I recently had a conversation with a frustrated client.
He wanted a straightforward report that shows all contacts in Salesforce with the following criteria:
- had an email address
- didn’t opt out of any type of marketing
- donated in the last 5 years (a donation is a record type of opportunity)
The report must display
- full name
- email address
- city, state, and country
- last donated amount
- last donated date
This information would be used to segment an audience for upcoming events.
Sadly, the report was painfully hard to create. Why is that? Well, the data model didn’t follow the best practices of the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and so all the contact rollups were not working (last donated amount and last donated date are out-of-the-box in NPSP).
As a result, we are now having conversations on whether we should realign their current instance of Salesforce to NPSP, move to a new instance of Salesforce with NPSP, or move to new instance with the new Nonprofit Cloud (NPC).
These are not light conversations, and the impacts of the last two options are quite large. All because technical debt was allowed to fester.
The takeaway
A smart general contractor once told me about home maintenance, “take care of the small issues while they are still small. Don’t let them fester into larger ones”.