Salesforce | The new Top Chef

Lizette CZ
6 min readJan 24, 2022

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Automating breakfast, lunch and dinner for you

This is Chef Zahn coming to you LIVE from the Top Chef kitchen. The question I have for you is, “If you could have all of your meals made for you without lifting a finger, would you like that?” Now if I asked you, “If you could have repetitive tasks done for you at work without having to even think about it, would you like that?” I think your answer to both questions would be, “YES!!”

In The Giving Tree Foundation project that Abby and I completed for Talent Stacker, we leveraged Salesforce features to automatically do work for our Users. This org has their process down. Everything is timed and everyone works in sync. But how? SALESFORCE!

In a previous post, I showed you how Cookie Johsnon used our web to lead form and created a Potential Donor (Lead) record. The first GTF associate in the donation process is the Lead Generator and they manage the queue of leads coming in from the web. Once they change the record to the Volunteer Project Manager, they no longer have access to the record and the VPM takes over. The VPM contacts the potential donor, turn on their charm and when they get the first donation — they convert the Potential Donor (Lead) to a Donor (Contact). Convert button is located on the top right corner of the potential donor record page.

Click on Convert

3 things happen when a Lead is converted to a Contact: Account, Contact and Opportunity are created.

Once the VPM clicks Convert, the owner of the Contact record will become the Donation Manager. But we also want the opportunity to auto update to Closed Won since the donation has been made and is no longer pending. And let’s not forget to send Cookie a Thank You email for her generous donation. Let’s go see if the automation worked. First let’s look for Cookie Johnson under the Donor tab:

When we click on Cookie Johnson, we go directly into her Donor record. And Christmas Morning, the Donor Owner has been changed to DM (donation manager) and the donation is listed in the Donations related list section with Stage Closed Won for $100.

So how did we cook it up? Automation!

We created a record triggered flow to run whenever a Donor record is created.

The first step is to Get Record of the new Donor.

The second step is the Update Record element that runs without a condition and updates the OwnerID field to Donation Manager.

Then in the third step, we added an Action element to create a Task of sending an email to the *Assigned To ID: Record Owner (donation manager) to Subject (follow up with Donor w/ Donation options) with a *Due Date Only of today and this is regarding *Relating Record ID (Cookie Johnson).

This is what the email looks like:

The second Automation we created was a record triggered flow whenever a new Donation was made.

The first step is to Get Record of the new Donation.

The second step is the Update Record element that runs without a condition and updates the OwnerID field to Donation Manager and update the Stage to Closed Won.

Then in the third step, we want the system to update these fields too. Enter in the amount and the date that Cookie entered from the Web to Lead form and copy it onto the Donation record.

Then we created a third automation — record triggered flow to run when Paid field = TRUE. In NSPS, a payment is automatically created when a Donation is Closed Won. So whenever a donation is Closed Won, it will check the Payment “Paid” field to trigger this flow.

The first step is to Get Record of the new Donation (opportunity)

Then we want the system to assign the Donor as the Primary Contact on the Donation record. This is to guarantee that we have a contact email address to send a Thank You email.

In the next step, we ask the system to make a Decision. Does the Donation record have a Primary Donor? Why yes, we made sure of that in the previous step. Is Null = FALSE really means there is a value in the field, it’s not empty. So does the donation have a Primary Contact? Yes.

The second decision is asking the same question, but the answer would be the donation record does not have a Primary Contact. Is Null = TRUE, means the Primary Contact field is empty.

The next step is an Action element to send an email to the email stored in the Primary Contact’s record, from the person who created the record, with the Subject (Thank you for your Donation). And use the message selected in the Body (ThankyouTemplate) that we created as a variable.

The body / message was created as a text template variable:

And the last action the flow does is the Update Record element. On the Donation record there are fields that the User needs to enter: Acknowledgment Status and Acknowledgment Date. They need to enter “was the Donor sent a Thank You email?” and “on what date was the email sent?” Since we sent the email using this flow in the previous step, it’s only fitting that the flow can answer these fields too. After the email is sent, change the Acknowledgment Status field to Acknowledged and enter today’s date into the Acknowledgment Date field.

This is what the email looks like:

And when we look back at Cookie’s donation record, you can see that her “1st Donation” of $100 is Closed Won and it was Acknowledged on 12/4/21.

Isn’t that a tasty treat?! Well, all of The Giving Tree Foundation Users think so! They love all this automation because it helps them process donations faster and more accurately. And seeing your Users happy is PRICELESS!

Mahalo,

Lizette

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Lizette CZ

Salesforce Magician + Home Chef Enthusiast + Fun Size = ME!