Page 30 – Attain Partners

Happy 10th Birthday, AppExchange!

January 15, 2016/in Salesforce Watt Hamlett/by Josue

As anyone who has been around the Salesforce world knows, you don’t get far into a conversation about Salesforce before theAppExchangecomes up. This is certainly true for the work ACF Solutions does in the nonprofit and higher ed sectors. We have completed over 500 Salesforce implementations for nonprofits and higher ed clients and, with few exceptions, they have all involved at least one app from the AppExchange. This week, as the AppExchange turns ten, we are reflecting on the positive impact that the AppExchange has had on our customers.

The AppExchange, of course, is the vast marketplace of Salesforce-compatible applications that enhance and extend the capabilities of Salesforce. Yes, Salesforce in and of itself is a fantastic application for managing data and engaging constituents. And yes, it is possible to build customizations or integrations for Salesforce to get it do things it does not natively do. But creating and maintaining such one-off customizations and integrations would be cost-prohibitive to the majority of our customers and would greatly increase the length of an implementation. That’s where the AppExchange comes in.

Thanks to the AppExchange, there are a wide variety of tested and approved applications designed specifically to work with Salesforce. These applications can be delivered much more quickly than customizations, and can do so more cost-effectively while also including benefits like upgrades, a product roadmap, documentation, customer support, and a community of users.

Here are some of the key categories of applications on the AppExchange that our nonprofit and higher ed clients frequently rely on. In each of these categories, there are multiple options for apps that enhance the native capabilities of Salesforce, connect Salesforce to external systems, and in some cases, both:

Fundraising
Recruiting and admissions
Event management
Email marketing
Integration
Productivity

That last category is a broad one. It includes an array of different tools that make Salesforce more functional – and even more fun – for day-to-day users. Examples here include apps for plotting and analyzing data on a built-in map, generating sophisticated merge documents, and connecting Salesforce with your inbox.

Happy 10th birthday, AppExchange! Thank you – and all the innovators at Salesforce and partner software companies who make you possible – for helping nonprofits, colleges, and universities do what they do better.

Get Ready for the Higher Ed Summit!

January 14, 2016/in Higher Education Leidy Smith/by Josue

As the holiday season fades and we ramp up into the new year, one exciting event on the horizon is Salesforce’sHigher Ed Summit (HED Summit), scheduled for March 30 – April 1 in New Orleans.

I have attended both Dreamforce and the Summit for several years now. While Dreamforce is exhilarating due to the shear enormity of it and all of the new and wonderful things Salesforce is introducing, the HED Summit is equally exciting for those of us who work with Salesforce in Higher Ed. It is at HED Summit where we see and hear specifically about how Colleges and Universities are using the Salesforce platform (and all those new and wonderful developments) to transform constituent engagement and solve real problems in Higher Ed.

HED Summit is a great resource for any school (and definitely worth the time, effort and cost to attend) regardless of your stage in the process. If you are still evaluating Salesforce, you will learn the big lessons from those who are further along the journey. If you are presently involved in an implementation, you will pick-up best practices and create good peer contacts for ongoing support and dialogue. And, if you have completed an implementation, you can offer sage advice and discuss plans for growth and innovation. Even better, you canshare your experiences in a session, giving back to your peers while showcasing your team’s success. No matter where your school is in the process, there are huge benefits to networking with colleagues and partners who can add perspective to new possibilities when leveraging the world’s leading system of engagement.

This is the 4th HED Summit in as many years and if growth is a testament to value received, then the HED Summit must be delivering on its promise. The first summit saw 250 attendees, and last year there were 700. Early indications are that this year will double 2015. So get on board, register soon and please considersharing your story – the holidays are past, but it could be the best present you give in 2016!

2015 Year in Review

December 24, 2015/in ACF Solutions/by Josue

The Muddle in the Middle: Strategies to Maximize Your Year-End Appeal

November 20, 2015/in Email Marketing, Fundraising Carla Estey/by Josue

In Muddle in the Middle, Part 1, we learned about the value of mid-level donors to your long-term fundraising strategy and the reasons for nurturing those relationships. In this follow-up post, we show you how you can use Salesforce to identify, target and ultimately grow your mid-level donors, in the context of your year-end push.

When it comes to nurturing your mid-level donor — or any donor, timing is key. According to Network for Good, in 2014, 30% of all giving occurred in December and 10% occurred in the final three days of the year. Hopefully, this year-end push is something your organization has been planning for all year. But just in case you are a little behind schedule, grab your Salesforce administrator, roll up your sleeves, and read on.

