Down Under Community Innovation: Wrapping Up the first ever Commons Community Sprint in Sydney, Australia

November 15th & 16th, 2023, Sydney, AU

“If you get the opportunity to Sprint, just do it!“ - Sprinter Feedback

WOW, Sydney you did it! After a successful virtual ANZ time-zone Sprint in 2021, we received heaps of requests to host an in-person event, gathering local nonprofit organizations, schools, partners, and staff to focus on local challenges using Salesforce in the region. We’re hearing it was “Abs mind blowing“, and “I really feel like I can contribute in a useful and practical way“. 🥳 We started the day with a networking breakfast with a special appearance from the one and only Sprinty (our Community mascot), a gratitude filled welcome, and after a interactive challenge identification a number of local and global challenges were discussed, resulting in four NEW projects initiated to define the problem and consider solutions.

Read on to get a glimpse into the incredible Sprint, and if you missed out on all the fun stay in the loop via the Commons & Sprints Trailblazer Community Group.

Who was in the room?:

We had the pleasure of hosting 50+ attendees, of which a whopping 90% of Sprinters had never Sprinted before! Responses to our survey are still rolling in, but as of posting 100% of new participants felt supported and ready to Sprint. 👏 “This being my first community sprint, I initially felt clueless, but thanks to the incredible team effort and the warm and supportive community, I not only learned a lot but also had the honor of representing my team during the final presentation. The experience was truly transformative.” - Sprinter Feedback

Special Welcome from Nonprofit Leadership:

We kicked off the day with a welcome from Michael Wolff (Executive Vice President, Nonprofit) and Andrew Hill (Area Vice President, Nonprofit APAC) who showcased the support for locally focused collaborative innovation in the Commons.

What was worked on:

There were six amazing projects in the room, two of which were existing projects (DLRS, and the newly launched Salesforce Indicators) and FOUR new projects focused on local challenges:

Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (DLRS):

What is DLRS? It’s an interface to rollup data between records where Salesforce can’t natively. At the Sprint, feedback on the new UI wizard was gathered and huge progress was made to create end-user friendly descriptions for roll-up operator types, documentation, and an audit of the support group to define new FAQ’s.

• Next Steps: provide UI feedback to the rest of the DLRS team, and update documentation.

Salesforce Indicators:

What is Indicators? A new LWC that allows you to highlight important data in with icons and colors, making it easy to focus on what matters most on a Salesforce record. At the Sprint new users were introduced to the product, discussing potential install/setup barriers including documentation.

• Next Steps: Update documentation, and continue to consider ways to improve UI.

ANZ Payment Solution Framework:

Focused on creating a decision tree to identify which companies/products could be used to solve local and general use cases. Payments, Receipting and Integrations is top of mind for a lot of people; customers want guidance about where to start, they want simplicity. The team designed a working Flow to help local NGO’s understand what local providers would be a good fit for their unique needs, resources, and skill-sets. And, check out their incredible video to promote their work!

• Next Steps: Publish the flow externally so NGO’s can start using it!

Lightning Page Layouts 101:

Focused on helping Admins build out those super amazing page layouts they see in demos. They want their org to look like the ones they see us showing off! To resolve the challenge, they are working to design the perfect page layout and support with help documentation on the most useful topics and recommendations for AppExchange Resources.

• Next Steps: Create a clean documentation piece to share for the community that guides a new admin in a non-profit space

Soon to be Published! Admins Guide to Field Audit Trail:

Field Audit Trail allows a customer to define a policy to retain archived field history data. This feature helps them comply with industry regulations related to audit capability and data retention. However, seeing key details like the amount of time your data is being retained for is currently difficult for the average admin, and requires developer skills. This project will publish an “Admins Guide” to understand some of the product setup, which is difficult as an Admin.

• Next Steps: Publish and article showing how an Admin can use Workbench to see behind the scenes - no dev skills needed!

Wrapped! NPSP Household Naming for Suffixes:

Many in the room identified challenges with how suffixes are handled in the NPSP Household, specifically that conventions can’t handle suffixes that apply to only one of the Household members. One example was OAM (Member of the Order of Australia) and we even had a person in the room who has been appointed this honour! Before wrapping up and moving to other teams, this mighty team of two compiled a doc that asks for updates to the existing NPSP documentation to include the custom example {!{!Salutation} {!FirstName} {!LastName}} {!Suffix}, which is not currently referenced.

• Next Steps: Salesforce.org Doc writers will update the NGO Doc to include the example and custom formula to make it easier to find the solution.

Feeling the FOMO?

Guess what? We’re not done yet! Stay in the loop on all upcoming events and happenings in the Commons - join our Trailblazer Community Group today.