by Rachel Natik | Jun 20, 2017 | Blog
LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE Since August 25, 2015, the Salesforce ecosystem has been buzzing with excitement over the Lightning Experience, a revolutionary update to Salesforce as we know it. Lightning, or LEX as it is often called, is more than just a visual change. It will change the future of Salesforce and how we all use it. The Lightning framework allows a user to create custom pages and layouts, using standard and custom components, while greatly enhancing the user experience and interface. Lightning has become famous for its drag and drop Opportunity Board, customizable Home Page, redesigned List Views, enhanced Dashboard layouts and assistant led record pages. Other features native to LEX are the sleek and more responsive interface, improved Lookup fields that auto-search records as you type, and an enhanced date picker field. In January 2017, Congregation Connect shared that switching to Lightning was on the roadmap. Attendees at the NATA/NASA conference were shown a high-level demonstration of what LEX would look like down the road. We are excited to announce that the School Module is fully Lightning ready. Over the summer, all Congregation Connect instances will be introduced to some Lightning properties in the School Module. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU? For this release, Congregation Connect users do not need to take any specific actions to utilize the Lightning features. The release is built directly into the Classic experience and will be accessible once our next release is generally available. Users will have the same functionality they have had until now, with an upgraded interface. The School Module contains 5 features that have been upgraded to LEX: Schedule Meetings Button: Users will continue accessing...
by Rachel Natik | Jul 14, 2016 | Blog
Congregation Connect is a managed application on the Salesforce platform for synagogues to manage their members. Below, we have compiled a list of the top 10 reasons Synagogues are using Congregation Connect. 1. It’s in the cloud. Congregation Connect is completely based online and can be accessed anywhere, at any time – as long as you have internet access! You are no longer limited to servers or your office computer. Easily connecting with your congregation, and having a dynamic, up-to-date view of your organization has never been easier. Our scheduled releases are automatically pushed into the system, without requiring you to download or install anything. 2. It’s mobile! Yes, more than being cloud-based, Congregation Connect is easily accessible from your mobile phone or tablet. With a simple navigation menu and intuitive functionality, you can have a 360 degree view of your synagogue at any given moment. A few screen clicks is all it takes to record a visit with a congregant, update contact information, or create an internal follow-up task. These are just some use cases of what can be done with Salesforce1 – the mobile app. 3. It’s for synagogues. Congregation Connect was designed to suit the religious needs of synagogues. With 3 complete synagogue modules (Financials, Membership, School) we have all the components you need to manage your organization. Some of our most popular features includes Yahrzeit tracking, Torah readings (Aliyot), automatic Hebrew date conversions, and Religious/Hebrew School enrollment. 4. It’s functional. Being a synagogue administrator can be a rather complex position with multiple duties and various details and task to track. Congregation Connect offers an abundance of functions to cover all your...
by Cloud for Good Blog | Jun 30, 2015 | Blog
Data is a four letter word, but it doesn’t have to be a dirty one. Clean and complete data means trustworthy data, and trustworthy data is what will ensure user adoption at your organization. Importing and maintaining clean data can feel like a daunting chore, especially when you’re just getting up and running in Salesforce, but there are a number of tools to lighten your load. These range from the basic import wizards and merge tools that are built into Salesforce, to a number of more powerful applications. And the really good news is, all of it, even the third-party programs, are free to Nonprofits, so there’s no added cost to making sure you avoid the heavy price of dirty data. Best Practices: Start by Improving the quality of your data files Whether you need to load data records into Salesforce for the first time, or you want to improve the quality of the data that’s already in your system, or you need to augment that data with new information, there are some best practices you should follow before running any imports. No tool will perform its functions well if the file you’re importing with it contains sloppy or incomplete data. Your first step should always be to do some basic level of cleanup on the data files you plan to import. This can include: Put First Names and Last Names in separate fields. Unless your constituents are pop singers and Brazilian soccer players, they probably have at least two names, and you should load them that way. Last Name should be 100% populated. Keep the data in your...
by Cloud for Good Blog | Jun 23, 2015 | Blog
There are times, in the life of a database administrator, when you just have to go back to good ol’ Excel. We use it for taking data apart, for finding duplicates and flagging them, for sorting up and down to find anomalies and errors. We use it to replace whole columns of one number with another. Francis Scudellari from the Cloud for Good team started this discussion with this excellent post, Keeping it Clean: The Data Import Basics. Check that out to get started thinking about your data importing. One of the most common uses, however is for putting cells TOGETHER. Usually this happens when I have a FirstName column and a LastName column and we need a Full Name column also. Sometimes we need to put one line of the address together with the second line. Excel calls this function “concatenation,” but I always think of it as “sticking things together.” Let’s see just how easy this is. We start with a name issue. Here we have a list of names. Some are husbands and wives, but for the first example, all we want to do is get full names for everybody. Say I’m addressing envelopes for an invitation and I want to invite each individual. I’ve exported my contacts pages, and I’m looking at split names. I need to find a way to get them all into one cell. Click the formula button above your table. It looks like fx. Notice that I’ve already created the “destination” column. Your concatenation needs someplace to go! Insert function comes up and CONCATENATE is at the top of the list!...
by Cloud for Good Blog | Jun 16, 2015 | Blog
This is a cross post from the Cloud for Good blog. As Francis wrote a few weeks ago, it’s important to import clean data into your Salesforce system. Gaining & keeping users’ trust is especially critical at the beginning of a project. When we work on a QuickStart project, the client is always tasked with preparing their data in a spreadsheet file with all the columns named and set-up. Even if you’re paying a consultant to manage your data import, you can save money by making sure you’re giving them the best data possible for import. And consultants won’t be able to catch anomalies in your data the way someone who’s more familiar with it can. Whether you’re migrating from another database, or finally moving away from multiple spreadsheets to manage your data, there are a few principles you want to keep in mind, and some tools you can use in Excel or another spreadsheet program to achieve them. SEPARATING COUPLES’ NAMES Many organizations have data where both members of the couple are listed in one field. If your data has a separate Last Name column, and you have a single column in which couples’ names are together, you’ll want to separate them (unlike Trish’s post from last week about sticking them together). You’ll have a lot more flexibility going forward with Salesforce if we use the 1 Contact = 1 Person concept consistently. What you can do for data import, that will make your data preparation much easier, is to just separate the column with the two first names together into two columns: If there is a mix of “Chris &...
