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NPSP Batch Gift Entry

The NPSP Batch Gift Entry brand new tool which can be used to help users enter donations. It is completely different from batch data entry, which is sadly no longer available.

Batch Gift Entry makes things quicker and easier for users entering donations .

Users can choose which fields they want to add, fields from the Opportunity and Payment objects. Can also capture defaults, e.g. donation stage.

Also update existing open donations and prevent duplicate donations from being created by users.

Batch Gift Entry is well documented on power of hub. https://powerofus.force.com/articles/Resource/NPSP-BGE-Overview

Set up my domain, setting up visability to tabs, objects. Configuring field permissions, and users also need visability of two visual force pages. It is reccomended that this is done through a permission set. Even System Administrators need to be granted the permission set.

Go to the App Launcher and search for Batch Gift Entry.

02. Click New Batch. The Batch Gift Entry Wizard will take you through several steps.

Expected count of gifts and total batch amount are used if you know , how many gifts and the total value of the gifts expected. If you are certain the expected count of gifts and the total are correct, you can check the Require Expected Total Match checkbox.

03. Now you need to select the fields that you would like to enter, both on the opportunity and the payment object. As the donation involves creating both.

04. Now we can specify if the fields are required and what the default value should be (if required) . E.g. Donation Stage, Donation Date.

05. This is when the system is looking for existing open donations, it will match or suggest updating an existing donation- there is documentation on the behaviours of these matching rules. And select the fields that the rule should use as the criteria, e.g. Donation date, Donation Description etc.

06. Here is the Batch Gift Entry page, select if the donation is an account or contact, any default fields are not-editable, The donation is then added into the batch.

If there is an existing donation, the system will include a notification to “Review Donations” Users can click to review the donation and update the payment or alternatively create a new opportunity. Updating will not create a duplicate.

Now we are ready to process the batch, upon clicking process batch you will see an important information notification confirmation page. The import wizard keeps you updated on the progress of the import.

One the batch has been completed, you can see that the donation has been completed and the status has changed to imported.

You can continue to add donations to the batch if required.

15Jan

By Elaine Forthin Business, Salesforce NFP

How nonprofits can minimise Salesforce implementation costs

Hyphen8 strives to help nonprofits to minimise Salesforce implementation costs wherever possible. As well as being passionate about our social mission, in the current economic climate, we are all keen to sharpen our pencils. None more so than third sector organisations who need to demonstrate the value of investments to Trustees, donors and other stakeholders, and in some cases to rely on fundraising to pay for the configuration of new technology.

In this blog, I explore some of the main ways that non-profit organisations can keep down the cost of their Salesforce implementation when they engage an external partner.

1. Phased approach

The beauty of the Salesforce platform is that it is completely flexible and easy to configure. So you don’t need to ‘go live’ with all of your processes at the same time. You can fast-track the benefits by taking a phased approach as ongoing changes can be developed and tested in a Salesforce Sandbox (development environment).

Prioritise the key processes for phase 1 that will add the most value
Phase future enhancements over time in line with available budget
Factor in existing software contract renewal timings to reduce licence costs

2. Appoint internal super-users

We are great believers in self-sufficiency – using one of my favourite analogies, we like to give you the fishing rod rather than the fish. This not only reduces reliance on external partners but also increases internal ownership and user adoption. Internal super-users can be trained during the implementation to get involved in the configuration of time-consuming elements such as forms and communication templates.

Super-users don’t have to be technical wizards but it does help if they are more technically-inclined
Make sure that time can be dedicated to this role without detrimental impact on their day job

3. Minimise scope creep

With careful initial scoping of requirements, your implementation partner can provide accurate cost estimates for the implementation. However, costs can creep up if too many change requests are raised during the project. It is vital that rigorous project management processes are in place so that there is complete transparency on time/costs incurred.

Ensure that requirements and deliverables are documented in sufficient detail before the project starts to avoid any disputes over what is in scope
Appoint an internal Project Manager who can channel feedback and monitor time logged against requirements
Plan and finalise the content of data capture forms, email and document templates before they are handed over

4. Avoid unnecessary bells and whistles

It’s a simple fact (that applies to most things in life) that the more bells and whistles you add, the more it will cost. The Salesforce platform allows you to go beyond standard functionality and develop custom processes, screens, buttons, apps, integrations – the scope is almost unlimited. These are, of course, often necessary but they all take time (and therefore money) to develop. The good news is that it is now more than ever before easier to configure complex requirements using native Salesforce tools. If you do want to keep costs down, we encourage you to stick to standard Salesforce unless it is absolutely necessary.

