty busy most of the time, creating reports, refining processes, answering questions for your users… there's plenty to do. Outside of those day-to-day functions, though, there are lots of other tasks that don't need your constant attention but still shouldn't be forgotten about forever. In our next three posts, we'll make some suggestions for things you might include in a quarterly cleanup of your Salesforce account.

Automation and Forms Audit

With workflows, Processes, web forms, and triggers, your PatronManager/Salesforce account can take care of a lot of work on its own, without needing direct action from you. It's kind of like driving a car that's equipped with cruise control -- you get on the highway, you get up to speed, and then you can take your foot off the gas and relax for a bit. But your car doesn't magically transform into a self-driving one -- it's probably not a great idea to take a nap or read a book and trust the machine to do ALL the work for you. You still need to check in every once in a while and make sure that everything is working smoothly and safely. Today's "spring cleaning" checklist is about auditing your automation.

1) Workflows and Processes

"write a description?!"

• Do you know what all of your workflows and processes are doing? Is everything that's active something that actually should be active? When you created those automation actions, were you kind enough to yourself to write a clear and helpful description that you can look back at now and understand? If the answer to any of these questions is "no," now's a good time to fix it.
• Review everything that's active in production, and write some notes on any of the ones that aren't clear. If there's anything that's a real mystery (and that'll probably be a Process more than a Workflow, in our experience), hop over into your sandbox (refreshing it if needed) and experiment with it until you understand what it does.
• Also, if you've been using your account for a while, you might have a whole bunch of older Workflows that can now be combined into a single Process!

2) Web Forms

"please give us money"

• If you're using PatronManager, you probably have at least three places on the web that your patrons use to interact with your organization: Your ticketing site, your donation form(s), and your email signup form(s). When was the last time you tested those forms yourself? Do you have a good sense of your patrons' experience online?
• Bring your colleagues into the conversation too! Make sure people from sales, fundraising, and marketing also review and their respective forms. Are you effectively communicating the right message to your patrons? Do the forms reflect your organization's current priorities?

3) Email Templates

ack!

• Related to both automation and web forms -- your account probably sends out all sorts of emails automatically. (Donation acknowledgements, order confirmations, volunteer schedules… etc.). When was the last time you (or anyone!) read and updated them? Again, rope in your colleagues to make sure that you all still like / agree with whatever you're saying in these automatic messages.

(Part 2, part 3)

Checklist: When a Contact is marked as "deceased"

Here's a discussion question that came up in our internal company Chatter today:

"How do clients tend to handle the marking of a deceased patron in a household when things like the Account Name, Salutations, Address Names, etc need to get updated. Workflow off the checkbox?"

We started thinking about this, and decided that a hybrid approach is the best. There are a few things that should happen automatically right away if a Contact is marked as "deceased" -- like checking "Do Not Mail" box, and changing their Email Status to "Opt-out' -- but for other things like Account Name and Salutation changes at the household level, it's probably a better idea for a human to do the work, to make sure it's right and that it's handled sensitively.

Here's a terrible example that one of our coworkers shared about what can happen if you're not handling this well:

"My friend James' Mother passed away last year, and this was the letter he received in the mail. Not only is the letter wrong, but it's causing all sorts of confusion and he'll have to call them and get it all straightened out."

"dear james, we're sorry you're dead"

But, okay, does that mean you need to train your entire staff on how to make the correct changes to fields on a record when you're checking the "deceased" box? Maybe not -- it could be that the person finding out about the deceased-ness and marking the record isn't necessarily a person who needs to be super-trained on a whole cascading list of other things to do.

Instead, let's create a workflow that does those things we mentioned above, but that also creates a task or series of tasks for particular staff members to take care of the name fields, and perhaps send a condolence card, depending on the relationship to the deceased person.

Overall, the takeaway here is: When you're thinking about new workflows for your organization, consider the difference between automatic changes that can happen in the background versus things where you want an actual human to use their brain… but don't overlook the benefit of a reminder task for the latter! Create a list of the things that should happen, assign it to the right person, and you'll be in the clear.