Category Archive: How To

Happy Wednesday all! We’ve survived the long weekend and are back in the swing of things at work. As you’re buzzing by in the productivity lane today, take just a small detour and evaluate how you get your work done most days. If you caught a glimpse of the image with a white X in a green workbook and suddenly feel anxious and frustrated, get ready to turn that frown into a sly grin.

Now take a peak at the image below on the right, Zach Brown Band fans Find Out More, this is how relaxed you will be in Excel after following our Excel series. Prepare facial muscles for sly grin. Comfort level= toes in the sand. 

Most of us know excel has the capabilities to be a lifesaver, but before it proves helpful it can be daunting and stressful. (Keep the music playing)

Sometimes when navigating Excel, it seems the application is set in its ways; the small gridlines on your screen make you feel like a prisoner as your project remains blank and your patience plummet. But Excel can be nothing short of a pot of gold or expansive beach when you realize there is a work around for nearly anything you might want to accomplish.

Getting the inside scoop on excel tips and tricks can make getting your work done infinitely faster and void of errors.Thus this tool deserves its praises from the paragraph above. Cue rainbow.

Here at fusionSpan, Excel is invaluable to our work and we want to share the gold. This series is going the old school route and episodes will be released periodically. 

Season 1, Episode 1: The Pilot: Checking for Duplicates 

Checking for duplicates is a tool that is simple yet timeless, like grilling in the summer or a rubber duck in the bathtub.

fusionSpan Excel wizard, Jess Sansaet details how to check for duplicates and then remove them in Excel 2016 below. Be sure to check out her bio following the post.  Click on any of the instructional images below for larger view of documentation steps. They will open in a new window.  

Once you’ve populated your information:

1. Click home
2. Highlight the data you want to check for
3. Select Conditional Formatting

Once in conditional formating

4. Select Highlight Cells Rules
5. Select Duplicates

Once you click duplicate values the data you highlighted will designate duplicates by highlighting them as red. From here you can either manually get rid of duplicates or

6. Click data at the top of the page

7. Highlight the section again

8. Select remove duplicates

9. Remove duplicates section will pop up and you can select which columns need attending.

This is a fairly simple task but one that can save hours pouring over data. Stay tuned for the next installment by subscribing to the blog. Do you have any excel processes you’d like to see featured? Have a clever name for the series? Comment below! We’ll tag top entries in episode 2.

About Jess

Jessica (Jess) is an IT Analyst at fusionSpan, where she provides support to small staff associations for their technology and registrar needs. She assists with implementing, maintaining and updating websites, membership databases, and event management software.

Your work communication style typically refers to the way you communicate. For example, are you a more direct or indirect communicator? Many organizations use a tool like DiSC or Myers-Briggs or Strengthsfinders to help employees figure out their preferences, and those of their teammates, in the workplace.
While those same principles apply to remote work, when you don’t occupy the same space as your colleagues it’s also important to figure out the actual method you prefer to use for communications.
Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you come across best in person? Have you ever been told you have an “expressive face” or can’t keep a poker face? Are you naturally observant and able to easily pick up on people’s nonverbal mannerisms?
• Are you a phone person? Your brain works best while pacing or doodling (where your communication partner can’t actually see you)? You enjoy talking on the phone in your free time or have a good deal of experience talking on the phone for previous jobs?
• Do you prefer text communications, over email, messenger, or other online programs? Maybe you like having some time to think about what you are going to say before actually saying it. Do you get nervous or self-conscious in face-to-face social situations?

Determining your own strengths and preferences is the first step to being a better team member. Once you have a handle on your own style, learn what style of communicating your team members prefer. Managers should make it a point to facilitate these types of conversations – either through personality tests, team building or other “getting to know you” activities, or even straightforward polls and questionnaires. Michael D. Watkins of HBR also suggests managers “commit to a communication charter,” which will help guide employees on what and how to communicate, when.

