What is a “Customer Relationship Management” database?
Salesforce is a specific type of database focused on “Customer Relationship Management” (CRM). The idea behind a CRM is that you want to track more than just info about your Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, etc (link) – you also want to track communication, specifically (1) communication with your staff and folks external to your organization and (2) communication between your staff about the work at hand.
Tracking Communication with External Contacts
This is part of a series of posts providing a basic introduction to what Salesforce is and how it can be useful to you and your nonprofit. Click here to see all of the posts in this series.
Below is a screenshot of an example of Salesforce tracking external communications. It’s called an “Activity Feed”. Below shows a log of emails and calls (highlighted). You can click into each of email and call to see further details.
You can also log events and tasks on the Activity Feed. Additional plugins (some free, some paid) also allow you to track texts and other forms of communication too.
These Activity Feeds can be added to records representing people such as Accounts and Contacts (as show above), and they can also be added to records representing things – logging calls and emails about a particular donation or grant or program service.
Calls, email, events, etc can also all be logged to multiple types of records at the same time. You can log the same email to an Account, Contact, and Donation all at once.
I mentioned Events and Tasks just now (which both show will also show up on the Activity Feed), so let me explain the very basics of how those work in Salesforce.
Tasks
Salesforce has a built in to-do list feature using Tasks. You can relate a task to an Account, Contact, Opportunity, or anything. You can also set a status (i.e. “Not Yet Started”, “In Progress”, etc), priority (Low, Normal, High), and a Due Date. In the example below, a Task was created for Patrick to invite Evan Evanston to the nonprofit’s annual fundraising gala. Patrick’s due date to complete this task is 7/22/22. He’ll need to mark the task complete once he’s done. If he doesn’t complete by the due date, the task will automatically get flagged as overdue.
Events
Salesforce has a Calendar feature that works like a Google or Outlook calendar. You can create events, associate them with other Salesforce users, Contacts, Accounts, or almost anything. There are also ways to sync your Salesforce calendar with either a Google or Outlook calendar as well.
And here’s a simple version of an individual event.
Tracking Communication: The Benefits
So why bother tracking emails, calls, events, and tasks in Salesforce? There are many benefits.
First, it provides continuity when a staff member isn’t available. If all the interactions between your organization and a contact can only be found in a staff member’s email inbox and that person leaves for an extended period of time (sickness, quitting, vacation), it’s going to be challenging.
Second, tracking communication provides transparency when multiple staff are interacting with the same person. In the example above, both Patrick and Cindy are interacting with the same donor, and they can both see what the other has done.
Third, it provides a thorough history of what’s happened. It’s not realistic to expect to remember every interaction you have with somebody. Communication histories can span years. The ability to quickly review previous communication greatly enhances your interactions.
Tracking Communication Between Your Staff - Chatter
In addition to logging communication between you and folks external to your organization, you can also track internal conversations amongst Salesforce users. The best way to do this is with a Salesforce tool called “Chatter”. It looks and functions like a Facebook newsfeed, and each individual record has its own. You can post comments, images, and much more.
You can put a Chatter feed on any type of record. This one below shows the Chatter feed for the Evanston Account, but we could also put a Chatter feed on a Contact, Opportunity, or almost anything that you want the ability to collaborate on.
You can even run polls.
There’s a lot more features to Chatter, but I’ll leave it here for this post.
Approvals
Another type of internal communication tool is Salesforce Approvals.
Salesforce has a built-in way for Salesforce users to request approval for something from another Salesforce user (most often their supervisor, but it’s flexible). The approver receives an approval request and then can either approve it, reject it, or reassign the approval decision to someone else.
These “Approval Processes” are always customized for your specific needs. They can be very simple or quite complicated depending on what your organization requires. I’ll provide a few real examples of Approval Processes I’ve created for my nonprofit clients to help illustrate how they work.
Service Plan Approval
One of my clients has a process by which a staff member creates a Service Plan for their client. A Service Plan outlines basic client information, client goals, and strategies to meet those goals. Once the staff member completes the Service Plan, they send it to their manager for review and then approval.
Here’s how the process works in Salesforce. When a staff member completes a Service Plan, they submit it to their manager using the “Submit for Approval” button.
When submitting, the staff member can send comments along with the approval request.
Their manager now receives both an email and in-app Salesforce notification alerting them to the approval request. Here’s what the email looks like.
The manager can now log into Salesforce, review the service plan, and can either approve it, reject it, or reassign the approval to someone else. The manager can also include notes with their decision.
Timesheet Approval
Here’s another example from the same nonprofit. They needed another Approval Process for staff to submit their bi-monthly timesheet to their manager for payroll purposes. Before submitting the timesheet, staff check for inaccuracies in their time entries and fix everything. After it’s error-free, they submit it to their manager for approval. And when the manager approves the timesheet, the related time entries are frozen from further editing (for accounting and payroll reasons).
The manager can also see a list of Approvals that are waiting for their decision, which includes both timesheet approvals as well as Service Plan approvals. No need to manually keep track of what needs to be done next, since Salesforce does it for you.
Nonprofits grow to love Salesforce Approval processes because they remember what these kinds of processes were like before Salesforce – manual tracking, input errors, things getting lost, 10 people using 10 different ways to do the same thing, etc. With Salesforce it’s standardized, so much is automated, and it’s all automatically tracked.
Conclusion
Most Salesforce users interact with Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities the vast majority of the time they spend on Salesforce, so you’re now even closer to understanding the foundation of what Salesforce has to offer. Remember though, Salesforce is infinitely flexible to your needs, and all my clients optimize their Salesforce systems through customizations.
The built in ways to track communication with external Contacts as well as for staff to collaborate internally are universally useful. And there are host of other features you can utilize, depending on how you’d like to structure your system.
Book a free 15 minute call with me to chat about your organization and how we can utilize Salesforce’s NPSP and core features to save you hours of time.
And also please keep reading to dive deeper into what Salesforce has to offer!