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)