If your company hasn’t organized any ice breaker activities or a communication charter, you may need to pay special attention to the methods the rest of your team is using for day-to-day communications. When in doubt, ask. As we’ve written about before, it’s important that you are open and honest when you work in a virtual environment since the potential for miscommunication or crossed wires is high.
For that same reason, be extra careful not to make assumptions, or take text the wrong way. If you are going to assume anything, assume good intent. Look for the innocence in the action before jumping to conclusions. And if you need clarification or want to smooth things over, opt for a quick call or video chat.

Adapting your communication style for virtual work

Without question, working remotely or as part of a virtual team means you’ll be doing much less face-to-face communication and more text or written communications.

Even if you’re someone who feeds off of face-to-face interactions, it doesn’t mean you can’t be just as successful in a virtual environment. Figure out exactly what it is that you like about in-person conversations and try to replicate those feelings whether you are communicating in writing or over the phone. Consider smiling when you’re talking (or typing), having notes or even a short script in front of you for important discussions, or asking more questions since you won’t have any non-verbal cues to respond to.

Some members of your team may have the opposite challenge – in many ways, working remotely is ideal for introverts. With less office noise, they can focus on the tasks at hand and spend more time listening and strategizing. As Oliver Maskell writes for the Quiet Revolution blog, “When it comes to working with others, networking, and communicating, introverts can often take a less conventional approach but one which leads to meaningful business relationships and creative solutions to problems.”

But introverted employees can still find themselves overwhelmed in meetings or struggling to make their presence known, even on a remote team. Managers should make a point to proactively include introverts in group discussions, or give pre-meeting assignments so everyone has time to develop responses and contribute during the conversation. Introverts themselves should try to check in with coworkers every day (whether by email, messenger, etc.) and find ways to get recognized without being the loudest voice in the virtual room.

Looking for a communication method that everyone can get on board with? Video is the best of all worlds – social folks get their face time in, online communicators can use the message box when they don’t feel comfortable speaking out loud, and phone people can rest assured that their voice will be heard. Additionally, video chat is great for informal communications, which are key in helping remote team members feel connected and supported. There are plenty of ways to incorporate video to help your team get to know each other on a personal level, including virtual happy hours, team lunches, contests, games, and more. Luckily there are several great options for video chat technology available no matter your company size or budget – Slack, Join.me, Zoom, and Google are just a few.

Communication, remote work, and trust

When it comes to communicating with your virtual team remember this, from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology: “At the core of nearly every model of knowledge dissemination within virtual teams is trust in other members.” Simply put: Your team wants to feel like they can trust you, and vice versa. Don’t let miscommunication derail what could otherwise be one of the most productive, effective teams you’ll ever be a part of – distance aside.

Have you ever had to change your communication style for work? For those of you who already work on a virtual team, what has your biggest communication challenge been? Anything that’s helped your team communicate more effectively from afar? Let us know in the comments!

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
We love Salesforce reports
And we hope you do too!

Salesforce provides standard report types which can be used to build reports summarizing and analyzing your organization’s data. Salesforce reports are a powerful tool that helps you and your organization’s staff proactively respond to your organization’s trends and activities.

Hint: If your organization is new to Salesforce, check out our blog post “Common Issues for Organizations New to Salesforce (And How to Avoid Them!)“.  If you have any additional questions about report-building, contact our talented Salesforce Customer Success team!

Questions to Ask Before Creating a Salesforce Report

Before creating a report, work with staff requesting the report in gathering report requirements. Consider asking the following questions and use the answers to build your report criteria.

1. What question is being answered by building this report?
2. What is the intended business use for the report?
3. What information is needed?

Once you have your report criteria, you are ready to start building the report!

How to Create a Salesforce Report

In this blog post, we will build a report to pull all active users in your organization who logged in this month.

Note: In this example, we will be using Salesforce Classic. Almost all of these steps can be used to build a report in Salesforce Lightning.

Step 1: Navigate to the Reports Object
Click on the Reports object from the navigation bar

Note: If you cannot find Reports on the nav bar, you can also find it under the All Tabs section by clicking on the + icon

Step 2: Create a New Report
Click on New Report.

