A Very Brief History of Salesforce as It Relates to Nonprofits.
Salesforce is a database system that was built for sales teams of for-profit companies to track and analyze customer interactions and information. While most nonprofits don’t typically have sales teams, most nonprofits DO track a lot of information about clients, donors, households, donations, programs, communication, staff, etc.
Nonprofits also need to summarize data into reports, tailor their database to their unique needs, and automate administrative tasks. Salesforce does all that really, really well. And it’s free for nonprofits with fewer than ten Salesforce users and heavily discounted for those with more than ten.
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.
Salesforce became the top nonprofit database for three main reasons.
- One, it’s the most customizable database option out there – you can really make it do whatever you need. You can customize it to gather data for new programs, make alerts for due dates, automate repetitive tasks, and integrate other kinds of software and computer programs.
- Two, Salesforce specifically created a donor-management module for nonprofit fundraising. Most nonprofits I work with utilize Salesforce for a lot beyond fundraising, but the donor-management module is a big part of why it’s become a staple in the nonprofit world.
- Three, as I mentioned before, Salesforce gives ten free user licenses to all 501c3 nonprofits, and heavy discounts on top of that too. Many of the nonprofits I work with have never paid Salesforce a single penny after using Salesforce for many years.
That’s the brief introduction. Now I’ll show you what Salesforce actually looks like.
Salesforce has Three Main Views and Two Different Types of Navigation
There are three main types of views in Salesforce, and once you’ve seen them, you’ll have a a really good idea of what Salesforce generally looks like. I used the word “generally” because Salesforce is so customizable that – like snowflakes – no two Salesforce databases will look exactly the same.
The three main views are (1) Record Pages, (2) List Views, and (3) Reports and Dashboards.
There are also two different types of navigation, Standard and Console. I’ll explain the difference between these later, as well as what “different types of navigation” means at all.
I’ll start explaining the three main views, starting with record pages.
The Three Main Views
1. Record Pages
A record page shows you information about a single record.
If you’re used to spreadsheets, a Salesforce “record” is the equivalent of a “row” in a spreadsheet, but displayed differently. Here’s an example of what a record looks like in a spreadsheet. It’s a spreadsheet of contacts and the row for Liam Lopez is highlighted.
Now let’s see what the “row” for Liam Lopez looks like as a Salesforce record. You can see the same basic data about Liam including his full name, birthdate, age, email, phone, and address. On the right-hand side, you can see that he doesn’t have any files uploaded and doesn’t have any events.
Currently we’re on the “Details” tab within Liam's contact, but let’s click on the “Related” tab. In the screenshot below, we can now see “Addresses”, “Employments”, and “Goals”. These are all different kinds of “related records” for Liam.
The “Addresses” is a collection of his previous addresses (with move-in and move-out dates). “Employments” is a collection of his employment history with wages and employer contact info. And “Goals” are a collection of his current goals with the nonprofit.
They’re called “related records” because they technically are different records from Liam’s contact record, but they’re still related to him. If I click on one of these related records, let’s say one of the Goal records, it opens a new Record View of Liam’s goal, which you can see below.
To sum up, we looked at two record views. The first was Liam’s contact record. And then we clicked on one of his goals, and we saw one of Liam’s goal records. Both were record views.
Our example with Liam is fairly straightforward because it contains just a few fields and a few related records (if you've never seen Salesforce before, it might already look a bit complicated, but I guarantee you'll get used to it after a few weeks of using it).
And remember, record pages are extremely customizable. We can create any field we want and add it to the record page. We can add as many related records as we want. And there are a ton of other components you can put on a record view page (but that’s for a different post).
Here’s Liam’s record below with more fields and more kinds of related records (Animals, Benefits, etc) as well as other components. Salesforce is extremely customizable and already has a ton of built-in capabilities very useful for nonprofits.
We’ve now covered record pages, one of the three main types of views in Salesforce. Next, we'll look at List Views.
2. List Views
The second main type of view in Salesforce is a List View. This shows a list of records. Just now, we were looking at Liam’s record via a Record Page.
Here we see Liam’s record (highlighted) as just one of many records on a List View. We can also see Aaron, Ben, Camille, Daniela, Evie… and so on. It looks like a spreadsheet in many ways since it's structured with rows and columns.
List Views are very customizable in two main ways.
The first is filters. We can add filters so that we only see the records that we want to see. For example, using filters (on the right-hand side), we can decide to only see contacts who are between the ages of 40 and 65.
The second way to customize List Views is through choosing the display fields. In the screenshot above, you can see these fields displayed: “Name” (full name), “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Birthdate”, and “Age”.
But let’s say we want to see different columns for our clients ages 40-65. We want to see their “Name” (full name), “Favorite Color”, “Age”, “City”, and “Email”.
We can do that too, as seen below.
And then, once we’ve configured the filters and display fields to our specifications, we can then save our unique configuration of filter and field displays as “List View” for later use.
If I click on the down triangle next to the List View Name, I can see all the saved List Views (for Contacts) to choose from.
