Soapbox Engage Blog

PICnet is proud to welcome CloudFixer as the latest certified Soapbox Engage Partner. CloudFixer automatically improves, cleans and maintains your Salesforce instance for you. In this guest blog post, they share tips from their data custodial expertise that can benefit your nonprofit.

By Ehren Foss, Founder and Managing Partner of CloudFixer

This nonprofit-focused Salesforce stuff is pretty snazzy, don’t you think? People are building everything from online fundraising apps and wealth data sources to special migration tools and lots of other things to lower the cost of doing good.

Soapbox Engage and Soapbox Mailer for Salesforce have assembled several widely trusted components (Joomla and Amazon Web Services) into something many nonprofits need, like simple event signups, donation forms, and a mass email tool integrating with Salesforce.  These basic components can be quite a challenge to assemble and interconnect without a service like Engage.

It's the "little" things that can bog down a DIY nonprofit person, like mobile-friendly templates. Having many of these snags taken care of by the platform is a plus. I also like how Soapbox unobtrusively inserts data as Leads, thereby working more seamlessly with the many different Salesforce data models we've seen in the wild.

One other "little thing" that can drag down your organization is data hygiene. If you aren’t careful, you might not end up so happy with duplicates, staff turnover, and unused reports.

I don’t like to hear that an organization switches CRMs every few years.  Usually, they switch not because the software is bad, but because nobody is taking care of the data, and nobody remembers how hard the last migration was.  It’s much more expensive to pay consultants to clean and fix everything every few years than it is to keep stuff healthy from the start.

We built the CloudFixer Analyzer to help both clean data simplify your CRM. It saves an administrator over a week’s worth of pulling reports and combing through data; the report scans all your Salesforce data to point out potential problems you didn’t know you had.  Plus, we’re focused on nonprofits, which means we’ve added lots of checks and best practices related to the Nonprofit Starter Pack and other apps like Blackbaud’s Common Ground.

But products aside, how, among your half a dozen existing jobs, can you find time to stay ahead of the curve?  Here are three of my favorite recommendations:

• If you add something, delete something.  Need to add a new custom field?  Take a quick look at some of the fields you added last year.  Are there some that are mostly empty and unused?  Install Field Trip and have a look, and then kiss your cruft goodbye.  Same goes for tabs, reports, email templates, and anything else:  The fewer things in your Salesforce instance, the easier they are to manage.  You don’t need it all.
• Preventative medicine.  Tired of duplicates?  Tighten up your forms and data entry practices so they don’t appear in the first place.  Is weird data making your reports inaccurate?  Fix your data inputs now before it leads your Executive Director to make the wrong decision next year.
• Look and listen.  Sit down with each user and watch them work. Be ready for an earful.  You’ll be able to catch their reasons now for abandoning Salesforce later and going back to spreadsheets. It’s the little stuff that doesn’t come up in meetings - a few extra clicks doesn’t sound too bad to you, but you aren’t the one doing them 300 times a day.  Plus, if you show them a handy shortcut they weren’t aware of, you might even get a hug.

We built the Analyzer to help get an organization with skeletons in their closet back on their feet.  It saves at least a week of running reports, and makes the cleanup process much faster.  As your data from Soapbox Engage starts to flow, check out CloudFixer to keep your CRM data clean from day one!