With only 42 days left in the year, how do you maximize those year-end donations? You automate your ask through drip email campaigns because, face it, who wants to be in the office between 12pm and 6pm on December 31 when online giving is at its most concentrated? Using Salesforce’s email marketing platform — Marketing Cloud — you can easily create a series of highly targeted messages that are triggered by a prospect’s behavior and/or response. If you don’t have a tool like Marketing Cloud you can still execute these strategies it will just require more manual work on your part. Here’s the plan:

Choose the right targets: First, create the following segments in Salesforce, using Salesforce reports:

Constituents who have attended at least one event or otherwise engaged as a volunteer for your organization during this past year, but have never donated directly. (According to Charity Navigator, volunteers are almost twice as likely to donate to a charity they are passionate about than non-volunteers.) Report How-to: Assuming you are using Campaign Members for your event attendees and volunteers, create a Campaign Member Report, filtered by the appropriate Campaigns and Campaign Member status (attended, volunteered), and grouped by Contacts where campaign start date = current year. You will also need to add a filter to the report for just those members who are not donors. One way to do this is by first creating a formula field on the Campaign Member object that puts a flag on the Campaign Member record if the person is not a donor. You could reference the lifetime giving amount field on the contact or account in your formula.
Lapsed donors, specifically LYBUNT (last year but not this year) and SYBUNT (some year but not this year). Report How-to: There are standard LYBUNT and SYBUNT reports within Nonprofit Starter Pack, NGO Connect, and Advancement Connect.
Recurring donors to ask them to consider giving at the next level. Report How-to: In NGO Connect and Advancement Connect, filter your report by the “Active Sustainer” flag and “Current Amount” fields.

Set up the message sequence: Next build out your drip campaign, for each segment above, using Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder. Journey Builder’s dynamic content and marketing automation will enable you to deliver the right message to the right constituent at the right time based on their actions. The Campaign canvas allows drag-and-drop representation of the prospect’s journey so that it is easy to visualize the time elapsed between each activity of the campaign. The diagram below represents the type of automated sequence you can build with Journey Builder.

Monitor and measure: Finally, measure your results with metrics provided by Marketing Cloud, e.g., open rates, click-throughs, conversions and average donations. Campaign Manager reporting allows you to see which efforts are bringing the best results. You can set the overall goal and then see success rates against the goals, watching the icon change from orange to green!
Tweak and repeat! Make the most of your year-end appeal by using tools already in your toolbox. Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud allow you to create targeted lists and produce personalized drip-campaigns responding to your prospect’s behavior. Start nurturing those mid-level prospects now to take advantage of people’s tendency to donate during the holiday season for both practical and charitable reasons. That mid-level donor may be a major gift donor down the road. It starts one ask at a time – why not automate it!

New Name, Same Great Mission

November 18, 2015/in Salesforce Kristin Sharpe/by Josue

ACF Solutions is excited to celebrate the rebranding of the Salesforce Foundation to Salesforce.org. The name change reflects Salesforce’s continued corporate commitment and leadership to making philanthropy an integral part of its business, offering Salesforce technology, people and resources to improve communities around the world. And this new branding reinforces its deep support for the Nonprofit and Higher Education communities.

As a member of the Salesforce Foundation ecosystem for more than 10 years, the ACF Solutions team has witnessed the organization’s remarkable evolution. When we first became a partner in 2005, the Salesforce Foundation was a small group of people dedicated to doing good, mainly through a nascent program that provided donated or deeply discounted Salesforce licenses to Nonprofits. From that early start, we saw the Foundation’s commitment to doing good evolve and expand in so many meaningful ways:

The development and continued evolution of the Nonprofit Starter Pack, software offered free to the community;
The establishment of a Higher Education industry vertical and deep commitment to the Higher Ed community including thought leadership at its annual Higher Education Summit;
The development of strategic CRM visions for the Nonprofit and Higher Education sectors with the introduction of Salesforce1 for Nonprofits and Salesforce1 for Higher Education;
The development of The Power of Us Hub, an amazingly active online community, supporting 20,000 nonprofit and Higher Ed users and answering over 1,000 community questions per month;
The more than 26,000 Nonprofit organizations and Higher Ed institutions now using Salesforce, all receiving their first 10 licenses for free and any additional licenses at a deep discount;
The more than 1 million direct hours volunteered by Salesforce employees (and paid for by Salesforce) at Nonprofit and Higher Ed institutions of their choice around the world; and
The more than $90 million in grants awarded to over 25,000 organizations.

