Are you hesitant about moving to the Salesforce Lightning Experience? Me too. I've been using the current Salesforce user interface (UI) for years, and the nonprofit clients I work with here at Longshore Consulting just need a functional, affordable CRM. A lot of the bells and whistles offered by Salesforce Lightning seem great but two questions remain:

1. When will I have the time to make the switch to Lightning?
2. How do I do my job in Lightning?

In other words, I know I need to make the switch to Lightning, and I don't want to fall behind, but my main goal is social change (and fundraising, programs management, civic engagement, etc.), not running the world's greatest database (although of course I love Salesforce). Sound familiar?

To help your journey to Lightning (which, it's true, will basically be inevitable at some point*), I've curated these resources to help you out - please feel free to contribute more in the comments so I can update this post! 

*While technically Salesforce will not retire Salesforce Classic (sometimes referred to as the Aloha UI), all webinars and demos you see from Salesforce, for example at Dreamforce, and all documentation, are quickly being moved to Lightning. Even more important is that no new features are being developed for Salesforce Classic (or at least, the bare minimum of features/improvements are being made to classic). Salesforce wants to do as much as possible to entice everyone to make the switch to Lightning.

1. Review this handy list of Lightning vs. Classic Features. It will super quickly allow you to see what's available and what's not in some areas you may have heard conflicting information about, like reports (and of course keep in mind more functionality is added each release). So as you can see, if you're ride or die with pie charts, you may need to wait or just plan on switching into classic to use those (but P.S. you shouldn't be using pie charts anyways - read 'death to pie charts'). While you're on this page, be sure to Preview Your Org in Lightning Experience and run the Lightning Experience Readiness Check​ - two great tools that take no time at all!
TIME REQUIRED: 5-10 minutes to review the list, 30 minutes to preview your org, 1 minute to run the readiness check (then 5-30 minutes to review the report).

 
2. The Lightning Roadmap:  That's right, Salesforce has actually posted on the Internet when they're doing what with Lightning, so you can know when you really need to make the switch and can plan accordingly. A few that stand out to me as coming in the 'future', meaning beyond Summer '17, that may be important to nonprofits, include:
- Lists - Mass Inline Edit
- Reports - Search within Folders
- Reports - Printable View
- Dashboards - Scheduling
Just remember, you can always switch back to Classic at anytime to access these features!
TIME REQUIRED: ~10 minutes to review the roadmap

3. Understand what changes you would need to make for the NPSP to work.  AKA 'known limitations,' some things will function differently in Lightning if you use the Nonprofit Success Pack and it's important you review the link to see what changes you might need to make so you can continue to be awesome (and do things like create Donation records as easily as possible).  
TIME REQUIRED: ~15 minutes to review the list; ~2 hours to make the changes depending on your skill level (instructions are provided).

4. Trailhead Don't get overwhelmed that this trail has 7 badges. You can pick and choose  individual units as you need them and remember to use Trailhead to train your end users, too!
TIME REQUIRED: I recommend ~15 minutes a day in the two weeks before you go live with Lightning. 
TIME SAVED: All the hours you would have spent writing training materials to train your staff on Lightning! 

5. Lightning Resource Inception: There's a lot to learn about Lightning, so it's a good idea to benchmark this post and other resources that you find most helpful. Here are some fantastic resources you'll want to come back to again and again:
- The Salesforce.org Webinar: Migrate to the Lightning Experience
- Healthy Org: Migrate to Lightning Experience

Of course, I most want to know what *you* think of Lightning and all of Salesforce. Longshore Consulting's second annual Nonprofits who Salesforce survey is happening right now, and if you take five minutes to fill it out you will be entered to win over $600 in prizes! Thanks!

You are awesome. You like fun things. Perhaps even Salesforce things. And I like making Salesforce things for you. But I can't make awesome Salesforce things for you if we don't get to know each other better. So...

I'd like to introduce you to the Longshore Consulting second annual Nonprofits who Salesforce Survey. It takes 5 minutes to fill out, and I'll hugely appreciate you if you do! Still not convinced? Here's 5 reasons why you should spend the next 5 minutes sharing your knowledge with the community:

1. Visiblity = Power. Your feedback will allow the Salesforce nonprofit community to understand on a large scale what is working well and what could be improved. 

2. It will help you. When you check out the results, you'll know how other nonprofits are thinking and feeling about Salesforce. It'll be like you'll be able to read minds!

3. You can win stuff. Seriously. To thank you for your 5 minutes, you can optionally enter to win one of 19 prizes (!) valued at a total of $600 (!!!). Check out all of the prizes here.  

4. You'll get more awesome free stuff! When Longshore Consulting offers free training, affordable coaching options, blog posts, and additional resources to the nonprofit Salesforce community, the number one resource I use to determine what topics I should cover is the Nonprofits who Salesforce Survey. 

5. Did I mention I would appreciate you? For real for real. Want to take your awesomeness to the next level? Click here to tweet a message to your friends to invite them to take the survey too!

Happy Birthday Salesforce! As Salesforce turns 18 today, it's important to remember that as any adolescent emerges into adulthood, there will be growing pains. And so that's what we're seeing with Salesforce a bit, as the company-wide keynote events need to serve larger and larger audiences... a few of us are bound to get left out. What am I talking about? On March 7, 2017, Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, and other Salesforce executives held a fiscal year 2018 kickoff event that showed the power of Salesforce to 3 million viewers from Salesforce offices and user groups around the world. Here's a full recap and link to the video.

​It was inspirational and fun as always, but the two companies featured, Coca-Cola and Amazon Web Services, might be harder for nonprofits and small businesses to relate to. That left me wondering: how much of what is generally available with Salesforce Einstein is now applicable to nonprofits? 

My answer: not a lot, if anything. 

My reasoning?

There's an extra cost for a lot of the (i.e., most exciting) new Einstein features, including:

• Sales Cloud Einstein

Most of the features are designed for Sales.

• This Trailhead unit shows you all Generally Available Einstein features

What is ready for nonprofits that takes advantage of Einstein AI? 

• An unanswered questions component for Communities


• Company Highlights feed in Chatter (Lightning Only)

Special thanks for Adam Olshansky's excellent Spring 16 recap blog article for helping me to understand all there is to know on this topic! Would you like to learn more? Adam and I did a great overview of the Spring '17 Salesforce release and Salesforce Lightning which you can watch right now here: