Author Archives: Anna

When I first started working on Flows, I read this post, which has remained incredibly useful even as Flows have changed and improved. I’ve come back to it several times in the last few months, as I worked on two Screen Flows that needed to do some expensive things in a loop. I know whatContinue reading “September 2023 – Batching in Salesforce Flows”

I started working with Stripe in 2016, and I’ve always really liked it. Back in 2016, Stripe didn’t support recurring payments, which was a problem for the organizations I work with, and there were no good connectors available to connect Stripe and Salesforce. Things have changed a lot since then! Stripe has added more paymentContinue reading “May 2023 – Stripe Connectors”

The non-profit world is changing a lot, and that means that new data sources show up all the time. Some of them are a flash in the pan, and some wind up being core to the organization’s work. I had a great conversation with some organizations recently about how to approach and think about newContinue reading “February 2023 – Thinking about new data sources”

One thing that non-profit Salesforce users run into right away is Accounts and Contacts. If you’re coming from a classic non-profit database, this distinction is confusing, and there’s a real tendency to use Accounts for reports and day to day work. I always encourage people to resist that urge. If you ask your Salesforce expert,Continue reading “December 2022: Why Contacts”

Why your data doesn’t work for you

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 createContinue reading “July 2022”

Inspiration As promised in my last post, I’ve been experimenting with UnofficialSF’s Flow Actions. I’m in love with the Execute SOQL query action. With it, I was able to create a Flow to send a daily email with metrics from Salesforce. The SOQL query lets me do things like get the membership revenue so farContinue reading “April 2022”

Inspiration Lately I’ve been working on some task automation that required code in the past and doesn’t anymore, thanks to Flows.  Flows can replace Workflow Rules and Process Builder for acknowledgement tasks, but Flows can also perform weekly scans of major donor accounts to see who qualifies for a cultivation task. Flows have real potentialContinue reading “February 2022”

Inspiration I’ve been thinking a lot about documentation in the last six months. Across the Salesforce ecosystem, people seem to agree that documenting a Salesforce instance is an ongoing challenge, and there aren’t many best practices or templates to follow. As I’ve worked on various bits of documentation recently, come up with a few guidelinesContinue reading “January 2022”

Inspiration Form Assembly is a tool lots of organizations haven’t heard of, but it is affordable for non-profits and cuts down on manual data entry and/or data imports. An organization I know uses Form Assembly to send out a custom form to donors each year, asking them to provide a mailing address for their donorContinue reading “November/December 2021”