Thriving as a Non-Profit Salesforce Admin

But before we dive into our topic this week , I want to thank everyone for their patience , as we've been taking the time to figure out what our episode cadence looks like and , ultimately , what next steps for the show looks like .

It's been an incredible journey so far , sharing all these amazing admin stories with our audience , and we can't wait to evolve the show going into the second half of 2024 . So , with that said , we're into the month of May and with that comes conference season being in full swing .

So don't forget to register for all the amazing upcoming Salesforce events , knowing that we'd love to take the show on the road . So be on the lookout for us at Salesforce Connections at the end of May and Texas Dreaming on the last week of May , going into June . We'd love to see you there . So don't forget .

If you'd like to get in contact with us , reach out to us on our website at adminsoftomorrowcom . Forward slash , share your thoughts , reach out to us , let us know which events you're going to and where you'd like to see us go . So , taking conferences aside , let's dive into our episode .

So today we sit down with Mark Jones , a Salesforce admin with a focus on nonprofits . I've said this before , but from our very first episode of the show , I've always wanted to share stories of admins with unique backgrounds but inspiring stories , and this doesn't disappoint .

I've always had a special place in my heart for nonprofit admins because in my experience , those kind of admins who are working with nonprofits small mom and pop shops they're some of the most selfless people you can meet in the ecosystem .

Ultimately , finding ways to give back not only to the Salesforce community but to the wider world is something that just doesn't get highlighted enough , and our time with Mark gives us the chance to do just that , from starting a user group to helping lead the automation dream and user event .

This is a wonderful story of someone who just naturally wants to give back to the community . So , without further ado , let's meet Mark . Mark is a 10-time certified Salesforce professional working as a Salesforce consultant for Time Technology .

Mark is the leader of the Newcastle upon Time Salesforce user group and speaks regularly at various community events and conferences . An avid lover of process automation , specifically Flow , mark is also one of the founders of Automation Dreamin' , a trailblazer community conference focused on all things process automation .

Mark also runs two Salesforce blogs the Ragamuffin Admin and the Flow Architect . So let's not waste any more time and dive on in fantastic .

So before we dive in to kind of your journey , you are a frequent listener of the show , which I'm really appreciative of , so you kind of know that we we dive into the story but we also kind of have a theme that we go around and talk about .

So this week I want us to really talk through not only just your life and your experiences because I'm really interested to learn more from what I already know but also you specialize a lot in the nonprofit space . So I feel like there are a lot of misconceptions out there that admins have around either working for a nonprofit or specializing in in PSP .

So , with that being said , I want us to kind of talk through like how admins can thrive with being in the nonprofit space . But before you go into that , I'd love for you to quickly introduce yourself to the audience and kind of share a little bit of background about yourself . How did you get started working with Salesforce , with nonprofits ?

How did you then become so passionate to create all the amazing blogs and resources that you have now coined and created ? Cool ?

I was previously working at another non-profit where I was doing a non-salesforce role and basically came to the end of the contract and , as is often so sometimes often the case here in the uk , it came to the point where the contract was coming up at the end of march , then to the next financial year , which starts for us in april , and uh , basically they

took the employee , turned around to me , said we don't have a space for you anymore at the end of the financial year . So I had to start looking for another job and , approaching the job I was looking for , I was looking for , again , non-profit roles .

So I've been in the non-profit space and the education space in working in usually support roles , whether those are like technician or office administrative roles . I've been in the nonprofit space since I pretty much left school at the age of like 16 in terms of that , and I'm 36 now , so just about the turn .

So nonprofit space , such education , for about 20 years Wow . So that's quite a long time . I've never really been outside of that , even though I work now in consulting , which we'll surely get onto in a bit .

But the role I went for , which first got me into Salesforce at the time there was nothing salesforce in the job description at all and a couple of days before my interview the company got in touch with me and went oh , we've just purchased salesforce and do you know anything about it ?

And I gave as much of an honest response as I can which was um , not , not technically , because I've not , I've not used it however uh . However , I have used crm systems in the past .

I'd use things like hubspot and bespoke ones in the past and I'd also , in my role I just left , I was an admin assistant person on their crm system , which was totally bespoke uh .