This means we only have to set up the filters and display fields of a particular List View once. Then, we can come back to it any time we want with just a few clicks – and it will always contain the most up-to-date data.
If you have a particular list view that you always want to default to, you can also use the pushpin icon to set it as your default.
We just covered the second main type of screen in Salesforce, the List Views.
On to the third and final: Reports and Dashboards.
3. Reports And Dashboards
Dashboards are simply collections of reports. Now I'll explain what a report in Salesforce is.
A report looks and acts very similarly to a List View because you add filters and choose the display fields.
BUT there are four unique features that reports have that List Views do not.
First, reports have much more advanced capacities like summing columns or grouping things together. In the example below, the report is pulling from 294 different donation records across the 8 different donors shown to calculate the total donation amount for each of the donors.
“Total Records” and “Record Count” (both 294) refer to the *number* of individual donations (not the summed *amount* of total money). The bottom “Total” row (in light blue) shows both the sum of the donations (“Sum of Donation Amount” column which is $55,230.00) and the number of individual donations (“Record Count” column, which is 294).
We can also filter these results. In this case, we have a filter for donors aged 50 or younger, so all of the results we’re seeing is for this subset of donors.
The second main difference between reports and List Views is that reports can be exported to an excel file. You can’t do that with a list view.
And you can export two different ways. This screenshot below shows the summarized version that we’ve been looking at in Salesforce.
But you can also export all the rows (so you’d get all 294 donations, not just the summarized version), such as in the screenshot below.
The third big difference between Reports and List Views is that you can make advanced charts with Reports. The Report below shows the number of hours worked each month (and the different colors in each column represent the hours of a particular staff member). It’s drawing from 5,899 different “Time Log” records that staff made documenting their time with clients.
The fourth difference is that you can put many reports together to make a dashboard. Here’s an example dashboard below. All of these charts and tables represent a different report.
As I mentioned earlier, dashboards are simply collections of reports. They can display many different types of graphs and tables.
And with that, we’ve covered reports and dashboards, the third and final type of view in Salesforce. You have now seen what 95% of what Salesforce is generally going to look like when you use it.
Let me also point out one more feature that has been in many of the screenshots so far.
The Main Search Bar
At the top of almost every screenshot is the main search bar (highlighted in yellow below).
The Main Search Bar does what its name suggests. You can search every record of any kind in the entire database. If we type in “David” we get the results below.
Note that it’s showing us some records for “David Davis” but also showing us some records for “Daniela Davis” – that’s because Salesforce knows we often make little typos and is also showing us results for “Davis” (with an ‘S’ at the end) in addition to "David".
The Main Search Bar is one of the best ways to navigate around Salesforce, and it’s always there at the top of the page no matter whether we’re looking at a Record View, List View, or Report/Dashboard.
The Main Search Bar is also there no matter which type of “navigation type” you’re using. Now, I’ll explain what "navigation type" means.
Two Different Types of Navigation
The easiest way to explain “navigation type” is simply to show you.
Console Navigation
You’ve already seen part of what console navigation offers because that’s what the screenshots so far have shown.
Console navigation uses tabs (like web browsers). It also has subtabs. I’ve highlighted the tab in yellow and the subtabs in green.
The console navigation also has a main drop-down menu which you can use to look at different *kinds* of records. In the screenshot below, you can choose to go to the home page, contacts, reports, dashboards, accounts, animals, assets/debts, background and credit. If you click on any of these, it will take you to a List View of that kind of record.
If I scroll down the console navigation menu and choose “Goal” it will bring me to a List View for Goals.
The last main feature of the console navigation is that you can choose to show a List View and a Record Page simultaneously.
The screenshot below shows what this looks like. It shows the list view on the left side of the screen and the record page on the right. You can open and close this split view using the tiny little triangle on the vertical bar that divides them.
Standard Navigation
The second type of navigation is the standard navigation. As opposed to console navigation, standard navigation (1) doesn’t prioritize tabs; (2) doesn’t have the console menu; and (3) doesn’t have the option for the split screen between the List View and Record page.
Instead of the dropdown console menu, the standard navigation has the menu at the top, laid out horizontally.
If you click on the down arrow near one of the menu options, you’ll get a submenu of options. They include recently opened records (bringing you to the Record Page for those) and recently opened List Views.
If I choose “Liam Lopez” from the submenu it opens his contact record. Looking at the screenshot below, the record looks exactly the same as it does in the console version. The only difference here is we still have the standard horizontal menu at the top, vs tabs and the console dropdown menu.
It IS possible to add this record as a tab using the submenu.
But it doesn’t happen automatically as it does with the console navigation. With the standard navigation, all the main menu options will always be at the top too.
And with that, you now know the main differences between the console and standard navigation types.
Closing
Congrats! You’ve completed this introduction to Salesforce and now you understand the basic structure! There are a million more things you can do with Salesforce, but you’ve now got a good overview.
Ready to chat about how to better structure and manage your organization’s data? Click below to book a free 15 minute consultation call with me today.
And also please keep reading to dive deeper into what Salesforce has to offer!