UK: 
As an organisation working in the Salesforce ecosystem, one of the things that we sometimes get to do is to take part in initiatives to help amazing Nonprofit organisations get the most out of Salesforce. Two such events took place between 30 October and 2 November in Chicago, the Salesforce Commons Community Sprint and Nonprofit Dreamin’.
In this post, we’ll talk about each event and share some of our highlights with you. There are one or two gems that could immediately benefit your nonprofit’s use of Salesforce.
Salesforce Commons Community Sprint (30 – 31 October)
If you’ve never been to a Salesforce Commons Community Sprint let us briefly explain what they are: A Salesforce Commons Sprint is an event held, usually across two days, where people from across the Salesforce ecosystem come together to work on solutions that benefit Nonprofits using Salesforce. This work can be on new projects, providing new solutions to problems faced in the Nonprofit space, or on existing projects, where updates, enhancements, and evaluations are carried out.
Some of the projects that exist currently relate to products you might have heard of such as Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (DLRS) and Outbound Funds. Also, as a fact you might not know, the Nonprofit Success Pack was originally created and developed by the Nonprofit Salesforce community in a programme that preceded the current Commons programme.
Some of the projects worked on in this particular Sprint included:
- Memberships Done Better
- Deployment Best Practices
- Nonproft Cloud Best Practices
- Data Generation Toolkit
- Summit Events App
- Salesforce Indicators
One of our consultants, Mark Jones, was present at this event and led the ‘AI Prompts for Nonprofits Group’ which was started at the Commons Community Sprint event held in June earlier this year. In this, a number of community members did some key work on developing and ratifying a number of example prompts that will eventually become part of a recipe book that will be made publicly available. These prompts are being designed for use in generative AI assistants such as Google Bard and ChatGPT with some minimal tweaking required to suit the specific use case.
Nonprofit Dreamin’ (1 – 2 November)
The second event held during these four days was Nonprofit Dreamin’, a Trailblazer Community Conference designed specifically for Nonprofit organisations and the Nonprofit community. The event included a wide range of sessions covering topics such as DLRS, Salesforce Indicators, Inclusion, Fundraising, Mentorship and yes even AI. Across the two days there were around 30 sessions for a range of Nonprofit users including End Users and Admins.
Mark was one of the over 30 different speakers at the event, delivering a technical session on how Nonprofit Admins can use SOQL Queries in their day-to-day work and how to get the most out of it. SOQL is a technical language that returns data held in a Salesforce org in a table format like that of a report. SOQL, with its SQL like structure, is a little more powerful than standard reporting and can be used in other more complex functionality throughout Salesforce.
There was also a session based on the work done in the Commons Community Programme (described above), bringing that work to a wider audience. This session focused on two of the existing projects in the programme, the Summit Events App and Salesforce Indicators. Salesforce Indicators was of particular interest to us, as it is an application that sits on top of Salesforce and allows you to display icons (or indicators) to highlight important data or things to know about that record. For example, if a Contact has said that they should not be contacted, then, as long as you have a field in your org to record that, you can create an indicator for that and display it on the record in Salesforce. It seems likely that this will become a common feature of the implementations we deliver, as really helps draw the attention of the user to any important details.
All the sessions at Nonprofit Dreamin’ were recorded and will be available on their YouTube channel at a later date. No announcement on when the next Nonprofit Dreamin’ will take place has been announced yet.
