Family House adopted Salesforce as their donor management platform about five years ago at the urging of a board member who had previously worked at the company. All donor-related information, from the dollar amount of each donation to the donor’s relationships with board members and organization staff, goes into the database.
Joe Blodgett, Family House’s IT Manager, is the in-house Salesforce Admin. It’s his job not just to make sure the right data goes into Salesforce, but also to make sure that Family House can get the information back out in a form that helps the development staff raise more money to help families.
Apsona for Salesforce and the Multi-Step Reporting add-on are crucial tools in Joe’s workflow. They ensure that he can deliver the donor information the fundraising staff needs, quickly, accurately, and easily.
Joe discovered Apsona soon after Family House moved to Salesforce, and it quickly proved its usefulness. He says, “I use it as my primary tool for uploading data, making batch changes to records, and updating information.”
But the core Apsona for Salesforce offering didn’t have a big impact on one of his most time-consuming tasks: preparing the complex reports that the fundraising staff needed to make sure they were talking to the right people at the right time. For this, he was dependent on exporting reports and manipulating them in Excel.
For example, Joe is often asked to create mailing lists to target specific groups of donors. A request might be something like finding everyone in the database who either attended the most recent fundraising event or who has given $1000 in the past year, not counting gifts to the capital campaign unless the gift was over $500.
And the final report needs to show not just the names and emails of the contacts who match this criteria, but also the history of their giving over the past 3 years, including their year-to-date total.
The way Joe used to produce these reports involved creating several different native Salesforce reports, importing them into Excel, and then creating VLOOKUP formulas to match the information in different reports by the Contact ID.
It was tedious, involving a lot of steps, each of which had to be done right in order for the results to be reliable.
And, as Joe explains, sometimes the process has to be done several times to get a final result. “It’s not uncommon for me to show someone the report I’ve created and have them realize they need to tweak the criteria.”
Whether the person wants to widen the search to include more names or they realize the criteria have produced too many matches and they want to narrow it down, it oftens meant that Joe had to start fresh with a new batch of reports and redo all of the intermediate steps.