Make sure your partner identifies any requirements that will require custom code that will require specialist skills to maintain
Don’t assume that users will reject standard Salesforce functionality until they have tested it
Check that your selected partner is up to date with the latest Salesforce tools

5. Prepare your own data

It may sound dramatic but data is the blood that pumps the heart of any database. If users lose trust in the integrity of data in their shiny new system, their interest may wane. Data migration can often be the area that burns a lot of time. Don’t brush this under the carpet, it’s better to invest some internal time to this task to avoid unnecessary costs being incurred.

Prepare your data – if you have multiple spreadsheets / data sources – consolidate them where possible or opt to carry out some of the imports yourselves)
Only migrate the data that you really need – the more disparate and complex the data sources, the more time it will take to migrate
If you don’t have internal capacity, think about drafting in low cost resources (or even family members) to help clean up your data

6. Train the trainer

Training is an important part of the introduction of new technology within an organisation and should not simply be a tick box exercise. Depending on your team’s size, diversity of roles and geographical location, training costs can mount. Especially if all sessions are delivered by an external trainer. So we often recommend a ‘train the trainer approach where an internal user can cascade their knowledge.

Choose someone who is engaging and understands your business processes
Don’t request lengthy user training materials if these can be managed internally and are likely to change frequently
Plan for an ongoing training programme that includes refresher sessions, new starter inductions and advanced training

7. Widen the scope

It is very common for organisations to use a wide variety of applications for different purposes and the ongoing costs for these can add up. To save ongoing costs, consider whether Salesforce can be used instead. With a rich array of out of the box features and continually enhancements with 3 new releases each year, chances are the platform offers what you need. There are also thousands of plug in specialist applications available on the Appexchange, Salesforce’s app store, many of which are free or discounted for nonprofits.

Even if they don’t seem relevant, do make your partner aware of ALL of the apps currently used
Have an open mind – it can be difficult to switch away from apps you have used for years but if cost-savings are significant, it’s worth exploring alternatives

8. Choose the right partner

The process of selecting the right Salesforce partner to implement your solution should not be taking lightly. It should not just a case of comparing day rates – it’s more about evaluating who offers the best value for money. It’s also worth investigating whether you qualify for any pro bono time from Salesforce.org or partners that participate in the Pledge 1% programme.

Your partner should guide you through all of the elements that will help you to save costs and not incur them and:

Have experience delivering similar types of solutions to minimise solution design and development time
Be able to provide references for projects delivered on time and on budget
Demonstrate that they follow best practice in terms of methodology, quality of documentation, project management processes

I hope that this blog provides some food for thought that will help to save money that can be put towards contributing to good causes. If you need help estimating the cost of your Salesforce implementation, get in touch at team@hyphen8.com

09Jan

By Jess Wilsonin Admin, Salesforce NFP, Spring 19

Salesforce Spring 19 Release

Spring… those lighter evenings, warmer weather… Unless like last year we had 12 foot snow drifts to contend with and a cold spell that kept coming back. Anyway Salesforce Spring 19 offers a little a ray of sunshine in an otherwise grey and dreary February. So grab a cup of tea, some leftover christmas chocolates and read our Spring 19 highlights.

Lightning is here to stay

Salesforce have announced that Lightning is going to be activated on a rolling basis starting in Winter ‘20. You can opt out of it by contacting support, but we highly recommend getting on-board with Lightning, as the constantly growing feature-set is well worth the initial time investment to migrate. For any more information on making the leap to Lightning, please contact our Evolve team.

Enjoy expanded data storage

Salesforce have listened to their users and have increased data storage from 1GB to a whopping 10GB minimum plus the usual allocation for users! Orgs will begin to see the increase in March 2019!

Additional Storage Release Notes

Pinned list views

Again Salesforce have listened to their users and FINALLY you can change the default list view – and even better, each User can select their own default and update it whenever they want with handy pins. Finally an end to searching for your favourite list view.

https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring19/release-notes/rn_lex_pinned_lists.htm

Add custom resources to the help menu

Garry Willis, Evolve Manager here at Hyphen8 likes this feature because it’s intuitive – Users instinctively go towards the help menu when they need it and for heavily customised orgs the standard menu isn’t always that helpful. The ability to add Custom Resources opens up some great options for self-help within an organisation.

