Knowledge Base & Topics

On any given day at your nonprofit, your staff and volunteers have their hands full with conducting outreach, planning fundraisers, following up with donors, and more. With so much to do and limited resources to work with, leveraging the right technology can be a game changer for your operational efficiency, program delivery, and overall community impact.

Salesforce for Nonprofits is one impactful software solution to consider investing in, especially for direct-service nonprofits. The platform makes it easy for frontline workers to collect, manage, and reference program participant data, allowing you to make more informed decisions and improve how you provide your services.

Jen Lee interviews Jenn Taylor on the solution to a strange little Salesforce Flow problem - how to copy the content of an image into a rich text field.

This one should be in the category of “if you only do one thing in Marketing Cloud THIS is what you do.” Which should be in the category of “here is a handy step by step guide for people who don’t know Marketing Cloud because this task is super simple.”

If it is in this category, I couldn’t find that guide. Instead, I invented new swear words while watching my blood pressure rise. So I’m writing it here in case it prevents you from spending days shouting at cryptic and only partially helpful pieces of answers on the internet.

The good news is that the steps to make this work are mostly super easy once you know what to do.

A quick one that is the bane of many a fundraiser’s existence. You want to compare Q1 this year to Q1 last year. You’ve probably found tutorials that let you create a formula that outputs Q1, Q2 etc but then in your report filters you have to manually update the quarter each time it changes.

What if it could always represent a living quarter-to-date analysis of whatever the current quarter is? So as soon as Q2 hits, the report updates to show Q2 last year and Q2 this year, without anyone changing filters?

You may be a pro at Flows and Process Builders. You may just have discovered the amazing power that comes with Salesforce’s declarative (fancy way to say “no code”) tools. Either way, maybe you are feeling like you can SOLVE. ALL. THE. THINGS!!! for your users!

Yeah, me too. And many other tools before my journey with Salesforce. In the last 25ish years of building automated computery things for fed-up end users, I’ve learned a lot about jumping exuberantly into making my life a whole lot worse with all of my automation powers.

When asked for automations now, I find myself saying “not yet” a lot more. I have a checklist I use now for anything that might incur technical debt or risk, and it’s loosely based off of Bill Gates’ quote about automation and inefficiency.

The Pain: You have a Salesforce Community (public-facing Digital Experience) that is protected by a login. You want to let people self-register. You are using either a VisualForce or Experience Builder page.

You are getting the dreaded “Your request cannot be processed at this time. The site administrator has been alerted.”

Every 23 seconds someone, somewhere, asks for “a new field” to be “added to the database.” Several times per month I am the lucky recipient of such a request. I often wonder about my role in hoarding so much data that if every human who will ever live works frantically until the heat death of the universe we won’t be able to make meaningful use of it all. I also sometimes wonder if we are tearing small holes in the space/time continuum in our race to coerce ever-tinier bits of matter into storing All! The! Photos! of adorable wombats.

But I digress. I want to talk about fields in databases.