So I had some crm experience before that um , but the time my uh my late father , who's no longer with us was working for one of salesforce's um biggest clients uh out of the uk as a uh his his role was essentially he was a like a security layout uh person where he would go around to like different stadiums across like the uk and into ireland and basically

plan out where all of their security setup would go and they use salesforce and they were still to this day , one of salesforce's biggest clients in the world . So I asked my dad it goes , do you , do you know anything about this ? I know you use it and he pulled a few strings and got me able to see the back end of Salesforce .

I didn't see anything from the client side . I didn't see anything on the front end . I just saw setup in Salesforce Classic and that was my introduction to Salesforce going through and setup up as much as I could before a job interview and um managed to took my way into a role , and that was how I got started , almost eight years ago .

I want to be as smart as possible and be the smartest person in the room for what we need to know yeah , yeah .

Um , you know , the north face is historically a lot more insular . You're kind of we often keep ourselves to ourselves , so you know you'll go into work , you'll do your job , you'll go home and you'll spend time with your family and your friends , but you won't necessarily see , you don't see as much movement in terms like the community presence .

And for me , after being in the ecosystem for like a couple of years and I started finding there was more stuff that I was kind of trying to figure out , and I was got to the position of going , well , if I'm trying to figure this stuff out for myself , surely there's going to be somebody else who's trying to do the same .

And I basically started looking into ways okay , how can we create some kind of like a group or some kind of presence in the area , uh , to help other people in the same , in the same or a similar board . So I basically started looking at the true version community groups , uh , program , uh and , as I say , this was , say , a couple years .

It was actually three years and I started looking at this into 2019 , so I'd been in for a little while and before I did that and started the user group that I lead in newcastle , upon time in early 2020 , due to some personal stuff that went on during 2019 , uh so , but basically , yeah , for me it was a case of you know if you know , if there's nothing

up here for for us start something and things kind of grow from there .

I want to talk a little bit about your work within nonprofits and how you have been able to work as a consultant not just as like an admin for large companies but for smaller shops for nonprofits . I to be able to specialize a little bit in the nonprofit service cloud and to be able to have those insights again the topic of this episode .

I really want to kind of dive into a little bit around how admins can thrive for you . Knowing that your first job and your background was in that space and they said , hey , we're about to open up Salesforce .

I would like to kind of dive into how do you think new admins should navigate learning that system and finding opportunities to grow with that system of whether it be sales cloud for nonprofits or within NPSP directly .

But if I was to kind of pivot away from the Trailhead stuff and some certifications and things like that , which are all good , the thing that really helped me , as simplistic as it sounds , was just get hold of a dev org or get into a sandbox and just try stuff .

You know , think of use cases that you can use to benefit the nonprofit that you're in and try and build it and try and see if you can get it to work . You know , as somebody from the North East , one of the things that we often would say is , like our best teachers are usually experienced .

So you know , just having time that you can carve out to go away and learn stuff , which isn't always easy . To be fair , you know , you've always got like stuff like deadlines , tasks that you're working on , and if're in the non-profit space , you might be in a similar position to what I was , but I was first time I was doing this , doing the part-time .

You know , I didn't have a full-time job in salesforce until , uh , until 2021 . Um , even though I did stuff outside of work in within the community , I I did volunteer and help other groups . So , as one of our listeners , you might be in a similar position where you're not even doing it full-time .

You might be a mother with a young family who's doing work part-time and looking after the family the rest of the time , or some other circumstance . But having time to build that up , your knowledge up , is so , so key , and I do honestly believe that a lot of people tend to learn the most by by building up that experience .

Um , also , alongside that , you you're trying to build up connections in the community . It's okay .

You know the amount of times I will go to somebody that I know in the community and say , like , message them on LinkedIn or WhatsApp or turns up to a community group and ask somebody a question , uh , or just turn up to a session that I'm interested in and and have a listen . Um , you know , getting to those groups are so important .

So there's like a non-profit group in your area . Those are really , really good to go to uh , and there's loads of non-profit groups in in across the world . Um , you know . So those are kind of the kind of the . I guess the point , the three main ways I would say is kind of like really helpful to help you learn .

You know , like time on trip on trailhead , you know just time playing around in salesforce . You know , if you do it safely in the dev org or sandbox , you know the worst that's going to happen is you're going to have to delete the sandbox and create a new one in this place , you know .

