Recent Updates

  • Updated on: Jan 17, 2023

    Batch Creating Connections

  • For system administrators and/or staff that do a lot of administrative handling of data -- there are a number of data management tools that can be enabled in HandsOn Connect by your system administrator:

    • Batch Creation of Teams from the contact record
    • Batch creation of Connection from the contact record
    • Import Team Members (making it possible to create team members from a report result)
    • Import Connections - which makes it possible to import connections for team members
    • Batch Moving or Copying of Connections (from occurrence record)
    • Adding occurrence connection contacts to a campaign (for use with a mass emailing tool that works with Salesforce Campaigns
  • This article details the steps taken by System Admins to enable the Move/Copy Connections.

    NOTE: The ability to move or copy Connections while making it easier to complete these steps have the potential to corrupt or duplicate your data. System Admins should only enable these features for trained users. It is not recommended that you enable this feature for Partner Staff. If desired you can use permission sets to enable it for designated staff and partner staff users.

    To learn more about permission sets, see this Salesforce post

  • Updated on: Jan 17, 2023

    2.5 Release Notes

    Manual Release Notes
  • Updated on: Jan 17, 2023

    2.13 Release Patch 8

    Manual Release Notes
  • Updated on: Jan 17, 2023

    2.13 Patch 6 & 7

    Manual Release Notes
  • When teams sign up for volunteer opportunities, the only person who may be notified of opportunity details may be the team captain! As a best practice, if a large percentage of your volunteers are part of a team, its a good idea to reach out to the team captain and make sure they are relaying all info to their team members, and that all team members WILL be attending.

    You can create a report that will look at all upcoming connections where the volunteer is a member of a team, and then calculate what percentage of the maximum volunteers needed for the opportunity are team members. Here's how:

  • Updated on: Jan 17, 2023

    Mass Emailing in Salesforce

    There are two options for mass emailing in Salesforce. You can mass email contacts which has a daily limit of 1,000 emails. And there is the option to mass email users which has no daily limit. However if you choose to mass email users and use merge fields, the fields have to be user fields - if you put contact fields in it will not work since it is pullling from the user object. Also in mass email users you're only able to filter the list you send to using user fields, not contact fields.

    Another thing you should be aware of is that the preview email function really doesn't guarantee what your email will look like. The only way to really know how the email will appear when it is sent is to simulate the conditions under which it would be sent. You can create a list in mass email users that only included you and send it so you could see for sure how it would work.

    The bottom line is that Salesforce is not built to be a blast email tool.We highly recommend you investigate some of the other blast email tools, many of which integrate with Salesforce. If budget is an issue, Vertical Response allows nonprofits to send 10,000 emails per month free.

    One feature you really should have to follow the CAN-SPAM law is the ability for contacts to unsubscribe themselves if they don't wish to get extraneous emails beyond project confirmation, reminder and thank you emails from your organization. And by using the mass email user function you can't even access the Email Opt Out field built into Salesforce to make sure you're excluding those who have opted out.

    A final note is that Salesforce doesn't put any resources into ensuring the deliverability of their emails because they're not in the email business. So you should know that emails you send through Salesforce are more likely to end up in people's spam folders.

    Nonetheless -- for occasional use, here's how to use the mass emailing functionality in Salesforce. Let's consider a case where we want to send emails to all out active partner staff users.

  • Manual Release Notes