Level 1: The Basics

Level 1: The Basics

  • Brand new to Salesforce for Nonprofits? Feeling a little bit lost? This course captures so many things that we’ve found are fundamental to clearing up confusion for new users, and even some experienced users, that we offer it for free several times per year.

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  • This is the introduction to Salesforce for administrators, taking you through the start of what you can do to manage, configure, and customize your Salesforce. You’ll get an orientation to the tools available to administrators while getting hands on with the basics of data storage in Salesforce - fields and objects.

  • This is second part of our introduction to Salesforce for administrators, taking you through the start of what you can do to manage, configure, and customize your Salesforce. In this course you will get an overview of user and profile management and how that interacts with home pages, apps and page layouts.

  • Learn to use tasks, activities, events, and engagement plans to keep track of all the heavy lifting you actually do - donor calls, foundation grant meetings, participant emails and more. The built-in Salesforce functionality can be extended by linking to Google or Outlook, Ring Central and more, so we also talk about the strategy around the Tasks object. This course is suitable for non-administrators as well as admins.

Level 2: Learn to Admin

  • The Salesforce Report Builder is easy to learn and hard to master. This course starts off by teaching you how to think about and approach your reporting needs before you build the first report. We talk about how your data connects, explain why you’re not really seeing duplicates sometimes when you may think you are, and introduce you to the report builder itself. This course is suitable for non-administrators as well as admins.

  • Building off of our Reporting Fundamentals part 1, this course teaches you about dashboards and touches on more advanced reporting topics like row-level formulas and creating new report types. Dashboards are a collection of charts and graphs that show different data all in one view, so if you have been wondering how to make some “at a glance” visualizations for your users this may be a good course for you.

  • Our deep dive into all things User Experience that Salesforce provides, out of the box, to administrators. Your development team probably needs to see different things than your program team when working with households and individuals; different departments need different quick-entry for tasks or new records. This course shows you how to make that happen.

  • Take a deeper dive into what is possible with your object and field management. This course mostly focuses on formula fields and their many uses, with some additional attention to roll-ups and taking advantage of links between objects to make sure the data in your Salesforce is being managed both for your end users and with reporting in mind.

  • Salesforce has a number of built-in power tools that let you automatically add data, create records, update information, set tasks, send emails and more. This course is an introduction to the go-to tools for administrators: Process Builder and Flow. You will learn basic automations in this course.

  • The free tool Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (DLRS) is a mouthful, but we can’t manage Salesforce without it. When rollups aren’t an option, DLRS comes to the rescue, letting you aggregate data for better reporting and many other uses besides. This course takes you through the basics of DLRS and walks through some of the most common use cases.

  • The free tool Dataloader.io (from Salesforce) is another tool that we rely on every day to move data in and out of Salesforce. The built-in Salesforce data importer is handy but limited, while Dataloader.io gives you a real power tool. We show you the basics and touch on some of the expanded use cases for Dataloader.io in this course.

  • FormAssembly is a key power tool in our toolkit, and we use it for everything from simple donation forms to extremely complex and robust intake applications. Learn to use FormAssembly to set up forms that de-duplicate contacts, prefill from Salesforce, create targeted and customized data, or whatever your organization needs.

  • Experience Cloud from Salesforce lets people outside of your organization log in to see and interact with information inside of Salesforce. We deploy Experience Cloud for scholarship organizations, human services organizations, schools, and many other groups. You don’t need to be an active Experience Cloud user to take this course - we will show you how to set up a community, how to edit and manage your community’s branding, and the considerations you’ll need to make when designing your community experience, including when to bring in apps or a consulting partner for some programming.

Master Classes

Master Class Offerings

  • Salesforce is a large, complex engine that can be made to do almost anything. Unless you have experience with an enterprise system (like a university SIS, or a commercial ERP) then it’s easy for admins to get pulled into a tech-focused world that doesn’t account for the rest of the job, like change management, documentation, user adoption and support, and staying sane when you’re probably the only administrator in your organization.

    This course is for the admin who has at least a year of Salesforce under your belt. Guided by our senior team, you will work on the critical stuff that often gets overlooked while strengthening your technical expertise in all things Salesforce for nonprofits.

    This class meets four times, for 90 minutes each time and includes assignments that may take an hour or two between classes.

  • Salesforce is capable of so much automation without writing any code at all. But it can be a little daunting to learn your way around and use the tools to their maximum benefit.

    This course is for the admin who has at least a few Process Builders or some basic Flows under your belt. Guided by an instructor who has a ton of experience with automations of all kinds, you will work on your automation skills with Flows and other tools, and have an opportunity to explore all of the automation options that Salesforce provides.

    This class meets four times, for 90 minutes each time and includes assignments that may take more than an hour between classes.

  • You use Salesforce because you need a way to capture data about donors, participants, partners, and other constituents, as well as their activities. Salesforce provides a powerful reporting engine, but often organizations hit a wall with their reports because of a gap in understanding how to manage complex data for Salesforce specifically. And many organizations are moving toward more robust data visualization tools and are struggling to close the gap between their transactional (living) data and what is needed for analysis.

    This course is for the admin who has at least six months of experience and has done a lot of report writing. Guided by an instructor who has managed enterprise data for a long time, you will gain new approaches and tools to manage your Salesforce data for a range of reporting and analytics needs.

    This class meets four times, for 90 minutes each time and includes assignments that may take more than an hour between classes.