But your story and your background is so interesting around how you've been able to foster and develop the community . We talked about it a little bit ago and everything you do comes back to that . So I kind of want to ask you , why do you believe the community is so important ?

So if I talk about just from a practical sense , the last two jobs I've had have come from connections within the community . You know , and uh , and there's so so much benefit in that you've got such a wide array of array of knowledge , uh , and also just some of the people just in terms like just from even a personal perspective .

Some of the most recent best friends I've built up are from the community . So like , for example , I had a bit of a rough spell last year for personal reasons . I was diagnosed with a chronic kidney disease last year and one of the first people I went and went and talked to about it was somebody from the trailblazer community .

And you know to me , you know I've , you know , and to kind of pivoted into something a bit more in the personal life as well , I , I'm a , I'm a christian , go to church here in the uk .

Uh , so I I come from a bit of a background where you're kind of that community , kind of uh mentality was fostered in me since , you know , I was a toddler and just here walking , you know .

So for me it's it's a natural kind of thing to want that community , want that connection with other people and in terms of the professional space I've not seen anything quite like that outside of the sales force space , you know , and you know there is other groups like microsoft has a , has a thriving community from what I understand .

But I've never quite experienced anything like the sales force trailblazer community . So for me it became just a natural kind of byproduct to give back Because realistically , if I think about it at this position of time , I'm in the best kind of set of jobs I've ever had in my entire life coming into Salesforce .

I'm also earning the best salary that I've ever had coming into Salesforce ecosystem . So many people have given me such opportunities to get to travel around the world and do all this . So to me this is a natural thing to say , to want to give back and to try and help others kind of achieve something similar if they want to go to that same kind of level .

It can either be the ohana , or it can just be a group of people you get a beer with , or it could be literally just that rando guy I'm getting quick troubleshooting help from . It is what you make it .

So to that extent , knowing that one being in a small area of the UK is limiting you a little bit , you're in nonprofits , which is also now limiting you , and you are also kind of around the more automation admin , which it's not very niche into one cloud . It's just kind of a little bit of everything .

So all these things kind of putting you in like this crazy niche zone , what were you able to do to not only create your own thing but then find other communities for you to get that starting point ?

So like , for example , like when I first started thinking about it , one of the very first things I did because I had never been to a community event from salesforce or anything like that um wow , before I started looking into this .

So one of the first things I did was actually go to london's calling uh , which is like uh , which you , somebody , somebody who listens might have heard of , but it's Europe's biggest trailblazer community conference , which happens in , ironically enough , london every single year .

a new uber back together to to the airport together because we were flying out at similar times .

So you know , that's like five years difference between the two , almost uh , because london's call that time was in march and it's it's now in like june or july , so you're almost five years to kind of almost a day I'm sitting in a taxi with one of the very first speakers I went to listen to uh at london's calling uh , and for me , I just started build up

connections from there , like I built up a connection with uh , if it's okay , the name drop of christine marshall from salesforce ben uh , she's kind of been . That was one of my kind of almost like idols in the ecosystem going through , because you know she came as an admin startup of her own blog that works with sales sales was ben uh and to me .

She was always someone I looked up to and you know I met her for the first time in london's calling back in 2019 as well , uh , and she was one of the people who really inspired me to start pushing the community stuff .

And I got to a point again trying to make things a little bit personal , because it became I didn't start my community group officially until 2020 and that was because during the course of that year I ended up having quite a relatively serious mental .

That year I ended up having a quite a relatively serious mental health episode and ended up not being in the position where I was in the right mental space to do that . So it took me until probably about the october of 2019 before I kind of really started to pick that back up .

And that was after going to a conference which doesn't happen much anymore , but it was the first conference in the ecosystem I spoke at and it was a conference in Cambridge over the UK called Inspire East and , to be fair , it was the first time I did a talk in in terms of Salesforce I'd be , I spoke .

I've been speaking , doing public speaking since I was like 16 as well , but I hadn't been doing a talk in the context I was doing it before , compared to Salesforce , is quite different . So I went there for the first time , didn't know anybody . I'm a massive introvert so I was very , very nervous to talk to people .

And I met some really great people there , people I keep in touch with to this day uh , and you know they . So a lot of them probably don't even necessarily fully understand how significant their kind of uh impact was on me at that time .

