A Salesforce Gift for Each of the Eight Nights of Hannukah
It’s Holiday time! And that means in my family we’re pulling out our menorah and dreidel, and hiding away my toddler’s presents. Regardless of what specific holiday/s one is celebrating this season, ‘tis the time for sharing goodies and gifts with friends and family. Here’s how Salesforce, shows its Ohana (extended community), especially nonprofits, some love. Here are my eight favorite hidden gems that Salesforce and its nonprofit user community are offering this Hannukah, and all year round!
Night 1: Email & Calendar Extensions
You know that feeling when you are about to meet with a client or donor and you know they have asked you a bunch of questions over the last year and they’re about to ask you them all over again? That might mean you have to go poring through your email and calendar to reference previous conversations, and that is a spectacular waste of time. Well, Salesforce’s first gift is a free bidirectional sync with your Gmail/Google Calendar or Outlook to prevent just that!
Few features of Salesforce light up new users' eyes with glee like the knowledge that you can create and edit Salesforce records from inside their email/calendar tool, or that they can see every email and meeting they’ve had with a person in a timeline interface on their contact record. Not only that, but the paid version, Sales Engagement, is a more reliable and robust tool that can replace Calendly and other scheduling tools.
Night 2: Data Cloud & Tableau “Freemium” Licenses
At Dreamforce this year, Marc Benioff announced that all Salesforce users would get “freemium” licenses for their new data cloud and Tableau products. Why is this a big deal? Data Cloud is a huge innovation in the Salesforce ecosystem, providing a lightweight tool that can connect and harmonize data from disparate sources. Tableau can then take this new data mosaic into a compelling visualization and UI that can fuel new insights and equip more informed, nuanced, and fast decision-making without hiring a fleet of data scientists.
The recipient should understand the value of this “freemium” gift. These licenses will enable you to showcase the potential power of these tools with a small set of your data. The gift is a tool that allows you to inspire your executives' imagination in what you could do with Data Cloud and Tableau, and the confidence that the potential is truly relevant to your organization.
Night 3: Free Pardot Enhancers!
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Née Pardot) is a powerful marketing automation tool that connects CRM and Marketing data seamlessly and automates drip campaigns with intelligence and layers in advanced marketing analytics. It creates huge amounts of value for users and has a licensing cost that matches that. However, available free enhancements can further leverage an organization’s investment in Pardot. Some of the most popular are integrating with WordPress to closely weave together the UI of your Website and your email marketing campaigns.
And in the post-pandemic Zoomiverse, Pardot’s integration with Zoom allows for you to capture leads and prospects from Zoom webinars and events directly into your marketing campaigns. For a longer list of free Pardot integrations and stocking stuffers (whoops, wrong Holiday metaphor), check out this post from our Marketing Cloud team!
Night 4: Trailhead
There is no greater gift than knowledge. And in this spirit, the Salesforce gift for Night Four is Trailhead.
Trailhead brings together topics that cross the full spectrum of business and organizational excellence. From technical enablement on the Salesforce platform and tools to agile implementation, DEI, sustainability, and beyond, Trailhead provides an engaging, supportive, and truly fun experience in providing skills and information to the Salesforce ecosystem. Like our great National Parks (which the UI is based on), Trailhead is open to the entire public, you don’t need to have a Salesforce login to jump in and start down the trail.
Night 5: Omnistudio & Accounting Subledger for Nonprofit Cloud
2023 was a huge year for Salesforce’s investment in the Nonprofit sector, with the introduction of its newest industry cloud: Nonprofit Cloud. The Nonprofit Industry Cloud takes the best tools and features from Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack and combines it with learnings from other industry clouds like Public Sector, Health, and Financial Services.
Not only does this bring faster innovation and deeper investment into its nonprofit offerings, but some big gifts are also included with its licensing. Accounting Subledger, which templatizes your Salesforce data into debits and credits, makes for a highly expedited financial reconciliation process. Omnistudio, which provides a low-code capability to do more interesting and dynamic application design, includes document generation among other things.
Night 6: Connecting to Online Giving
Ok, so for the sixth night, this gift doesn’t come directly from Salesforce, but is still a great gift for nonprofits. Give Lively is an online donation platform that connects to various payment gateways, enabling online giving from your donors. Beyond the transactional cost of your chosen payment gateway, Give Lively provides its service for free to nonprofits. And on top of that? It has a robust pre-built connector with Salesforce NPSP that just needs some basic mapping, e.g.”The donation amount field in GiveLively should map to donation amount field in NPSP,” and switch on the connection. How do we know the publicly available pre-built connector is robust and reliable? We built it.
Night 7: Ecosystem and AppExchange
Salesforce has convened an incredible ecosystem (or Ohana if you will) of business leaders, technical savants, thought partners, clients, consultants, employees, advocates, evangelists, and rebels. Dreamforce is the largest in-person gathering, along with its traveling World Tour and user community events led grassroots style around the world.
And the gift for those who aren’t ready yet to commit to the time of travel and in-person gatherings, the Salesforce AppExchange is an incredible online resource. It brings together the experience of the iOS or Google Play store for third-party apps that plug into Salesforce, with Linkedin, because it also includes consultants and implementation partners, with client-supplied ratings and reviews to provide some crowd-sourced wisdom and what and who works best with Salesforce.
Night 8: Power of Us
And to end the Festival of Lights with one of the most generous gifts any software company has offered we have the Salesforce Power of Us Program. Very simply, Salesforce believes that it is in the business of changing the world, and the best way to do that is to equip those doing good with great tools. The Power of Us Grant provides 10 free CRM licenses to 501c3 organizations in perpetuity. This powerful investment in nonprofits has changed the impact sector with over 50,000 nonprofits joining the Salesforce Ohana, and has challenged other Fortune 100 Companies to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to corporate social responsibility.
So if you’re celebrating the Festival of Lights with friends and family, just remember: even if you’re not psyched about the new pair of socks you’re unwrapping, you are just a few clicks away from some great gifts this year from Salesforce!
Do you have some favorite Salesforce “goodies” that you want to share? Connect with Arkus on LinkedIn or contact me on Linkedin!
