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

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.

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!

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!).

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.

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.”

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!

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.

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.