Select your report type and click Create. In this example, we are pulling a report on our organization’s Salesforce logged-in users. Expand the Administrative Reports section and select Users.

When you click Create after choosing the report type, you will see your preview report screen.

1. Fields: Shows the list of fields available for your report. You can drag the fields on the preview (3) section.
2. Filters: Create filters to meet your report requirements.
3. Preview: Preview your report’s data.

Based on our Logged-In Active User Report requirements, build the report using the following filters:

1. View: Active Users
2. Date Field: Last Login
3. Range: This Month

Additional filters can be created by clicking the Add button. Additional fields can be added to the report by dragging fields from Fields into the Preview section.

Step 3 – Run Report and Save
Report Previews only display 50 rows of results. To view and export the full report, click Run Report. You can also Save the report for future use.

Congratulations! You now have a report to monitor all active users who logged in this month.

There’s so much more you can do with reports, like grouping the records using bucket fields, create a formula field, add cross filters linking the objects, add a chart to your report, choose from the report formats available etc.

How Can I Use Website Tracking Data for Marketing?

If your association is using a marketing automation tool like Pardot, Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, or another tool, then tracking a visitor’s interaction with your website, along with the email behavior provides an important view of potential or existing members.

For example, let’s consider Jonah, who is interested in model cars. He completes a form on the model car association website to subscribe to a weekly newsletter, which is available to members and non-members. He consistently opens and reads this newsletter, which is tracked in the marketing automation tool. After a month or so he visits the Membership Benefits page of the website. A third-party cookie from the marketing automation tool captures that visit and links it to his profile, along with a membership sales rep being notified. If the website hasn’t been updated with the “SameSite” attribute, then this key piece of information would be missed!

A journey can then be triggered based on the newsletter engagement and the membership interest signal. This journey may include emails with more detailed information about membership benefits, a special membership discount, or limited-time access to member content. Dynamic content could be included in the emails based on what other interactions Jonah has had on the website.

Bringing together information from multiple channels, such as email and web in this example, allows associations to further refine their marketing strategy to increase overall engagement and membership participation.

Whether or not this anecdote is relatable, a critical factor in a member’s experience with your association is the email content that gets delivered on mobile devices or desktop computers. There is a constant desire within associations to keep up with technological advancements to ensure a modernized and uniform membership experience. It is easy to keep the same email templates you have been using for the last several years or to manually update your mailing lists in the marketing tool based on reports in your CRM. By evaluating how you use your current marketing platform, your association can determine if the current product will meet your needs or if a new tool is required.

For associations, this serves as a great benefit, as a lot of the business questions associations ask are related to membership, certifications and events. Being able to quickly deploy models and address business questions can greatly improve your associations’ ability to attract and retain members.

Requirements for the Dataset / DataObject

For Einstein Prediction Builder to work, you need a well structured dataset that contains multiple variables and one predictive outcome. The prediction outcomes that Einstein Prediction Builder can generate is limited to a Yes/No answer or a Numerical Value. For instance, if you want to predict how much revenue a contact is likely to generate (customer lifetime value), you can set your total sales as your numerical outcome. If you want to predict which contacts are most likely to sign up for membership, you can set whether a person signed up or not as your Yes/No outcome.

The spreadsheet image below contains mock data we used to build our membership predictions, which also serves as a good example of how Einstein Prediction Builder looks at data. In the dataset, the green column, column P, contains Yes/No entries, this is our known outcome of whether someone signed up for memberships or not. We’ll be using most of the data from columns C to O to predict the unknown cells in Column P.

The general idea is to feed Einstein Prediction Builder training data that contains some of the existing outcomes, in order to predict the remaining unknown outcomes.

Do note that our known Yes/No data points need to be at least 400 entries, approximately 50% positive and 50% negative. Einstein Prediction Builder will eventually use the example data to train itself to build a suitable model to populate the prediction (unknown) data.

