Book Image

Accelerating Nonprofit Impact with Salesforce

By : Melissa Hill Dees
Book Image

Accelerating Nonprofit Impact with Salesforce

By: Melissa Hill Dees

Overview of this book

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud enables a 360-degree view of people related to your nonprofit to connect fundraising, program management, and grantmaking. With a single, unified view of every interaction with constituents, nonprofits can create strong relationships with the community and streamline internal processes. The book starts by covering the tools and features that make up Nonprofit Cloud, helping you understand their standard functionalities and how Nonprofit Success Pack's (NPSP) data architecture is critical to implementation. You’ll learn how the Nonprofit Cloud Program Management Module can connect your programs, automate case management, and track client progress. Next, you’ll explore the tools for creating a change management process to increase user adoption. Moving ahead, you’ll understand how to configure necessary permissions for NPSP administration and explore how declarative tools help better align the goals of a nonprofit organization. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll cover customizations, deployment, custom reports, and dashboards for fundraising analytics, as well as best practices for data management to maintain its integrity. By the end of this Salesforce book, you’ll be able to build and configure the Nonprofit Cloud for a variety of use cases to achieve maximum social impact with the least amount of technical debt.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Get Ready – Learn the Basics of NPSP
8
Section 2: Get Set – Correlating Need with Nonprofit Cloud Tools
14
Section 3: Go! – Data for Impact

How to create custom test data

There are several different use cases for custom test data in Nonprofit Cloud. Let's look at three of them and the best ways to create the custom test data to be used:

  1. Test new releases: NPSP has biweekly bug fixes in addition to Salesforce's three feature releases per year.
  2. New functionality: Testing for new functionality by developers, QA, and UAT.
  3. Training: Internal training in Salesforce.

Test data doesn't sound like it should be difficult, right? But it can be. You want to be sure that every worst-case scenario is explored and anything that might befuddle the new functionality, release, or user input is tested. From a trust and security perspective, you don't want to use private information to do this.

When I first began, I laboriously created an entire set of custom data to use in a demo instance. I carefully pulled out all the required fields as well as the preferable ones, specifically for a volunteer...