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All About...Salesforce: July 2021

At Fíonta, our summer has been incredibly busy. We’ve supported some inspiring new clients and continue to work with many of you. On a personal note, It’s amazing how quickly summer has gone by. Here in upstate New York, we’ve had a lot of rain, the river has been higher than usual which means it’s made for great swimming. Our gardens are producing vegetables and flowers which has added some beauty and excitement at mealtime.

In this edition of the Salesforce newsletter, I’ll be talking about upcoming changes to the Power of Us Hub, an upcoming .Org event on payment processing, data backup options, and some key dates around the Winter ‘22 (😬❄️) release.

Jordan Berger, Salesforce Architect

RESOURCE  A new home for the power of us hub 

The Power of Us Hub (PUB) is the central nervous system of the Nonprofit Cloud and Education Cloud community. It has been the forum for discussions around current and future use cases for Salesforce and a great resource for us and our clients to surface issues or post ideas around the use of Salesforce for nonprofits and educational institutions. If you haven’t visited, it is a must-have resource. The PUB is in the process of being merged into the Trailblazer community (scheduled to go live in September) which is becoming the central hub for all things Salesforce, where you’ll be able to engage with .org clients as well as take trailheads, get help and support, and join additional focused Salesforce discussions. No action needs to be taken now, but it’s good to know what’s in the pipeline and is a clear indicator of how important the nonprofit and education community is to Salesforce.

WEBINAR  Integrated payment considerations for nonprofits

For our current and prospective clients who work in individual fundraising, a topic that frequently arises during discoveries and projects is integrating your online donation platforms with Salesforce and streamlining your payment processing. Salesforce.org is holding a webinar on July 28th on this topic featuring a foundation guest and representatives from Salesforce and Stripe. These webinars are a great way to hear what your peer organizations and others do in the space and get questions answered by relevant experts.

RESOURCE Automated backup tools

In my work with our clients, I see more and more appetite for and interest in the world of backup technologies. Salesforce provides the native ability to schedule exports of data. However, many of our clients find that process too labor-intensive without delivering the value of identifying differences between backups and the inability to restore inadvertently modified or deleted data automatically. Enter the world of automated backup tools. I’ve recently implemented OwnBackup as well as Spanning for different clients and both have worked well. If you’re interested in learning more, please put some time on my calendar to chat further.

UPCOMING Winter ’22 release

It must seem as if I’m talking about the upcoming release in every newsletter! Well, here is my plug for the Winter ‘22 release. It is still early, but the release dates, based on your instance of Salesforce, are: 

  • September 11
  • October 2
  • October 9 

Sandbox preview is tentatively scheduled for August 28th, which is when you can begin testing new functionality and regression testing your existing applications against the new release. The Release Notes have not been published but will be posted here in the weeks to come. 

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR Leaving Luminate CRM: Considerations for nonprofit leaders

Last week my colleague, Erika McNichol, presented a 30-minute webinar about the upcoming end-of-life for Luminate CRM (LCRM) and talked about how nonprofit executives should prepare for replacement software, like Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP).

The webinar recording is available on-demand on our website. Erika would be happy to respond to specific questions about NPSP, cost, and timeframe for an LCRM migration in a phone call or Zoom.