Jessie joined Salesforce.org in 2018 to give introductory webinars to nonprofit customers. She now is a Senior Solution Developer supporting nonprofits and education customers at Salesforce. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own or those of the contributors. She's spent 17 years more or less in CRMs and databases, but didn't meet Salesforce until 2011. Jessie co-led the Seattle Salesforce Nonprofit User Group in 2015-2016. She wrote a sh*tty first draft of a novel and hopes to turn it into a screenplay!
Allow experience users to select a record by clicking on a joy-filled image instead of choosing from a boring old list view. Spark joy by adding records to a CMS Collection and adding fields to the object for your image, tagline, etc. and creating a (behind the scenes) boring old list view.
Happy pride month!
This example is for a community foundation – a nonprofit that helps donors give their money to other organizations that match their passions, like the Seattle Foundation or the Columbus Foundation. Above we see a selection of LGBTQIA organizations and below Animal Welfare orgs.
Want more practice learning Salesforce? Don’t have experience beyond Trailhead? Build an app to help you track good or bad habits. This is a win-win-win: hone your app builder skills, improve your habits, and you’ll have a cool app to show off in job interviews.
Salesforce Skills Used
Create a custom object and fields
Create reports
Create dashboard components
Make it mobile friendly
Problem solving: how to turn real life issues into measurable data
Send email every 3 days with stats
Bonus: Screen flow for easy tracking
My version: Migraine Tracking App
Forget record-triggered flows or apex triggers. The real demons are migraine triggers. I want to build an app to track when I have one of my trigger foods and when I have symptoms.
I have a threshold for tolerance of delicious triggers. I can eat some chocolate, dairy or red wine without reaching the threshold and getting sick, but I don’t know what the threshold is. Can building my own tracking app help?
UPDATE 1/13/23: If you’re installing today from AppExchange, it’s a new version 1.4 that you can run by running a flow called Year End Tax Flow. New detailed instructions below. To install the new version, please uninstall the old version first! Go to Setup, search for “Installed Packages,” find “Year End Tax” and uninstall that.
Easy peasy list of all last year’s donations
Send your donors (contact records only) a tax receipt at the beginning of the new year listing all of last year’s donations. For Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack users, this unmanaged package will generate a table for each donor listing the gifts they made last year. Use your own email to send a tax receipt by email. The table lists the amount, date and, optionally, the campaign name of each donation.
Package includes this sample template.
Thanks for the great app, just in time…Simple, easy, elegant, and just what we needed.
The flow will display either a photo or remind you to upload one. On any object!
How It Works:
The Flow looks for a file attached to that record with the title “SalesforcePhoto” (or another phrase of your choosing).
The File gets the title from the name of the file when you upload it. If you upload SalesforcePhoto.jpg, the title becomes “SalesforcePhoto.” You could also open the File details in Salesforce and change the title.
If not found, it asks you to upload a file from your computer named SalesforcePhoto and attaches it to that record. From then on the, the flow displays the photo!
We are using the app because constituents and donors are more than just a record, and seeing their faces humanizes the data.
Invocable methods used with Flow allow you to launch something in an admin friendly format that uses the massive power of Apex. For example, you have an intake screen that collects answers to a few questions, then you use Apex to loop through many related records dispersing those answers in places hard to reach from Flow.
Creating an invocable method in a nutshell: First you write an apex class with @invocable method (label and description) and whatever code you want the apex to do (easy, right?) Then make your Flow including your input and output variables. Then add an Apex action in Flow to send/receive those variables.
Here are some things I learned about sending data between Flow and Apex.
This is NOT an exhaustive list at all. I didn’t try sending a record variable (not just the ID from Flow), but I assume that will work. There are also generic sObjects that are pretty special, but I didn’t try.
“Here is the use case: sending a family of a deceased relative one letter with all the names of people who have donated in memoriam. So, one letter to the family for many people who gave. Client is a large hospice so this is happening weekly. Open to different options — apps? exports & merge? other? Thanks!”
Well, I’m a few months late, but here you go, Rob. I made a Flow that sends out an email like the one below. I see now that you said “letter”…oops. Hopefully you figured out a solution by now, anyway!
Broad use case: Use the new Collection Sort feature in Flow to find a specific number of records that meet your criteria, and sort them with one or more criteria (criterion?)
Example use cases: I want my top 3 open opps to have a giant dollar sign image on them or I want to automatically nudge/shame the five users who logged in least last month or I want to focus a campaign on my most active volunteers in the summer.
Our specific case: I want to look at a contact record in Nonprofit Success Pack and see immediately that they are one of my top ten donors.
