Embracing Innovation and Community at Salesforce World Tour New York Spring 2024: A Recap and Reflection
There are a few events that stand out to tech and CRM consultants across the globe–Salesforce World Tour is one of those events. In the past year I have been swept up by the waves of innovation with AI, data, and security pioneered by Salesforce. Salesforce World Tour in New York this past April was no different.
The energy and innovation at the Salesforce World Tour NYC 2024 was accented by the addition of a Community Sprint dedicated to leveraging Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) to address challenges faced by nonprofits. Yes, I said: Community Sprint! For many consultants, developers, and Salesforce admins, we know a sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a team works to complete a set amount of work, be it design, development, or implementation. This was the basis for the Community sprint. One hundred plus Salesforce enthusiasts and nonprofits leaders came together to identify and solve modern challenges using Salesforce.
Einstein and Astro!
Jerica Jones posing with the iconic mascots at Salesforce World Tour 2024.
But, before I jump into talking about the Community Sprint. Let’s talk about some of the takeaways from Salesforce World Tour. In case you missed it here’s a recap of the most impactful developments and how Salesforce is transforming organizations and engagement.
Embracing Innovation at World Tour: A Recap
Revolutionizing Nonprofit Operations with AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) was at the forefront of discussions, emphasizing its pivotal role in enhancing operational efficiency and engagement strategies. Salesforce continues to promote Einstein AI capacity to help industries, including non-profits, streamline workflows, automate tasks, and deliver personalized experiences to users and customers. This AI-powered approach allows non-profits to focus more on their core missions rather than administrative tasks.
Nonprofit Cloud: Tailored Solutions for Specific Needs
Salesforce continues to refine its industry-specific solutions, with nonprofits being the focus of this spring’s World Tour. The Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) is a comprehensive platform that offers robust CRM capabilities, volunteer management, and program tracking. One of the features taking nonprofit leaders and consultants by storm is the addition of the Household object in NPC. This new object allows administrators to dissect business accounts into households and individuals, allowing more accurate tracking of account-contact relationships. This revolutionary feature helps nonprofits by providing a clearer picture of the diverse makeup of individuals and families they serve. For example, Salesforce demonstrates how NPC addresses family and household dynamics with the Party Relationship Group records by:
Tracking temporary or former situations, such as short-term roommates.
Merging, such as when two households combine in marriage.
Splitting, such as when an adult child moves out on their own.
These actions are not available in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) or any of the other Salesforce clouds, making Nonprofit the first cloud to view business accounts through a human-centered lens.
Other amazing enhancements that were crowd pleasers at this year’s World Tour included Nonprofit Cloud’s fortification with Slack integration, which includes features like "Sales Home" and automated meeting notes. Also, NPC’s data visualization has reached new heights with Tableau’s new Pulse visualization. But, the big win with NPC is Salesforce’s signature no-code/ low code platform. This minimizes administrator’s reliance on hard code development and configuring, allowing them to be more focused on driving their mission to serve others.
There is no wonder as to why a community sprint was the perfect opportunity to learn more about these new features while interacting with leaders across the nonprofit and Salesforce landscape. Never heard of a Salesforce Community Sprint? If not, let’s get into it by considering what makes a community sprint.
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Community Sprint: A Reflection
For the Salesforce Nonprofit Community Sprint we–and I mean one hundred plus Salesforce enthusiasts and nonprofit leaders–were given one day to come together and contribute our skills and knowledge to address modern challenges nonprofits face.
Individuals were given a choice of working on a pre-existing challenge including building out Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries, building a data model for memberships, or they could choose to start work on a new project. I choose to work with the team responsible for documenting NPC Best Practices.
The individual contributors in attendance spanned the spectrum of NPC knowledge and experience–from novice to expert to the engineers who designed and built the prototype. Professional backgrounds varied between Salesforce Consultants, architects and engineers, SIs and Partners, Nonprofit CTOs, Administrators, and Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) end users. The knowledge and experience dynamic provided for robust conversations about the capabilities of Nonprofit Cloud and the differences between existing Salesforce platforms. One thing to note is that because everyone’s experience and knowledge differed, it did require a bit of storming and norming prior to getting our hands dirty with the work. This delayed producing deliverables; however, it made for a more engaging and equitable experience.
Taking on the Sprint!
Jerica Jones making connections in the space, and was able to snag a photo with Jonathan Dos Santos of Evolving Consulting and Rexy the sprint dinosaur!
Throughout the day the team I had the pleasure of working with (Team NPBP–Nonprofit Best Practices) took the time to dive into a demo org and look at one of the features we believed would most likely need to have a set of best practices–the new household object. We worked together to explore use cases, address assumptions, and distinguish the differences between NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud. We documented our initial draft and by the end of the day we were excited to share what we had produced with others for their feedback.
Conclusion
It took a community of individuals contributing their time, skills, and discourse to put together something that will eventually be valuable resources and features to millions of end users. And of course when you work hard, you get to join your team members and new friends for a beer in Times Square, New York City, New York. This is what it looks like to embrace innovation and community at Salesforce World Tour.