NPSP – Sunshine and Other Unhandled Exceptions

Use Your Tech Skills for Good on Sep. 26-27

A bunch of friendly Salesforce users, community members, staff and partners are getting together virtually to help make Salesforce even better for nonprofits and educational institutions at the Virtual Commons Community Sprint on September 26 and 27th.

And my Unsubscribe Link App will be a part of it! This app allows you to send emails from Salesforce that your recipients can unsubscribe from — without purchasing a fancy tool or doing any integration.

The app will soon be listed as part of the Salesforce.org Commons on the AppExchange making it no longer my app but a community supported app. Be a part of it!

Start Generating Fake Data with Snowfakery

How to Connect Your Org to Snowfakery

Snowfakery is a free and open source tool used to generate and insert fake data into Salesforce (and more!).

In this post I’m going to show you how to get started as quickly as possible using existing “recipes” or instructions for what data you want to create. Something like… I want a pinch of Accounts in Michigan, a heaping tablespoon of Contacts with ages ranging from 18 to 24, and 2 cups of Opportunities closed won.

Snowfakery?

We aren’t going to write our own recipes to get started today. The documentation on how to create Snowfakery recipes (and this excellent training video from 2021) will help you with recipe creation, but there are plenty of existing recipes to utilize. Let’s go!

How to Modify a SOQL Query with Two Objects

A SOQL query pulls certain records and fields into Apex Code. This post explains a SOQL query that includes Contacts and their related Opportunities from the Year End Tax Receipt app, but I aim to help you understand SOQL in general.

For those of you that want to modify the Year End Tax Receipt for your specific donors:

Follow along with this post to modify which records will be displayed in the table of gifts last year. We’ll look at an example of only included gifts marked tax deductible.
Look at the original post to learn how to modify which columns appear in the gift table.

Understand the SOQL

Here’s my SOQL query. This is how I get the records and fields that I’m going to do something with later on in the code.

1 [SELECT LastName, id,Gifts_Last_Year__c, 

2 (SELECT Id, CloseDate, Amount FROM Opportunities 
                                                                                  
3 WHERE CALENDAR_YEAR(CloseDate) =:year 

4 AND IsWon = True 

5 ORDER BY CloseDate) 

6 FROM Contact WHERE npo02__OppAmountLastYear__c > 0 

7 WITH SECURITY_ENFORCED]

How to Use the Migrate to Flow Tool and Recreate Your Workflow Tasks

The Migrate to Flow tool can quickly move your Workflows to Flows, but it can’t recreate your tasks. I’m here to teach you how to do that.

In this how-to-video, you can learn along with the Salesforce Nonprofit User group in San Francisco, how to:

Use the Migrate to Flow Tool

Create a task in Flow (jump to this point in video)

Assign the task to user in a way that works in the sandbox and production (jump to this point in the video)

My section of the video is the first 30 minutes. Thanks to the user group for having me!

Learn more about migrating to flow on the Salesforce Admin’s blo g .

Year End Tax Receipt for Donors

Update 1/20/2025: Added instructions on how to change on column.

Update 1/3/2024: Added instructions on how to re-run the data a year later.

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.

Thanks for the great app, just in time…Simple, easy, elegant, and just what we needed.
David, Eaglesrest.org

So you still want to Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit?

Here’s what you need to know.

By Gordon Lee

Before the proverbial ink dried on the first article on why you shouldn’t Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit, I could already sense the exceptions the community would raise that I didn’t have the time to address. The Salesforce Trailblazer Community, after all, is made up of passionate tech nerds who have a keen eye in finding exceptions to things. It’s in our nature since we have to sniff out those nuances to be great at what we do.

Folks sent in anecdotes, counter-points, and personal stories about how their experiences were mutually beneficial and what I put out there was a disservice to the nonprofit world. My opinion is that those experiences are the exception, and don’t reflect the greater trend of nonprofits that are harmed when a volunteer is only using them to get experience.

Nevertheless, there is merit in the exceptions raised. So, this follow-up aims to address those exceptions, and clarify when it is a good idea to Salesforce volunteer at a nonprofit.

Send Tables in Email in Flow – NPSP Example #2 Memorial Gifts

This is the second in a series on sending email with an embedded table of records of NPSP objects. The first post was a list of payments.

“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!”
Rob aske d in the Power of Us Hub, back in April

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!

Install this unmanaged package to try it out.

Use Summer ’21 Flow Collection Sort to Label Top Ten Donors

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.

Install this unmanaged package to try it out.

Should My Donation Page Default to Recurring Monthly Gifts? Ask Trump

On Tuesday, I gave a webinar with 4 tips to improve your online fundraising. Tip #3: “Thoughtfully set up recurring gifts.” Well, “thoughtfully” means two things: 1) with a lot of thought and 2) “with consideration for the needs of other people.” (Google’s English Dictionary). I meant both.

When the Trump’s campaign set up their donation pages with WinRed, they used deceptive design techniques to trick people into recurring and multiple gifts, says The New York Times. According to Harry Brignull, a user-experience designer quoted in the article, “the Trump team’s techniques were a classic of the ‘deceptive design’ genre. ‘It should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do,’ he said.”

In the webinar I suggested that organizations test out defaulting to recurring gifts to see how that works for them. One of my colleagues who has thoroughly studied the success of online fundraising efforts advised me against straight out recommending organizations default to recurring because it really depends on the donor base.

Send Emails with Tables in Flow – NPSP Example with Payments

This post is building on the work of the super-smarty Narender Singh aka ForcePanda aka @Nads_P07. With Spring ’21 rich text emails, you can now send tables with lists of child objects.

I followed his tutorial and built two flows specifically using Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) objects. The first one is a list of payments and the second is a list of completed volunteer activities. I’ll blog about the second one later. Also on the to-do list is to make one that lists all the gifts received in memory or in tribute to someone else.