July 2022

Inspiration

My favorite Flows right now:

• Delete old email templates
• Delete very old Payments (I’ll probably be writing a very similar one to delete very old Campaign Member records soon.)
• Send email with the day’s important membership metrics
• Send warning emails to donors with upcoming annual recurring donations
• A weekly scan of Accounts to create cultivation tasks for fundraisers

NPSP Summer ’22 Release

There was an issue where some people couldn’t create or edit Recurring Donations, which was patched on June 22nd. If you had that problem and it vanished – you weren’t making it up!

NPSP Summer ’22 was released in mid-May. The release notes are here, but my favorite updates are:

• Account and Contact Sustainer Fields, which indicate if Account or Contact is an active, lapsed or former recurring donor.
• The All Household Members Deceased field lets you know that all the Contacts in a Household Account are marked deceased.
• Recurring Donation Status Automation – lets you create settings to automatically change the Recurring Donation status when a donor misses payments.

These are all things that you might have developed your own workarounds for. When you’ve got time and if you’re able, I always recommend using the NPSP standard versions of things rather than your own custom version. NPSP is always bug-fixing and updating, and it is easier to benefit from those improvements if you’re using the standard things. In addition, having two versions of something gets confusing really fast, and you can’t delete the NPSP version! Using the standard option whenever you’re able means that your future job is easier, and whoever inherits the org from you will have an easier job.

Salesforce Summer ’22 Release

Summer ’22 is live, and even if you don’t care about anything else, I really recommend that you start taking advantage of Dynamic Related Lists. A really simple use case that most users appreciate is to separate out Closed Won Opportunities. Salesforce Ben has a nice explanation. Many of us have done various things over the years to get functionality like this, but this is another case where switching from a custom solution to using the simple, out-of-the-box option will save you money and headaches in the future.