Lightning reporting improvements

So many improvements, I couldn’t pick just one! As someone who loves building reports in the new Lightning report builder and activated it immediately upon release, i’m excited to be able to make joined reports, resize columns, input conditional formatting and stack summary fields to make matrix reports easier on the eyes. Lightning Report Release Notes

Conditional highlighting for reporting

Looking for a way to help staff easily identify grants or donations that need immediate attention? Want to know at a glance which Organisations have grants valued between £100,000 and £500,000? Apply conditional formatting to summary or matrix reports in Lightning Experience to lend colour to your reports and gather insights at the same time. release Notes Conditional Highlighting Release Notes

Email template folders

You and your team can now organise email templates into more folders than just Private and Public. Also, nesting folders makes it easier to organise and find email template. Email Template Folders Release Notes

20Dec

By Elaine Forthin Salesforce NFP

10 Hyphen8 Highlights of 2018

This time of year provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on Hyphen8’s achievements over the past 12 months. 2018 has been an incredible year for us so I have picked out my 10 highlights:

Launched grantFlex, our free application built on Salesforce’s Nonprofit success pack to provide grant-makers with a proven data model based on our deep knowledge of this sector (to date installed and configured for 11 organisations)
Achieved Silver Salesforce Consulting Partner status thanks to continual customer referrals, glowing customer satisfaction ratings and our commitment to Salesforce certifications
Recognised by Salesforce for our Nonprofit specialisation, we are very proud to be considered trusted partners of an increasing number of amazing non-profit organisations
Increased our community of non-profit customers with 17 new Salesforce implementation projects, the majority of which came from existing client referrals
Renewed, uplifted and initiated over 50 support partnerships for our ongoing customer care programme evolve
Grown our team of certified consultants all of whom are carefully selected not just for their expertise but for their shared passion to work with nonprofits
Ramped up our marketing efforts with a shiny new website, increased social media presence and a schedule of events
Continued our commitment to our social mission through participation in Pledge 1% programme, enhancements to our core grantFlex product and team fundraising efforts
Practiced what we preached – we are continually evolving our own salesforce instance and now have seamless integration with Xero for finances and HR management including expenses, absence and personal development plan tracking
Appointed a new CEO (me) and I am delighted to be leading our team on our continued mission to help non-profit organisations benefit from cloud technologies

We are excited about what 2019 will bring and wish everyone a restful break.

Elaine

14Dec

By Jess Wilsonin Business

Salesforce Events Diary 2019

Salesforce and the Salesforce community offer some fantastic events throughout the year, here is my handy guide to make sure that you don’t miss out.

6 March 2019 London Calling

Europe’s largest community lead event for Salesforce professionals, I love this event, it optimizes what Salesforce is about. Whatever angle whether you are an admin, developer or consultant the day is ram packed for you. Early bird tickets are on sale now. To book your ticket, or to follow the event online check out their website. https://www.londonscalling.net/

23 May 2019 Salesforce World Tour London

This is like a mini Dreamforce, the good and the greats from Salesforce descend on London for a one day super event. The event is free to attend, but make sure you register early to ensure a place. The expo event has more apps and partners than you thought existed. There are sessions for every type of Salesforce user from clients to developers, there is something for everyone!

27-28 September 2019 Surf Force - A Salesforce Community Event with a twist....

Surf Force is an annual life-changing networking event with 3 major parts:

Surfing together in the sea.
A beach clean-up followed by logging the types of trash for worldwide research.
Educational sessions with inspirational experts.

For Further Information, check out their website https://www.surfforce.co/

October - Date TBC Inspire East, Cambridge

30+ sessions
Customer stories, admin and developer sessions
Hear about Lightning, Communities, Sales and Service Cloud
Take inspiration to improve your ROI of Salesforce
Boost your technology career
Get a taste of Dreamforce in Cambridge – hear about the highlights from the event.

Check Out their website for more information http://www.inspireeast.co.uk/

November Date TBC -Salesforce.Org Connected Non Profit, London

Here is a little snapshot of what you will be able to enjoy on the day:

Be inspired to drive change in your organisation
Hear from industry experts on how to overcome the toughest challenges faced by nonprofits today
Leverage ideas and best practices to help you build better connections with your donors, beneficiaries, advocates, staff, and partners
Be empowered to innovate using social, mobile and cloud technologies to accelerate your impact
Network and learn from peers and our partner ecosystem how to elevate your solutions and transform your nonprofit into a truly Connected organisation
Have fun and make connections with the most innovative community in the nonprofit sector in the UK

Throughout the year- Salesforce User Groups

Salesforce user groups are the perfect place to meet like minded Salesforce individuals, most areas of the country have a user group close by. User groups often have a couple of talks about new features, upcoming releases etc and are strictly not for sales pitches. Networking in between and of course some food and beer to wash down the Salesforce Knowledge.

