Nonprofit Salesforce Data Management

Salesforce holds donor data, volunteer data, contacts, and the tracking data from programs. Decisions are made, trends are acted on, and processes are created based on this data. That’s why it’s important your nonprofit Salesforce data management is optimized. Let’s say it was discovered that a list of names wasn’t assigned to the appropriate place. Now the data is off. There becomes a ripple effect in the amount of trust your organization has in the data source and Salesforce as a whole. It’s important to get into the habit of checking your data to keep it clean.

Clean data builds relationships. If a donor gets a second mailing, or you send to a wrong address, you risk losing trust with that donor. However, if you consistently send to the correct address and changes are quickly managed, you’ll inspire the donor to take action.
Personally, I have witnessed a family member whose spouse’s name was incorrect on a mailing from a nonprofit they enjoyed donating to. They called and asked for the change, but the next mailing was still incorrect. Guess who never received a donation again? You guessed it!

Do you have a cadence for data management?

Checking in on your data – for duplicates, for completeness, for accuracy – helps discover processes that can be changed to prevent future problems. You can manage how things get input and have standards around it, but humans will create errors. Regularly checking in allows you to do something about it. You can be proactive and get ahead of problems.

Of course, nothing is an immediate fix. It takes time to go through your data, but it maintains data quality so your organization can make smart decisions. So, a set cadence is the best way to manage your data.

How do you check your data? Salesforce tools, of course.

Salesforce has quite a few tools to help keep your data clean and healthy. If this is your first time going through a data clean-up, you might find an overwhelming list of errors to fix. You do not have to do it all at once. Set three goals to start with, reduce those errors and then set your cadence. Every time you check-in you can keep working through new goals while you keep up with the previous ones.

It’s important to keep in mind what data you need for the different areas of the organization. Keeping in mind organizational processes and goals will help you prioritize your clean-up goals.

Here are some suggestions for tools to get you started:

NPSP Health Check is a Salesforce native tool that will check your records for specific problems such as duplicates or missing addresses etc… You’ll get a list of errors and you can see how many in each category. This is great for getting a big picture overview of where to start. It’s great for getting you started and/or for your ongoing cadence.

• How to run a Health Check
• Trailhead
• Common Health Check Errors

NPSP Data Quality Monitor shows common data quality issues in NPSP orgs. You can get a list of issues to solve and subscribe to the dashboard so you have a starting point for each check-in. You can download the package at https://login.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04t3Z000001aeHl

Some examples of what the NPSP Data Quality Monitor checks for:

• Contacts not in a household
• Contacts with & /and in their name
• Contacts with title but no attribution
• Test Contacts
• Email Spelling Errors
• Accounts with no Record Type
• …..and whole lot more.

Wall of Zeros is a DIY way of monitoring for your organization. Often, the preset tools don’t cover the things you need to check for based on organizational goals. If that’s the case, you may want to build your own Wall of Zeros. This is a dashboard building concept that’s customized for you. What reports would you need to run to check the health of your data? Create the reports and add them to a dashboard with a view showing the amount of errors. When you go to do your check-in, you’ll know where your errors are, you can fix them, and when you’re done, hopefully, all your reports are at zero. Below is a video to help you set up a Wall of Zeros in Salesforce.

Duplicates are the most common data management check to run. If you do nothing else in your cadence, at least run this important check. Here’s our blog post on how to find duplicates in Salesforce.

Once you’ve found all your duplicates you will need to merge them. While it’s tempting to download the list and use a spreadsheet to merge duplicates…which you could do…it’s much easier if you use the NPSP merging tool. Below is a video about how it works.

This is generally one of those places where nonprofits get overwhelmed with the amount of errors. If you end up with a massive merge list, you may want to consider purchasing a one year subscription to Apsona (or a similar tool) which integrates with Salesforce to merge and cleanse your contacts. Once you’ve cleaned the large list up you’ll have a much more manageable size every time you check in. At that point, you can cancel and use the tools above.

Lastly, managing your features keeps data healthy too.

Salesforce Optimizer is the Health Check for Features. What are you missing? What would be better than your current features? Could you consolidate into one feature? This is your operations optimizer. When you use the appropriate features, you have better control over how your data is entered into Salesforce.

Of course, we are always here for you to help work through your errors and provide best practices as you need them. Send an email to support or contact us to find out more about ongoing support.