Salesforce housekeeping to do in quarantine

For some of our clients, these times are extremely busy as they ramp up services to those in need of them the most. For others, these times are very quiet, as events are rescheduled, and constituents are doing their part and staying at home.

If you are in that latter group and you have extra time to commit to Salesforce, this is the perfect time to put it to use for housekeeping of your Salesforce instance, either on your own or in partnership with a consultant!

Here are some best practices that we are recommending to our clients that you can adopt and that will have a lasting impact on your organization:

• Have you ever thought, “I wish I had a report that told me exactly…..”? Plan to build some of those deep-dive reports that you’ve always wanted, but never had time for.
• Does your staff have to scroll through dozens of fields on page layouts to get to the ones they care about? This is a great time to clean those up, so they only see what is important for their work.
• Make sure you have a strong backup plan by setting up regularly scheduled Data Exports and “Metadata Backup” Sandboxes, so you always have access to recently changed structure and deleted data
  Are too many users assigned the “System Admin” profile? Take some time to review profiles for your staff so people have access to only the right information
• You can set up a “Health Check” dashboard that highlights inconsistent or missing data for your important objects, and even emails you when it needs attention, so you stay on top of your data quality. More ideas here.
• You can comb your data for duplicates and ensure your duplicate rules are optimized to catch as many as possible

Salesforce.org provides great tools and resources to keep your system in tip-top shape. This is a good time to go through them on your own or with a consultant who can.

• Run Salesforce’s Optimizer Report to identify and implement improvements of your data quality
• Run Salesforce’s Security Health Check to reveal areas of weakness in the security of your org’s configuration
• Run NPSP’s Health Check to ensure that your data is inline with NPSP’s best practices
• Salesforce.org’s Healthy Org Workbook with great information about keeping your data secure and of the highest quality
• Salesforce.org’s Healthy Org Video Series which shows you how Process Builder, Validation Rules, and Flow can improve your business processes and data entry habits for your staff.

PercolatorConsulting.com has some great resources on best practices as well:

• Six Technology Policies and Processes Every Nonprofit Needs
• Discovering Your Hidden Engagement Pyramid
• Tales from the Trenches: 3 Database Administrators Explain Why They Love Their Jobs

These are just some ideas of what you can do to clean up your Salesforce instance. I’m sure you’ve got your own list. We would love to help, too, so please reach out!

Stay safe and wash your hands!