Category: Cloudy Blog

Cloudy at #DF16: Cloudy’s Favorite Apps – Mogli SMS by Tact

Cloudy sat in the front row of a packed house at Dreamforce 2016 to hear how one New York nonprofit is using Salesforce in a unique way to drive their mission. The Center for Employment Opportunities (C.E.O) provides employment training, job placement, and support to men and women with recent criminal convictions. By providing these timely and targeted services, they have been able to show impressive reductions in recidivism and increases in post-conviction employment. C.E.O. Chief Operating Officer Brad Dudding shared how a recent staff reading exercise led to a big shift in how C.E.O. approaches the concept of constituent ...

Cloudy’s Bright Ideas: Forecasting

Salesforce donation records can give you quick insight into your organization’s donation forecast and pipeline. This information is incredibly powerful and easy to access, yet many organizations use Salesforce for years without seeing this important data. Learn how to use Salesforce pipeline and forecasting reports to drive your mission! First, here are the Salesforce features you must know: Donation fields: Amount: This is your ESTIMATED total donation amount. The Amount is not locked in until the donation closes – you should feel free to adjust it as you work through the cultivation and solicitation process! Close Date: The Close Date ...

Cloudy at #DF16: Cloudy’s Favorite Apps – Workato

Last week, Cloudy went over the basics of Salesforce integration. Read it first to understand the integration “stages” and the example case study, which we will continue to use today. If you are now ready to find the right tool for your integration project, you may want to consider Cloudy’s latest favorite app:Workato allows you to create real-time connections between hundreds of web applications, including Salesforce. Here is a screenshot of an INCOMPLETE list of the applications it can connect to: Workato provides a simple drag and drop interface where you define the steps of your integration. A completed set ...

Cloudy’s guide to Salesforce Integration: Easy as 1-2-3!

What does it mean to integrate with Salesforce? The end goal of integration is to have one source of truth for your most important data. Rather than having the details of your client interactions spread across multiple systems (Eventbrite, MailChimp, Shopify, Quickbooks, ADP…), you want to view, manage, and report on all aspects of your business from Salesforce. Integration can occur in three basic ways. Let’s imagine you are using Eventbrite to manage events and attendees, and consider your integration options: Manual Integration: You may not think it counts, but when you type data from one system into another manually, ...

Cloudy at #DF16: NPSP Roadmap

For nonprofits using Salesforce and the NPSP it has been an exciting year! There has been an undeniable surge of energy from the Salesforce.org Foundation, manifested in the many new tools, resources, and functionality for nonprofits using Salesforce. Cloudy joined an excited crowd of nonprofit users at Dreamforce 2016 for a recap of everything that has happened in the past year, and a (safe-harbor!) sneak peek of what is coming in 2017.   In the past year, new tools added to the NPSP include: Volunteer Management Matching Gifts Honor/Memorial Gifts Partial Soft Credit Engagement Plans Levels Grant Deliverables Additionally, there ...

Cloudy at #DF16: Take the #PageLayoutChallenge!

We spend so much of our Salesforce time and dollars shooting for big game: that we sometimes forget the “little things” like usability. But in this case, the little things are really the big things; if your users don't like using Salesforce, you’ll have trouble getting the expected value from your trophy Apps and Flows! At Dreamforce 2016, Scott Kincaide from the Usability Sciences Corporation presented the #PageLayoutChallenge. Page layouts are a “little thing” that can have a HUGE IMPACT on the usability of your Salesforce org. Take the challenge with us, and tweet your results @CloudyCumulus with the #PageLayoutChallenge hashtag! ...

Cloudy’s Bright Ideas: Mastering List Views

List Views are an important tool in Salesforce to see, understand, and interact with your data, and often they are underused! Here are some tips to help you master List Views. (See Cloudy’s earlier post here for some List View basics) First, Cloudy knows what you’re thinking: What is the difference between List Views and Reports? While Reports are the most flexible and powerful way to understand your data, List Views can be a more immediate gateway to the records you need to view and work on. This table details the primary strengths of Reports vs List Views: Reports List ...

Cloudy at #DF16: User Group Leader Summit

At Dreamforce 2016, Cloudy was excited to have the opportunity to attend the 2nd Annual Salesforce User Group Leader Summit. Early on the first day of the conference, more than 200 User Group leaders from around the world gathered to hear the latest news for Salesforce User Groups, and to gear up for another year of learning and community with our local groups. Here is what Cloudy learned: As of this posting, there are 382 Salesforce User Groups worldwide, with more than 650 User Group Leaders heading them up. The worldwide User Group Community is comprised of more than 96,000 ...

Cloudy’s Bright Ideas: Find your Data – List views

When you log in to Salesforce, you want to quickly find, sort and interact with the right records, without a lot of clicking around. List Views are a very easy and useful way to drive your daily work in Salesforce. What is a List View? When you click on any tab in Salesforce (ie. Contacts tab) the first list you see is your “Recent” items. These are the records on that tab that you have most recently viewed (If you have not looked at anything recently, this list will be blank). If you want to revisit a record you ...

Cloudy’s Bright Ideas: Customize Search and Lookup Results

In Cloudy’s last post, we learned about finding records using salesforce global search; these suggestions apply to all users. An administrator can further customize search results to be more meaningful to users. Follow this step by step tutorial to learn how: Searching for a contact reveals that the standard columns in contact search results are Name, Account, Phone, Email, and Contact Owner: This is OK for starters, but will be even better if it is customized. Cloudy’s organization does not use Contact Ownership, but they do use a custom field called “Primary Affiliation”, and they would also be interested in ...