Category Archives: Uncategorized

June 2025: Experimenting with Data Analyses

There’s a whole set of data analyses that can and should be done at almost any nonprofit, and getting those things set up and communicating about them is a priority when an organization is setting up a new system. Once that’s done, however, a lot of fundraisers have some very specific things they want toContinue reading “June 2025: Experimenting with Data Analyses”

April 2025: Retention

For the past 10 years, I’ve been having conversations with people about retention metrics. It is a really challenging thing to work on for a couple of reasons, none of which are technical! Any time an organization wants retention metrics, I’ve got to dig in to what they mean when they say retention. Is aContinue reading “April 2025: Retention”

March 2025: More Recurring Donations

My update in January was about things that were cropping up around Enhanced Recurring Donations, and while I continue to find bits and bobs that are a bit annoying, I don’t have anything new and interesting to report on that front. I have been spending a lot of time deep in Recurring Donations, however, butContinue reading “March 2025: More Recurring Donations”

January 2025: Enhanced Recurring Update

Back in September, I posted about a recent upgrade I’d done from Legacy Recurring Donations to Enhanced. Since then I’ve learned an additional lesson that seems worth writing down. I started noticing that we had some Recurring Donations that were getting their future pledge created with the wrong Close Date. Some yearly Recurring Donations hadContinue reading “January 2025: Enhanced Recurring Update”

December 2024: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

People I work with frequently assume I work for Salesforce or have worked for Salesforce in the past, and that I’m always going to recommend Salesforce’s solution. None of those things are true! I started using Salesforce (Sales Cloud) because it was the right tool for a particular job. Like most people in the SalesforceContinue reading “December 2024: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”

September 2024: Enhanced Recurring Donation Migration

If you started using Salesforce’s NPSP a while ago, you might have used what are now called Legacy Recurring Donations (LRDs.) They provided some great functionality but there was a fatal flaw (see below) at the center of the implementation. It went wrong one day in March 2018, and sometime after that Salesforce decided toContinue reading “September 2024: Enhanced Recurring Donation Migration”

June 2024: Starting Simple

I’ve worked on several projects this year where the big goal is pretty complex and everyone involved knows it will take a lot of work. The typical way to approach something like this is to understand the requirements for the entire project and then build, test and declare the project finished. Most consulting companies can’tContinue reading “June 2024: Starting Simple”

February 2024 – Survey data

Last year, I worked with an organization to launch a big survey of their members. The organization is small, but the survey is big, and they expect to keep doing it annually for many years. We’d planned on using Form Assembly, but the pricing changes there made that impractical. We switched to Formstack. There areContinue reading “February 2024 – Survey data”