Building your Prediction Model

To start building the model, we will tell Einstein Prediction Builder that we are predicting Yes/No outcome and choose “No Field” as shown below so we can split the example and prediction data easily.

We will then tell Einstein which records we’d be using for “Yes”/”No” examples, in our case, it’s column P outcome_term_subscription that we mentioned above in our prerequisites. Using the Data Checker on the right hand side, we can see how big our examples are and how many records we are trying to predict at the moment.

After that, we choose which columns to contribute to your predictions, making sure we do not include any unnecessary features such as who created the record in salesforce and the email address of the contact. Just to reiterate, we are using age, income, contact_times, education to predict whether a person will sign up for membership or not.

Finally, we can click through the remaining pages and land on the status page for our model. Depending on how much data you are using to train your model, the time it takes to generate a model could range from 30 minutes to 24 hours.

Once the model is completed, we are able to obtain a scorecard on how well the model did. In our example, we can see that our prediction quality is around 74 points, which means that our model will be 74% accurate in predicting future outcomes. The top predictor side bar graph shows that the variables that most impact the model include: whether a person signed up for previous memberships or not, whether they have a housing loan and how many times they were contacted this year.

To dig into more details, we can click on the predictors tab and see that housing_loan field has a strong impact but negative correlation, which means having a housing loan negatively impacts our model and the person is less likely to sign up for premium membership if they have a housing loan.

The other predictors such as prev_outcome – success, contact_times all have positive correlation and impacts over 0.50, which means they contribute to our outcome predictions positively and people that signed up last term and contacted multiple times are likely to sign up again.

Moving on, we want to get a list of these members so that we can reach out to them. In order to do so, we move to Salesforce’s front page and create a list based on the premium_membership object.

We proceed to filter the list by unknown outcomes and include contact emails with high impact variables. We also include the prediction results (score). This will be blank when first added, but will populate after about ten minutes or so.

After waiting for our results, we refresh our Salesforce page and filter by highest prediction_results. Prediction results show the likelihood of a successful sign up. We can see that the first user is most likely to sign up with a score of 91. We should reach out to him to see if he is interested in signing up for membership.

Monitoring your Prediction Model

So far, we have built and enabled our prediction model and created a list of users who are most likely to sign up for premium memberships. As new data comes in, our model will continue to make predictions. Based on this new data, the models performance could change. Thus, it is recommended to check periodically how well the model is doing by comparing the prediction results with the actual results.

Usually, this check is done by looking at the true/false positive predictions of the model over a certain period of time. An example of this is provided below:

Stay Tuned For More To See How fusionSpan Can Help

Overall, you’ve seen how you make a prediction with Einstein Prediction Builder and single out high value targets within your association for your next membership campaign. As mentioned before, this is a hassle free, no code required application that allows you to make predictions with Salesforce objects.

For those using the Fonteva platform, this will be particularly useful. Users will be able to quickly deploy models, comprehensively view how well the model performed and create dashboard visuals around the prediction outcomes.

Of course, that is not the only tool your association can leverage. Apart from Einstein Prediction Builder, there’s also Einstein Discovery; Discovery is another tool on the Einstein platform that can automatically analyze millions of data combinations in minutes. Einstein Discovery can help associations better understand who their customers are and why they do what they do.

If you would like to know more about Einstein Prediction Builder, stay tuned for our upcoming articles diving deeper into the tool. In the meantime, reach out to fusionSpan for help setting up your next membership campaign for success!

Well, it’s time to begin! In Your AMS Journey, Implementation is the execution phase of the whole endeavor. In Step 6 you defined the scope of your project, and the System Implementer (SI) will now begin to bring your vision to life.

The key is structure, accountability and discipline. While the earlier stages of the project have been planning, this is the building phase. Imagine looking at your brand new house coming to shape one brick at a time.

Structure

Most system integrators use an Agile delivery model. They tend to configure/develop for a sprint (usually 2 – 3 weeks) and demonstrate their work at the end of it. This model of delivery has proven to be the most successful since it allows you to provide feedback along the way, protecting your investment. It is recommended that you take these demo sessions very seriously and provide the SI the feedback they need. Fixing issues discovered early is far easier and cheaper than when they are caught later on in the process.

