June was a busy month in the Salesforce ecosystem and Trailblazer Community including the likes of London’s Calling, Salesforce AI Day, YeurDreamin’ and Salesforce World Tour in London.
One of the other events that took place in June was the Salesforce.org Commons Community Sprint. This took place the day after Salesforce World Tour London on Friday 30th June. This event saw a variety of Salesforce Professionals from across the world come together to help support Nonprofit organisations by working on Open Source solutions that they can use for free to help them in their work through the power of the Salesforce platform.
But what is a Commons Community Sprint we hear you ask? Let us explain.
In a nutshell, a Salesforce.org Commons Community Sprint is an in-person event where Salesforce Professionals come together to work on solutions for Nonprofits. Admins, Developers, Consultants, BAs, and a variety of other roles from both End Users and Partners come together to build out solutions in a hackathon-style event.
Solutions to come out of the Commons Programme include the likes of the Outbound Funds Module, which many of our clients use as the basis for managing their grant-giving activities, and Sprinty’s Community Resources (an online repository of helpful content for Nonprofit organisations using Salesforce).
The programme has also taken on the maintenance of Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (or DLRS for short) in recent years. This fab app is free for non-profits and enables us to create summary fields for clients on one record based on data from another record. For example, the number of events a contact has attended or number of volunteering applications they’ve made, and show these summaries on the contact record.
In fact, the Non-profit Success Pack (NPSP) sees its beginnings in an older form of the programme. So, the Commons Community Sprint Programme is a real benefit to the sector.
The Sprint that took place in June saw over 70 attendees come together to work on a variety of solutions across the day.
The projects that were focused on during the day were as follows:
• Technical Collective
• Flow Recipes
• Animal Shelter Starter Pack
• AI Prompt Recipes Book for Nonprofits (New Project)
• GDPR Compliance for Small Budget Nonprofits (New Project)
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One of our Salesforce Consultants, Mark Jones, attended this Sprint and headed up the AI Prompt Recipes Book for Nonprofits project. That project was dedicated to creating a recipe book for prompts to ask Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard. The prompts included in this recipe book are designed to help users troubleshoot challenges in Salesforce, retrieve information about various products/tools and create items such as formulas and SOQL queries. The recipe book will be available at Sprinty’s Community Resources in the very near future.
Other highlights from the day included the work of the Flow recipes group. This group created and documented five Flows that will be available to access for Nonprofits soon, with another 7 being currently in draft. There was also the work of the Technical Collective group, which is an endeavour to support the work of Nonprofits by matching Admins who need to build up more experience with Admins with a lot of experience to create a healthy and sustainable mentorship framework. At this Sprint the Technical Collective piloted two programs and worked on items such as marketing content and a third pilot project.
At the time of writing, we are not sure when the next Sprint in EMEA or the UK will be. The groups that were established at this Sprint will continue work on their projects (possibly at future Sprints) to see the content go live. Several of the projects will be ongoing, so there will most likely be more work to come.
Globally, the next Sprint event to take place will be happening in Chicago this coming October. If you’re in the Chicago area or are travelling in for Nonprofit Dreamin’ on the 1st and 2nd of November, then why not go ahead and sign up if you are interested in taking part.
To find out more about the Salesforce.org Commons Community Programme and the upcoming Sprint in Chicago, then check out the links shown below:
• Salesforce.org Commons Community Programme
• Chicago Nonprofit Sprint on 30 and 31 October
• London, UK Nonprofit Sprint on 30 June
UK: 