Overview

Salesforce’s reporting tool is a sure-fire method to bring your organization’s data together in a viewable manner. Whether you need to collect donor data from the past year or view new membership information from a recent event, reports are the easiest way to gather and easily digest those figures. Recently, Plutus was even able to use Salesforce Reports to bring some Christmas cheer by helping one of our clients build a report of key Contacts for their Christmas card mailing list. Read through this short case study to get the rundown on what we did!

Challenge

A Plutus client that focuses on advancing democracy in the United States, reached out asking for help building their annual Christmas card list. In past years, this group would manually curate their list through a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and add individuals and their addresses to that spreadsheet one-by-one. This process was tedious, time consuming, and missed key data capture as some new addresses were not being updated back into Salesforce. This list also took many hours to develop instead of being able to be quickly pulled from the database.

Solution

Plutus was able to streamline this process by first performing some basic data clean up and then creating fields to track Christmas addresses for each Contact to allow for a single report for the organization to conduct the mailing. First, we pulled a comprehensive list of their data from Salesforce in order to perform a v-look up from Excel to match as many Contacts and Accounts as possible. Plutus was then able to match some Contacts and Accounts with their respective IDs to upload a portion of the addresses from the excel file. The rest of the data was then cleaned by hand in conjunction with the organization’s staff.

Next, Plutus created fields to allow for easy tracking of the Christmas addresses inside of the system. Since the data was now in Salesforce, Plutus was able to develop a simple report that encompassed everyone who should be on the Christmas list thanks to the power of Salesforce Reports' Filtering mechanism.

The report was then saved so that staff would always have access to it and it could be duplicated as needed for the following year. New Contacts added to the list would also filter in real-time thanks to the Salesforce’s ability for dynamic reports. A report that used to take hours to manually create now takes less than five minutes to pull from Salesforce.

Results

With Plutus’ help, this nonprofit now has a functioning and mess-free mailing list for their Christmas card campaign. The organization no longer needs to track this information on a spreadsheet and manually rebuild the mailing list each year. Better yet, Plutus has transformed a tedious manual process into a simple five-minute one at the click of a button. Talk about bringing Christmas cheer to both their staff and members of their network! This use case is just one of many that utilize the power of Salesforce reports and illustrate how they can create efficiencies and streamline processes. Have a report your group needs built? Let us know and we’d be happy to help you build one!