Unit Level Testing

As you receive these sprint level demonstrations from the SI, devise a plan with them to conduct unit level testing along the way. For example, when your membership module is being set up: the first sprint was dedicated to the basic setup of your memberships purely with out of the box features, and the next sprint is dedicated to develop some customizations around the special pricing you need.

At the end of the first sprint, you should consider having your membership staff look at what has been set up and get some hands-on experience. At the end of the second sprint, your membership staff should begin some unit level testing of the features developed. As stated earlier, this gives you the opportunity to provide feedback and impact the course of the work quicker.

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)

As you go through the implementation phase of your project, we recommend that you build out your SOPs along the way, rather than at the end. This has been proven key to the success of many projects. The point to keep in mind here is that the SOP will serve as your final User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase, in addition to the test cases that the SI will provide you.

We have had clients overlook this, come to the UAT phase, and have nothing to use as a basis for their UAT. As go live approaches, the tension in a project increases, and the SOP task is frequently overlooked in lieu of all the other items that need immediate attention. Many times, clients fail to realize that the SOP is what their new staff members will use to learn the system.

Accountability and Discipline is Vital

Please ensure you keep yourself and your core team members accountable to the commitment of time and attention towards this project. It is during implementation that the ball gets dropped. There is high enthusiasm during the discovery and planning phase since time is explicitly allocated for those activities.

During the implementation, tasks like answering SI questions on time, conducting unit testing, attending status meetings are more are frequently overlooked for more pressing daily tasks that need to be completed. We have seen projects slip off the rails during the implementation phase more than once.

Sponsor Meetings

We recommend that monthly sponsor meetings be held between the client sponsor of the project and the SI sponsor. This can be the checkpoint where the project can be course corrected if required. While the project teams are hard at work in the trenches, the client sponsor hears feedback from the rest of the organization in addition to the project team. This insight can sometimes vary from what the project team perceives as the state of the project, giving the client sponsor an early opportunity to take corrective action internally as well as with the SI (if required).

Start The Data Conversion Early

Your efforts to evaluate your existing data for its cleanliness should have begun before the start of the project. If not, this is more or less the last chance. Contemplate a data governance project if one is required. If you need external help with data extraction, it’s time to get those vendors identified and contracted. More about this in the data conversion blog next!

Set Up a Payment Gateway Early

The selection and basic setup of your payment gateway needs to be completed as soon as implementation begins. Many may argue the timing is too early, but our experience has been that the legal paperwork involved with the providers and the pace at which these providers operate is in months.

Go lives have been held up in the past purely because the payment gateway was set up thwarting the possibility to support online transactions. Further complication is added if you are transferring from one gateway provider to another especially if you have periodic scheduled payments. Again, a topic for a blog post of its own!

A few years ago, the association I was working at decided to overhaul and upgrade the organization website. Among many other resources, this project involved the need for staff to coordinate work with an outside vendor in order to re-do the site.

Although the website updates were eventually completed, projects rarely go according to plan. Looking back, there are definitely steps we could have carried out differently to better help the consultant understand both our project objectives and expectations. Most of my learning from this specific project centered around communication and understanding business processes.

Understanding these pieces played an important role in the project, because it mapped the trajectory of the project and the key stakeholders that needed to be involved. Looking back, establishing this at the onset of the project would have paid dividends to all involved and the project timeline itself.

This blog was originally published on March 28, 2019.

Salesforce Sandboxes are crucial to testing new releases and functionalities in a controlled environment before they are placed in your live production environment. Before you test on your Salesforce Sandbox environment, we highly recommend taking the time to refresh your Sandbox’s metadata with the production org.

Despite this, many associations overlook the importance of planning a sandbox refresh. Here are a few things that you need to do in preparation of refreshing your Salesforce Sandbox:

Find Out The ‘Why?’

