Big Increase in Salesforce Data Storage Limits

With Salesforce’s Spring 2019 release, the base data storage limit is increasing from 1 GB to 10 GB.

Up until now, many nonprofits needed to be careful about their data storage limits and several of our clients needed to purchase additional data storage, so if you have purchased additional data storage, please check with your Salesforce account executive as, most likely, you can stop paying for your data.

This is a big deal as many nonprofits have limited their data around campaigns, historical information, and other areas such as limiting the number of custom fields available for use. This is becoming more of an issue as many of our clients are putting more effort into moves management and analysis to help with their fundraising efforts.

If you are not sure how much data you have available or how much you’re using, please go to: SETUP > Adminstration > Data > Storage Usage.

If your organization continues to have data storage overages, it may be worthwhile to check on what you’re storing as some of it may be no longer be useful or worse, creating confusion leading to mistakes. A few things to check:

• Look at the current data usage by Record Type (It’s on the same “Storage Usage” page) From this table it’s easy to see where all your data is being stored. Typically for nonprofits, the data issues are in Accounts, Contacts, Campaign Members, and Opportunities/Payments.
• Do you have contacts or accounts without any relevant contact data? You can check by running a report and searching for contacts without an address, phone, email, etc. If you find many than deleting these extraneous contacts can save space. This is always a good idea to do from time to time. You can even create a dashboard and then subscribe it monthly to stay on top of this any other data quality reports you may create.
• Run a report for field coverage. Do you have fields that are only slightly populated but are still taking up table space? Do you need these fields?
• Consider removing old campaign data. Maybe only keep campaign members who responded to campaigns that are older. Removing “Sent” campaign members could reduce your campaign member storage quite a bit.

If you’re not sure how to take advantage of these new limits or have been limiting what you do in Salesforce because of these limits, please contact us.