Late Wednesday evening of Dreamforce, I wandered into Moscone West with a distinct purpose: secure Codey, the stuffed bear, to give to my 15-month-old son upon my return home. In the process of tackling the three tasks required to win said bear, I ended up creating a brand new Trailhead account and was instantly hooked on the training opportunities it offered.

Within a month, my Dreamforce-born obsession spurred me to reach the highest Trailhead rank of Ranger and pass the Salesforce Administrator certification exam.

1/10/2018 UPDATE: My son is a month older - and I am an additional certification deeper into my Trailblazer journey after passing the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder today.

1/19/2018 UPDATE: Just passed the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification. Trailhead, ho!

12/26/2018 UPDATE: And Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Consultant certification makes four!

Here are eight observations about my journey for others interested in going from gamified Salesforce learning to real-world certification:

From #GivingTuesday to the end of the giving season, it will be critical for fundraisers to keep close track of progress toward their fundraising goals. For those with Salesforce, you can facilitate that by scheduling a report on that progress so it is emailed to key staff daily. This step-by-step recipe will walk through the creation of a fundraising report and how to schedule its delivery.

For other last minute #GivingTuesday tips, watch our webinar, #GivingTuesday Fundraising for Procrastinators.

As you gear up for #GivingTuesday and the entire end-of-year giving season, context can be critical in goal setting and fundraising strategy. With this step-by-step recipe, you can easily Report on year-end giving from those who gave for the first time last end-of-year seasons vs. previous donors who gave during that same period. This can help you craft goals for overall end-of-year giving as well as specific targets for new donor acquisition.

For other last minute #GivingTuesday tips, watch our webinar, #GivingTuesday Fundraising for Procrastinators.

Salesforce offers simple yet powerful ways to organize your fundraising campaigns. Through the use of Campaign Hierarchies, you can corral various marketing efforts and responses to those efforts into a cohesive whole that lets you report on total giving for a broad range of efforts. What's more, you can track costs associated with each of these Campaigns and compare the total investment across that range of efforts to dollars raised.

While Campaign Hierarchies are standard in Salesforce, a Salesforce administrator needs to take a few steps to make the summary information across an entire hierarchy visible on the parent Campaign. This step-by-step recipe walks you through how to do so.

Using this functionality is a quick and easy way to bring all of your #GivingTuesday fundraising activities under one proverbial data umbrella in Salesforce for straightforward analysis. For other last minute #GivingTuesday strategies and Salesforce tips, register to attend our free webinar, #GivingTuesday Fundraising for Procrastinators, on Thursday, November 16th at 3 pm ET.

To understand how best to acquire new donors, it is important to determine what methods have been most successful in doing so already. This task is precisely why the Campaigns object exists in Salesforce. With it, you can define an unlimited number of efforts and associate Donation records with those efforts. From direct mailings to peer-to-peer fundraising to email appeals to individual online donation forms to much more, creating Campaigns for each can help you track their results.

This step-by-step recipe is an ode to the power of Campaign, demonstrating how you can create a chart that shows new donor acquisition by Primary Campaign Source so you can understand what's working - and what's not - for your nonprofit.

For other new donor Salesforce recipes along with a discussion of donor acquisition strategies, watch our free webinar, Win New Donors this End-of-Year Fundraising Season.