This may be obvious, but solidifying why you need to do a Sandbox refresh should be the first planning step. Sandbox refreshes are often done for the following reasons:

• A Salesforce upgrade is scheduled to be released
• Major updates are being made to existing functionality

Based on your needs, you can then decide if you need a Partial Sandbox or a Full Sandbox. Partial and Full Sandboxes contain different default objects, data limits, and refresh intervals.

In most cases, we highly suggest a Full Sandbox. A Full Sandbox is the most exact copy of your production environment, which is important if you’re adding a major new functionality, or if you’re upgrading.

Remember, you want to have the most accurate copy of your live environment, so there are no surprises when changes are then deployed.

Build A Plan With Stakeholders

Prior to refreshing your Sandbox, we highly recommend communicating with other vendors and internal staff on the timing of your Sandbox Refresh.  Sandbox refreshes will overwrite any development that is in progress on your Sandbox environment, so it is important that any approved development or maintenance tasks on Sandbox are moved to production before it is overwritten. Full Sandbox refresh can only be done once every 29 days.

Contact fusionSpan For More

Once your Sandbox is refreshed, you are able to start development or test your Salesforce upgrade! Having an accurate copy of your live environment will ensure you are set up for success when changes are then deployed.

For more Salesforce best practices and assistance, contact our talented team here at fusionSpan!

As an Association or nonprofit, you likely rely heavily upon your members paying by Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, and Discover for membership dues, certifications, event registration, and more.

Now, imagine what would happen to your organization if you couldn’t accept credit card payments for any period of time. The prospect of not being able to accept credit card payments for even 30 minutes due to your services being down during the peak times would be a major problem.

Activities like carding could lead to an immediate suspension of your credit card processing services (also called merchant services) for an indefinite period of time – this in turn could result in significant loss of revenue or reputation to your Association.

What Is Carding?

Carding is a type of fraud in which a thief uses stolen credit cards to test its data against a merchant’s payment processing system, ultimately aiming to verify and identify missing values of stolen card details. Card cracking and carding are two common automated bot threats.

Fraudsters will typically visit e-commerce websites and initiate multiple transactions by submitting purchase requests on the Internet. Because credit cards are often canceled quickly after being lost, a major part of carding involves testing the stolen card information to see if it still works.

Methods such as Malware, Phishing, and Credit card skimming are used by criminals to steal your credit card information and use it for carding purposes.

Defense Strategies To Prevent Carding

Despite the liability that comes with creating and maintaining a payment processor gateway at your organization, there are ways to protect yourself! Some initial steps include using anti-spyware and malware-blocker software, as well as promptly running updates to that software.

Additional strategies to protect your organization include:

• CAPTCHA – a challenge-response test that helps an online merchant verify you’re a human shopper
• Address Verification System (AVS) – compares the billing address used in the transaction with the issuing bank’s address information on file for that cardholder
• IP Geolocation Checks – confirms if the details of a purchase made from a certain country correspond to other known banking and invoicing records
• BIN Number Tracking – participants in online transactions can detect cases of fraud and identity theft by matching the geographic location of the cardholder to the location provided by the BIN (The first four to six digits identify the financial institution that issued the card)
• Velocity Checks – merchants use this metric to identify irregular patterns in the checkout process that might show fraud
• Authorization/Capture – a merchant verifies that your card can be charged but holds off on collecting the funds from the card issuer
• Blacklist – build a customer blacklist to block individuals who are repeat fraud offenders
• Machine ID/Device Fingerprinting – determine whether or not a user is repeatedly visiting a merchant’s site using different payment attributes (names, addresses, IPs, credit cards, computer browsers, etc.) to mask their identity

How fusionSpan Can Help

A coordinated, proactive approach will ensure your association will be in a better position to weather potential threats. Carding could lead to an immediate suspension of your credit card processing services, so it is imperative to take defensive measures to prevent carding activity.

For more information on carding, and how to defend your member-based organization against such threats, do not hesitate to reach out to fusionSpan today!