Welcome to another “How I Solved It.” In this series, we do a deep dive into a specific business problem and share how one Awesome Admin chose to solve it. Once you learn how they solved their specific problem, you’ll be inspired to try their solution yourself! Watch how Jodie Miners uses the power of visualization with Salesforce Indicators to help a nonprofit manage their major giving process. Jodie also showcases Action Lists (a great way to utilize list views) and other visibility tips and tricks to streamline the process. Note: Although Jodie is showing functionality for a nonprofit, any org can use Salesforce Indicators. It’s fully customizable to fit in with your data points and requirements.
You’re probably wondering why I’m writing this blog about what Jodie did, as it’s usually the person featured in the ‘How I Solved It’ video who also writes the blog. Jodie and I (along with our amazing Developer Tim Schug) lead the Open Source Commons Indicator project and are used to splitting the workload when it comes to completing our tasks. We naturally took on different roles for the ‘How I Solved It’ task, with Tim focusing on some additional pre-release features for the demo, Jodie working on the demo video itself, and me jumping into the role of putting together the blog. Go to our website to learn more about how to get involved in the Salesforce Open Source Commons.
A nonprofit needs a process for its team to complete various tasks each day and to have a clear indication of what needs to be done on a record. Other team members need to be able to jump in to support one another and leadership. Other departments need to understand what ‘tasks’ have yet to be actioned by the team. The business also wants a clear visual way for the team to see what’s next, allowing for a more streamlined process.
I created a series of Action Lists. These Action Lists are Jodie’s concept, allowing organizations to manage their tasks without actually using the Tasks object — you’ll find no task here! These list views have records showing with an action that needs to be taken and are all stored in the user’s favorites.
Each day, the user, in this case the Fundraising Manager, logs in to Salesforce and works their way through their Action Lists. Once the relevant actions have been completed, these lists will be empty. These list views are driven by the data on the record using the list view filter.
If Jodie jumps into one of the GAU Allocation Required records, she can see that the GAU and Thank You Note indicators are red. The organization chose ‘red’ to indicate to the user that an action needs to be taken, with urgency; however, any color could be chosen. It’s also worth noting that the record’s data is not only driving the indicators but also the visibility of various components on the page layout — in this instance, both the Thank You Note and GAU Allocation tabs and the buttons, but this could also drive the visibility of other fields, sections, and Flow components.
As Jodie completes the tasks of updating the GAU Allocation, the Thank You Note indicator reminds her that this task can be done while working on this record. Once the GAU Allocation has been updated and the Thank You Note completed, the indicators update and, in this instance, both of these disappear.
We also receive a new indicator, a purple shopping cart. The image has been chosen to show that the donation is ready to be sent to the external accounting system. They’ve chosen the color purple to indicate that the task is something that is ‘non-urgent’ but could be done by the user now, or will be automated by the overnight processes if not done manually. Again, this image and color are fully customizable.
The Indicators product continues to evolve with a new user interface coming soon, so I won’t show you here how I set it up. Instead, you can find this information in the Salesforce Indicators documentation.
What I will show is a snippet of how one of the indicators has been customized. SLDS icons are quite special in that they can change colors by applying different styling rules to them, and using a custom Lightning component like we do for Salesforce Indicators, this allows one icon to have whichever color you want.
So you’re probably wondering why I’m writing this blog about what Jodie did, as it’s usually the person featured in the ‘How I Solved It’ video who also writes the blog. Jodie and I (along with our amazing Developer Tim Schug) lead the Open Source Commons Indicator project and are used to splitting the workload when it comes to completing our tasks. We naturally took on different roles for the ‘How I Solved It’ task, with Tim focusing on some additional pre-release features for the demo, Jodie working on the demo video itself, and me jumping into the role of putting together the blog. Go to our website to learn more about how to get involved in the Salesforce Open Source Commons.
Everything other than what’s listed below is built with standard Salesforce Enterprise Edition functionality. There is nothing in this demo that requires NPSP — any Org works fine.
Through this process, the nonprofit is able to manage its tasks but through record actions, with indicators signaling that additional ‘jobs’ need to be done, allowing for a more streamlined approach. This helps the team complete their tasks more quickly so that they can focus more on the high-value items instead of endless admin.
In this demo we’ve shown a few ways to use the same basic pattern of a mix of standard functionality and Salesforce Indicators.
1. Action needed — specified by the data on your record. This could be a checkbox, formula, picklist value, etc. (For example, Thank You Note Required is true because there has been no Thank You Note entered.)
2. This drives the record being visible in the Action List (that is, the list view).
3. This drives the indicator being visible.
4. This drives the visibility of various components (for example, tabs, buttons, screen flow components).
5. An action for the user to complete — this could be part of a flow, a button, or a simple update of data on the record.
![Record-triggered flow showing the trigger on Thank You Note message having the word [call] entered. This then creates a Log a Call action and posts to Chatter with the #ThankYou Topic.](https://d3nqfz2gm66yqg.cloudfront.net/images/20241104171040/image-7.png)
6. The completion of the action changes the formula (for example, the Thank You Note Required field is now false), which makes the components hidden on the page and the record is no longer displayed in the Action List.
We’ve showed you lots of different tips and tricks, not just for Salesforce Indicators but also favorites, Action List views, flows, and more. So many of these items can be utilized in your org to help your users be more productive, and help you be an Awesome Admin!
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