Just like kids need to have well-child checkups every year, it’s important to have well-Salesforce checkups regularly. Is your Salesforce instance healthy? Is it growing as it should? And does it have a healthy diet (of clean data)?

Then: The Founding of a Nonprofit 

A few years ago, I was assigned to be the project manager for a Nonprofit Cloud Implementation for the Kiewit Luminarium located in Omaha, Nebraska. It was 2022, so Nonprofit Cloud meant setting up the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). At the time, Kiewit Luminarium was a newborn organization, and their data consisted of capital gifts and email addresses tracked on Excel spreadsheets. Their building was still under construction, they were assembling their staff from scratch, and business processes were being constantly defined, revised, accepted, or discarded.

A partnership with Salesforce, Arkus, and Veevart helped Kiewit Luminarium set up its Salesforce instance with the native-to-Salesforce Veevart functionality for managing admissions, memberships, field trips, group rentals, and more. Arkus worked to streamline donor and other constituent operations, including managing pledges, grants, and sponsorships.

Just like the building undergoing construction, the implementation project started with a solid foundation – NPSP and Veevart’s best practices – and built from there to frame things to work with Kiewit Luminarium’s anticipated business processes. We finished our cloud-based construction in time for Kiewit Luminarium to open its doors to the public in April 2023. There were the expected hiccups of opening a new major attraction, but Kiewit Luminarium got people buying memberships and, eventually, through the front door.

Now: A Thriving Organization

What does your organization need to grow? Do you have the support your team needs? Reach out to Arkus to learn more about how we can support your team, using our contact form. We also invite you to stay connected to us by following Arkus on LinkedIn, and subscribing to our newsletter and events lists, using the form in the sidebar to the right. 

P.S. If you’re ever in Omaha, I highly recommend visiting Kiewit Luminarium (especially if you have kiddos). And be sure to wave to Iowa when you’re there. It’s right across the Missouri River.

The Benefits of a “Well-Salesforce” Checkup

Healthy Data

A key element of a healthy Salesforce org is ensuring that data is being entered. If your user experience (UX) is overly cluttered or complicated, users will be less inclined to take the time to fill in all the data you want to see. There are lots of ways to improve your UX by updating your User Interface (UI). You can declutter standard page layouts, embrace the use of Lightning Page layouts and Dynamic Actions, turn text fields into picklists, or, where appropriate, create validation rules to guarantee that when, for example, a Grant is marked as Closed Lost, a “Lost Reason” is noted. 

There are a number of built-in tools that help you evaluate your Salesforce instance’s overall health. A great place to start is by running the Salesforce Optimizer. Results will point out what page layouts have too many fields (affecting the user-friendliness of the page), what key updates need to be applied to improve security, enabling key Salesforce updates, profiles, and permission sets not in use, and so, so, so much more. We recommend you run Salesforce Optimizer at least once a quarter.

NPSP users should also run the NPSP Health Check. This will show you Household Accounts with no Contacts, Opportunities with Contact Roles where more than one is marked as Primary (affecting rollups and reporting), missing Opportunity payments, and more. Since NPSP Health Check keeps a keen eye on your data cleanliness, we recommend you run the check at least once per month.

Growing Stronger 

There’s the old adage that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. That attitude doesn’t entirely hold true with Salesforce. With ongoing innovation and three major releases per year, there will always be an opportunity to take advantage of new features. Organizations should read through the new release notes to see what might be applicable to them. Release notes can be a bit daunting, so reach out to your Salesforce Partner to help you understand what’s applicable to your organization.

A Good Data Diet

Nothing is more important to a CRM than clean and useful data. Without it, your reporting, pipeline, and analysis won’t be accurate. How can you ensure your Salesforce instance has a healthy diet of good data? In addition to cleaning up the UI to improve the UX you should also evaluate where there might be gaps in Salesforce training or in documenting your standard processes. If users don’t know how to enter good data, they’ll likely enter bad data.

Where are users getting frustrated with data entry, either because it’s hard to know what fields they’re supposed to fill in, selections to make, or it just takes too dang long to create a record with accurate data. This is a good place to look into automation. It could be as simple as setting up a Global or Object-Specific Action, or as robust as creating a Flow walking a user through a process one screen at a time. 

Flows can also be used to automate tasks post-data entry. One of the possible Flows discussed with the Kiewit Luminarium team was to create and assign a task when a donor’s lifetime giving reaches a certain threshold. It’s easy to keep an eye on that number when people are giving thousands of dollars at a time, but when a person gives you $100 here and $500 there, that threshold can sneak up on you.

Moving Forward: Growth On Target  

After I returned from my visit, I took the notes I’d gathered over our two days together, organized them, and separated them into four categories. Here are those categories with examples of the work Arkus recommended:

1. Quick Wins - easy tweaks that don’t take much time

1. Page layout cleanup and simple UI/UX updates
2. Picklist value updates
3. Update older donation records to match current business processes

2. High Priority - business critical updates

1. Revise Opportunity record types, Stages, and Sales Processes for better reporting
2. Create automation for a more streamlined donor acknowledgment process
3. Create functionality around new Account Stages (e.g., show a stage for the fundraising team, a stage for the marketing/membership team, and a stage representing the Account’s overall affinity for Kiewit Luminarium)

3. Medium priority - need to have, but not immediately

1. Revise defined funds (known as Specific Funds in Veevart and as General Accounting Units to everyone else using NPSP) to better represent Kiewit Luminarium’s programs
2. Move ALL remaining legacy data off of spreadsheets
3. Planning around how to track conditional grants

4. Low priority -  nice to have

1. Creating automation to, for example, create a one-off task once a household’s lifetime giving reaches a certain amount.
2. Setup Outbound Funds to “draw down” expenses for various programs (e.g., donations made to cover field trips then funds used to pay for field trips)
3. Create a custom object to track impact data

Arkus and Kiewit Luminarium’s amazing new Salesforce system administrator is already working to tackle the quick wins while the rest of the team evaluates the high, medium, and low-priority recommendations with plans to decide our joint path forward.

After we work through our to-do list, Kiewit Luminarium will score well on their well-Salesforce checkup, knowing they have a healthier Salesforce instance that better meets their users’ needs, reporting needs, and has fit data.

What does your organization need to grow? Do you have the support your team needs? Reach out to Arkus to learn more about how we can support your team, using our contact form. We also invite you to stay connected to us by following Arkus on LinkedIn, and subscribing to our newsletter and events lists, using the form in the sidebar to the right.