With such a list of accomplishments, it makes perfect sense that the Salesforce Foundation take on the mantle of Salesforce.org as a more appropriate reflection of its contributions to date and perhaps more importantly, as a leader for impactful corporate philanthropy.

As we approach Thanksgiving, I’d like to give thanks for the insight and impact that the Salesforce Foundation, now Salesforce.org, has made to so many lives. And congratulations on your fitting new identity – Salesforce.org.

Dreamforce Day 3 Daily Dispatch

September 18, 2015/in ACF Solutions/by Josue

Here’s what we learned and heard yesterday:

From “The Internet of Things: Delivering Customer Data on Salesforce,” a single platform harnessing data about your customer from beginning to end will provide the ability to predict customers issues before them. Happier customers, better business!
From “Salesforce for Nonprofits Live Demo: Analytics and Big Data,” Salesforce Wave lets you analyze data from external sources alongside your own data in Salesforce. Plus much of Wave’s functionality is now available on your mobile device. For example, if someone emails you a spreadsheet, you can push it into Wave with just a click on your smartphone and then proceed to build a dashboard from it right on your device. You can also annotate a dashboard component and email it back out to others.
From “Salesforce Products for Nonprofits: What We Have and Where We’re Headed,” the Nonprofit Start Pack is generally compatible out-of-the-box with the new Lightning Experience for Sales Cloud (with some exceptions). Organizations can try it out in a Winter ’16 sandbox. In terms of NGO Connect (NGOC), the team is testing new functionality against tens of millions of records to ensure support for data on a larger scale. NGOC is moving towards push upgrades and an NGOC user group is in the works.
From “Wave Analytics Roadmap: A Sneak Peek at New Features and Future Roadmap,” Service Wave is in pilot come Winter ’16 release, You’ll be able to develop and test out Wave in dev orgs and the new trailhead module.
From “Data Pipelines: Big Data Meets Salesforce,” data pipelines are currently in pilot with expected release in Summer ’16. Data Pipelines are designed to process massive amounts of data to/from Salesforce Sobjects/BigObjects/Files.
From “Admin Tips and Tricks,” Workato allows you to easily build a custom API with an easy user interface.
From “AppExchange for Higher Ed: Top Apps to Make You Even Smarter,”; Features of the best apps according to four higher ed. Admins.
- Form Assembly: (1) Web forms, (2) Multiple objects, (3) Public or private, (4) Dependency logic
- TaskRay: (1) Project management, (2) Salesforce data: Events, Contacts, custom objects
- AddressTools: (1) Autocomplete, (2) validate, (3) standardize from Country down to street
- Conga: (1) Composer for mail merge, (2) Courier for reporting
- Map Anything: (1) map routes, (2) map contacts in a region/route
From “Data Cleansing and Analysis with Cross-Filters,” Tips and tricks on using cross filters, including how to think about the cross filter logic to get what you want and exclude what you don’t want AND how to use an object formula and a custom report type to find all records that don’t have attributes on related records

Here’s what we’re looking forward to today in the Foundation Zone:

ACF client Joel Claseman of The College of St. Scholastica will participate in the session “With Great Platforms Comes Great Responsibility: Best Practices in Governance,” at 9:30am in Yerba Buena Salon 13-15.

Dreamforce Day 2 Daily Dispatch

September 17, 2015/in ACF Solutions/by Josue

Here’s some of what we learned and heard Day 2 of Dreamforce:

From “Program Management: Building Programs and Policies That Scale:” It is easy to get started with Salesforce, but without the right people and processes in place, it can be hard to scale across the enterprise. Organizations should create a clear vision of success at the outset to maintain focus and avoid distractions, In hindsight, the nonprofit Path would have tackled fewer projects at the outset.
From “Service Cloud Roadmap – Customer Experience:” Service Cloud SDK will enable mobile customer service inside of a custom app, including knowledge, case creation, and live agent. Plus, in Winter ’16 release, Lightning components will be added to self service community templates, one of which allows agents to easily add links to knowledge articles within the case feed.

Here’s what we’re looking forward to today in the Foundation Zone:

Connected Nonprofit: Using Salesforce Across the Organization to Drive Impact with ACF clients Urban Land Institute and Museum of Modern Art (2nd session), 10:30am-11:10am, Marriott Marquis, Golden Gate A.
Get the Job Done: Put Students & Employers at the Center of Career Services featuring ACF client Pennsylvania State University Smeal School of Business, 9:00am-9:40am, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Yerba Buena Salon 13-15.
AppExchange for Higher Ed: Top Apps to Make You Even Smarter, 12:00pm-12:40pm, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Foothill F
#AwesomeAdmin Hacks for Higher Ed featuring Kellogg School of Management, 3:00pm-3:40pm, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Yerba Buena Salon 13-15.

