Unpacking Winter 2021

Winter 2022 arrived! I can’t wait to check on the status of the “Top 10 Candy” list for organizations who have the Power ot Ten license grant like me. However, first I need to help avoid the buildup ...  read more

Using a Campaign to Manage a Newsletter

How I use a campaign to manage my newsletter subscribers. Note that an external email program is still required, such as Vertical Response.

I use Vertical Response but I manage my newsletter subscription within Salesforce. I use a campaign and automation to help me out! I’d love to have something fancier but “True to the Core” is actually pretty good!

Dealing with Limited Client Information

We often actually have anonymous donors and in-kind givers. We associate such actions with a contact with the first name “Anonymous” and the last name @Organization, where Organization is whatever affiliation they have or whenever location the action occurred.

We extended this idea of “fuzzy” information to our clients. We only know nicknames frequency. But the nicknames collide so we also ask a positive interest or passion. As we learn legal names and birth information, we record it and update it.

We had to implement a few fields and workflows to make his possible. You can read more about the solution here (You’ll have to request document access… I’ll move key features to this document if there is enough demand).

Automatic Email and Phone Preferences for NPSP

Three workflow rules that infer the value of the NPSP picklist called preferred email and set it. Saves time when moving or deleting email fields.

The NPSP is awesome in that it allows us to have cell phone, home phones, and office phones and emails for our contacts since it’s a B2C type of service. I like that. However, I disliked getting a warning when I saved contacts indicating that I had forgotten to set the preferred email or preferred phone. The worst is when I move the only email address from work to personal (or vice versa) and get a validation error that the preferred email is blank. So I decided to improve the intelligence.

Volunteer Shift Notes on Web

Display special notes for volunteer shifts on the web

We wanted to reserve some shifts for specific groups and we wanted to identify certain shifts as full or critical to fill. We added a couple fields and workflow rules to modify the data displayed on the web for volunteer shifts.

As a byproduct of this we were easily able to include how many positions remain available. This feature is now available as a hover popup directly on V4SF so that’s not so critical anymore.