04Oct

By Antony Daleyin Release Notes, Winter '19

Salesforce Winter 19 Release Highlights

Winter Insert numerous Game of Thrones puns 19.

It may only be October, but the ‘Christmas’ countdown has already begun for some people on social media along with so so so many Game of Thrones “Winter is coming” type jokes, and I swear I saw a house putting up his Christmas lights this morning on my walk to the shops and as always Salesforce are no different “Winter 19 is coming!”

General Overview

Previous releases have brought about new features, especially off the back of the Lightning Experience release, but this release seems to be more back to the core essentials, lots of “nice to haves” and maintenance type fixes that people have been asking for, for quite some time.

The full release notes can be found here : https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter19/release-notes/salesforce_release_notes.htm

Internet Explorer News

Now before I move onto some of the key changes, there is one point that comes up a lot with customers that I have spoken to over the last few months and that are the issues some users have, that in all honesty is because they still use Internet Explorer. Salesforce will no longer be supporting Internet Explorer 9 or 10 as of April 2019. They have previously dropped support for all older versions. You can still access Salesforce Classic, Salesforce Tabs and Visualforce Communities using these browsers.

If you have users still on these systems, it is now more then ever a good time to speak to IT about moving from these browsers. Microsoft themselves are not updating these browsers, they pose an inherent security risk and with GDPR a main factor of most companies focus this year, IE joins the list of things that need to be resolved.

Now onto the good things!

Lightning Specific Changes

Searchable List Views

My personal favourite of the release – You can now use a new search bar to search for data in your list views. You can find the new bar next to the List View Controls and works against most of the data on the record and not just those columns in the list view.

New Lightning Users “Welcome Mat”

This was my favourite piece in the release until I saw that I could search List Views (seriously, when you do it a lot it’s amazing how much time that can save) but as a consultant, I’ve been slowly migrating more and more customers onto Lightning, and one of the things we at Hyphen8 do is build Trailhead Mixes specific to our customers to introduce them to Lightning in a targeted manner.

This right here can potentially remove that need for us to introduce Trailhead to all of a company’s users, help them onboard onto Trailhead, get the users registered etc…

When you first log into Lightning you are presented with some useful resources for getting up and running quickly, it’s not always beneficial and couldn’t be customised. Going forward not only can you turn this feature on and off but you can customise the content to make the introductions more targeted.

Display Density

There is a new Lightning Experience display density setting available to your lightning pages, it reduces the amount of white space on a page, and in my opinion will cut down on the amount of scrolling you need to do.

Previously data would appear under the label, in the new version it can appear besides it.

Change Owner to Multiple Leads, Cases or Custom Objects

If you are on the following Lightning Experience in Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions. This feature is available in Lightning Communities. You can use the Change Owner button on a list view to change the owner of up to 200 records.

Change Owner Button- Change the ownership of up to 200 records.

All Salesforce

18 Month History Tracking

As of the Winter 19 release, all Field History Tracking on orgs created after June 2011 who have NOT purchased the Field Audit Trail add-on will see their history deleted once it hits the 18 month window.

Previously, Salesforce haven’t been known to always enforce this. There will be a short grace period once Winter 19 releases to resolve this.

Search Functionality

Searching in Salesforce is a great way of finding records fast without having to navigate through Tabs, List Views or Related Lists, however it hasn’t been known to be “tight” when it comes to returning results – It can and does throw a lot of results back at you.

Going forward you can now customise search results for Knowledge and Communities.

You can now search for opportunities that fall within certain amounts without having to build a report first to do so

New Numerical Filters – Ideal for Opportunities.

Admin Specific Changes

Not everything that Salesforce does is for the users benefits, some of it is aimed at those of us who build and maintain an org.

Deploy Active Processes and Flows via Changesets

You can now deploy process and flows via Change Sets without having to then activate them in production, and the number of Active processes and flows has seen a massive increase up from 500 to 2000.

It is worth noting that if you follow best practice, you should rarely if ever need 500 flows!

Field Sets. In Lighting?!

It always amazed me that you couldn’t create or edit field sets in lightning, you had to switch back to classic for this. Now, I can stop being amazed and do this really obvious thing.

Don’t forget to check out other posts in our blog for Admin help, tricks and tips hyphen8.com/blog