Category: NPSP

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.

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

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 Flow’s 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.

Continue reading Send Emails with Tables in Flow – NPSP Example with Payments

Is there a good, fast, cheap solution for web forms?

transportationchoices
Transportation Choices used a web designer to make their Salesforce Web-to-Lead form all fancy.

QUESTION: How can I make the simplest, cheapest “contact us” web form that will generate a new lead record in Salesforce and that people would actually want to use?

BACKGROUND RESEARCH: I’ve tested Salesforce’s web-to-lead many times in free Google Sites, but research indicates most nonprofits are using WordPress.

HYPOTHESIS: A WordPress site and Salesforce’s ancient web-to-lead form will get the job done.

WEBINAR PLUG: Tomorrow Get Started with Engagement:  Build Web Forms. Tue, Apr 14, 2020 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PDT Continue reading Is there a good, fast, cheap solution for web forms?

Delete Opportunity Contact Roles for Deceased Contacts

Cover image of fictional book
Don’t forget to handle your technical debt in the afterlife.

Question: When a contact dies, how can you use Flow to delete their Opportunity Contact Roles for open opportunities? Answer: With a Loop!

Here’s the unmanaged package.

Use common sense. Install and test thoroughly in a sandbox! You’re deleting records! I made it really quickly and did not test thoroughly!

Here are the requirements as posted by Ashlynn on the Power of Us Hub:

“I am trying to set up an autolaunched flow to remove Opportunity Contact Roles from open opportunities with deceased contacts. (For example, we are soliciting a major gift from a couple, and one of them passes away before the donation is received.) I have successfully configured a process to remove the deceased contact from acknowledgement for that gift when it comes in, but for the sake of clean data I would like to also automatically remove their OCR from the opportunity record. I am coming up with ‘unhandled faults’ and hoping since this is only my 2nd flow ever that someone will be able to see an obvious error with my configuration.

Continue reading Delete Opportunity Contact Roles for Deceased Contacts

A Glorious NPSP Day Seattle

npspday
“Next step in our : The meta-peeps create some organized chaos: What’s unknown in @SalesforceOrg‘s NPSP, at .” Photo &Tweet from @BRCTweets (Barbara Christensen)

Both years I’ve attended NPSP we’ve had incredible weather so the idea of a unhandled sunshine error is not applicable to this magical day.

MOOD of the room: Excited, happy, energized, grateful to be part of this amazing supportive community.

KUDOS: Ryan Ozimek and Katie Fadden are delightful facilitators! Megan and everyone at 501 Commons pulled this off flawlessly the day after Give Big! Congrats to Crystal on the birth of her new baby girl! So much !!!

STRAIGHT TALK: In this segment of the programming, we brought the elephant to the center of the room and talked about the .org acquisition. As a .org employee, I just want to make it clear that the opinions below are those of other folks who attended, some of which I might share, but they by no means reflect any official stance of Salesforce:

  • We want .org or .com to say “IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY. YOU DON’T NEED TO WORRY.”

Continue reading A Glorious NPSP Day Seattle

Printable Donor Profile

Sometimes as a Salesforce admin I’ve been asked to do things which just seem ridiculously old school, not very efficient and may involve actual paper. When I cannot convince someone to click through a few screens, instead of printing or having an email sent to them, it gets my admin panties all in a bunch.  (Wouldn’t that be cool, to have actual admin panties?!)

Sexy Sys Admin Women's Boy Brief
Not actually surprised that these exist! Thanks Cafe Press Canada!
But when working with a nonprofit, you gotta just let it go. And that is how this printable donor profile came into being.

My pro bono client: The Cedar River Clinics, which are fantastic, independent reproductive & LGBTQ health clinics in Renton, Seattle, and Tacoma.

My task:  Create a one-page document with important donor information.  The development director will print the doc and hand it to the executive director to review before she calls a major donor.  Continue reading Printable Donor Profile

When to Include an Unsubscribe Link

The benefits of sending email directly from Salesforce are that you can automate when they go out, you can send up to 5,000 emails per day, and email templates are really simple to set up.

woman using white smartphone on front of table
Dear Asses and Donkeys Trust, I no longer want to receive your email. XOXO, Belinda

But any time you’re emailing groups of people, you should be mindful of the requirements of the CAN-SPAM law (which I just learned isn’t called the “Canned Spam” law). CAN-SPAM requires that emails, in certain scenarios, provide an option for the recipient to unsubscribe.

I am writing to you on my personal blog as a puzzle-solving Salesforce admin, not a Salesforce employee. Your decisions around unsubscribe options can have legal implications for your organization so please do not take anything from this post as legal guidance or means to make your communications legally compliant.  That decision is between you and your lawyers.

Continue reading When to Include an Unsubscribe Link