Dreamforce Day 1 Daily Dispatch

September 15, 2015/in ACF Solutions/by Josue

Here’s some of the sessions our staff members attended Day 1 at Dreamforce and what they learned.

From “Wave Platform Best Practices,” be careful with data format changes.Bring in data that you need. Right tool for the right job. Build a foundation of your data versus recreate it each time.”
From “New Lightning Experience: Build Custom Apps in a Flash,” Lightning app builder offers drag-and-drop customization. You can control the user’s experience whether on desktop or mobile phone.
From “Integrate with Lightning Speed with Lightning Connect,” Lightning Connect allows Salesforce admins to integrate without a writing a line of code. From “Lightning App Builder,” the vision for Lightning Experience is to use the App Builder to reorganize standard Salesforce pages via drag-and-drop, including adding custom-built Lightning Components and ones from the AppExchange. “You should not have to write code just to rearrange a standard page.”
From “Lightning Components: The Future,”significant performance enhancements are being made in the Lightning Component framework to ensure fast mobile performance. Lightning Data Service will be be like the Visualforce standard controller on steroids, making it easy to operate on a Salesforce record within Lightning code.
In “Hands-on Training: Get Started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud,” we saw the ease of creating a customer journey using the new Lightning Experience.
In “Communities Engagement: Building a Thriving Community with Salesforce,” 92nd Street Y and NeighborWorks spoke about using Communities to exponentially extend their missions without having to increase staff sizes.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, 9/16) in the Foundation Zone:

ACF client Jennifer Goldstone of Birthright Israel Foundation will participate in the session “Driving Change is Hard. Let’s do it Anyway! Stories from the Front Lines,” at 8:30AM in the Yerba Buena Salon 8.
ACF clients Joanna Iturbe and Lauren Russo of the University of Colorado, Leeds School of Business are featured in the session “Accelerate and Automate with Process Builder,” at 9AM at the Intercontinental San Francisco Hotel in Union Square.
ACF client Chris Baker of Harbert College of Business at Auburn University is participating in “Setting the Curve: What Every School Can Learn from Business Schools’ Innovation,” at 11:30AM at the Metreon AMC Theaters.
The first of two sessions of ‘Connected Nonprofit: Using Salesforce Across the Organization to Drive Impact” features ACF clients George Prior and Jason Ray of the Urban Land Institute and M. Engineer at Museum of Modern Art at 4:30pm in the Yerba Buena Salon 8.

ACF Solutions and Clients to Present at Dreamforce 2015

September 14, 2015/in Kristin Sharpe/by Josue

We’re heading to San Francisco to attend the 13th annual Dreamforce conference, the largest gathering of Salesforce users and partners for four days of hands-on training, new product sessions, volunteerism and networking, which starts tomorrow and runs through Friday.

In our ninth appearance at Dreamforce, ACF will enjoy its largest participation by clients and staff to date. CTO Doug Sharpe, VP of Operations Aimee Cubbage, Delivery Directors Virginia Berkenkotter and Keith Robinson, Technical Director Sophak Phou, Account Executives Chuck Courtemanche and Leidy Smith, Principal Consultant Valenda Seaford and Solutions Architect Watt Hamlett will join our west coast contingency — VP of Business Development Susan Tobes, Account Executive Sean Speer, Delivery Team members Jeff Cowgill, David Bruce, Jennifer Heroux and Anne Duperault — at the show.

We are excited that so many of our clients are participating in Dreamforce sessionsthis year. Their stories will serve as inspiration for attendees contemplating Salesforce for their organizations and those looking to take their implementation to the next level. Some of those clients include:

College of St. Scholastica
Harbert College of Business – Auburn University
Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University
Leeds School of Business – University of Colorado
Museum of Modern Art
Pepperdine University
Smeal School of Business – Pennsylvania State University
University of Colorado
United Nations Foundation
Urban Land Institute

In addition, on Tuesday morning (9/15), ACF’ers Susan Tobes and Watt Hamlett will demonstrateAlumniEngage, a Salesforce-based solution to support and grow alumni engagement, implemented for University of Colorado, Tufts University and Allegheny University, at the session Advance Your Advancement with 1:1 Alumni Engagement.

Stop by our booth in the Foundation Zone and say ‘hello’!

Dreamforce 2015

September 14, 2015/in ACF Solutions/by Josue

At this year’s Dreamforce, ACF showcased the largest number of our clients speaking at the conference. Below are links to several of those sessions: