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!)

Spring '16 For the Rest of Us

Even though we're just getting into the thick of things winter-weather-wise here in New York, Salesforce rolled out its Spring '16 release this month. 

While there were a ton of new exciting developments made to Lightning Experience in this release, if you're like us -- not quite ready to roll it out -- you may be wondering, "what's in this release for me?" 

Here are some neat things sure to make admins everywhere pretty happy! 

Chatter Things

Broadcast Chatter Groups

Salesforce has introduced a new type of Chatter group called "Broadcast Only," which means that only the group owner or group managers can post messages to it.

This is great way to create a place for staff-wide announcements, while preventing others from posting to the group with off-topic messages. The rest of your staff will still be able to comment on the posts in a Broadcast group.

(Groups that are not meant for the whole staff--private or unlisted groups, which are "invite only"-- can also get the Broadcast Only treatment.)

"dear staff, there are valentine's day cookies in the kitchen!"

More relevant @mention suggestions

You might have already noticed this change, before you realized it was an official improvement -- we definitely did. This makes it much easier to address your posts to the right person. When you start typing @ + someone's name, instead of seeing an alphabetical list of users (including external Chatter users or Community users that you're probably not talking to most of the time), the list starts with the people you interact with the most!

Process Builder Improvements (for Intermediate/Advanced Users)

We loooooove Process Builder. Now there's a little bit more to love!

Reuse names and descriptions when creating a new version of a Process

Previously, when you cloned an existing Process to create a new version of it, you had to retype the name and description of it. Now it's smartly copied over for you and the copy is automatically assigned a version number when you save it.

"Emailing_The_Volunteer_Actual_Final_Version_Not_Broken_I_Hope"

View the names of your fields by hovering over them

It used to be virtually impossible to see the field names that were already selected in a Process Builder step. Now you can hover over the field selection box to see the whole name.

sometimes field names are much longer than this one

Reorder criteria steps by dragging and dropping

You'll also be able to easily move the parts of your Process around on the screen to change the order of the actions, instead of having to start over if you realize that your Process needs to start off differently.

magic!

Manage Everyone’s Reports and Dashboards

It used to be hard/impossible to have true administrative rights over Reports and Dashboards, because anything saved in a user's private or personal folder remained inaccessible, even if that user was deactivated. We mentioned a previous improvement that happened in Summer '15, which gave you the option of logging in as any user (and thus gaining access to their private folders) -- but now you can do even more. Using Workbench, you can write a query that will return those hidden reports and dashboards, and allow you to delete them. (Read more here in the Spring '16 release notes.)

Salesforce1 Enhanced Charts

A flash of lightning comes to Salesforce1! Even if you'e not ready to go all in with the Lightning Experience, you can benefit from some of its shiny and new chart functionality on your phone:

good job, fundraisers!

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.

"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.