You know , coming out of having like kind of one of the worst years of my life mentally and coming out five months after that conference running our first user group event .

How were the connections you had made from London's calling and all these events , how were you able to use these groups as your not just personal or sorry professional support system , as your personal support system as well , or sorry professional support system , but as your personal support system as well ?

I didn't speak to them for like another couple of years or so because of , like I was like well , they're up here , I'm like down here you know , uh , so , but for those I did keep in touch with , it was so largely simply cases like talking to them outside , offline and talking like for for linkedin messages or twitter or , uh , you know what .

What's up for those I did have like numbers of and just talk to them and just like , as straight as it sounds , not talking you're talking about salesforce stuff that I was interested in or and stuff that was happening at work .

I was , you know , away from all the stuff that was going on . Personally , it was , you know , oftentimes . Sometimes people will say like , if they're having like a real stressful work time , that getting away from work was kind of like it's the thing that helped them .

For me , in a sense , essentially , was the opposite , you know , so talk to people that could distract me away from all of the stuff I was worried about at home . Yeah , and focusing on stuff to do with salesforce and like having conversations around like mpsb .

Like the organization I worked in at the time , uh , didn't use mpsb , despite being a non-profit , so talking to people about that goes and asking them how does , or ? So so what , what do you mean ? Like , what is this thing called customizable rollouts ? What ? What is that ?

You know , and uh going through and uh getting pointers on on how to get hold of mpsp and learn that , and those were quite , quite good and quite quite helpful to keep in , keep in touch with those people and that also grew as I got more involved in the community . So , like 2021 was a real pivot in terms of that .

So , like 2021 , after the you're the , the rough year that was 2020 for everybody . Um , I spoke at non-profit dreaming for the first time and I made a connection with uh , with withys , who's a Salesforce MVP , who you might know of and some of our listeners might know of .

But Melissa became kind of one of the go-to people for myself fairly quickly and she also became kind of like one of those people who pushed me and stuff .

So I will sometimes make a bit of a joke if I'm in a , in a session that melissa's around at and say it's almost like it's melissa's fault in air quotes that I'm as present as I am , because melissa pushed me to kind of get involved in stuff like the salesforce , uh , the old community commons program , or to start putting out stuff like my blog and stuff

like that . It was like it was Melissa . The round conversation was where you should be writing all of this stuff down and put this out somewhere . You know people could benefit so much from the knowledge that you're picking up or the things that you're interested in , just randomly trying put that stuff out there .

And that's one of the big things about being in the communities having having people around you who can , who can push you in a good in a good way yeah it's the , it's the constant build-up that is done , like you said , in a good way , in a polite way , it's not in a there's no malicious intent .

I tell people at the user groups I go to and they ask me like how I don't have the certs or I don't have this , but I've done all this work and I've done these projects and I want to talk about these topics .

Build a blog , build a website , build something to get your voice out there , even if no one listens to it , or even just if one person listens to it .

know , and I'll , I'll , I'll sound like very ignorant at this point , like I don't really necessarily honestly keep a track too much of the analytics as such .

I , you know , I obviously you know I'm not a marketer by , by trade or anything like that , and while I do understand the importance of that for me , the mentality has always been you know , you know and it sounds almost flippant a little bit like I don't necessarily care whether it helps one person or a thousand people .

You're in my , in my head , you're a thousand , a thousand is a thousand one . So as long as it's helping one person , it's worth doing , and you know . So for me the reach is not necessarily the most important , important factor , although I do know , you know I reach it . I do have a bit more of a reach than I just wanted to to people .

For me , if I was just , if I could just say by the end of my career , hey look , I felt one person thrive in the ecosystem .

Because I at least know for me I'm speaking from my experience and admins I've spoken to at user groups when you're that young into your career of being a Salesforce admin or being involved in the ecosystem whether the admin is true admin or developer architect , yada , yada there's this mentality and block of , yes , I want to give back , but I need to look , I

need to look out for me myself and I I need to get that first job , I need to get that experience , and I I am guilty of that . When I first started I was very much in that mindset . I didn't actually join a user group meeting until like eight years into my career . But , that being said , it's so common to have that mentality .

How do you think people should , or what would you recommend for people to kind of step out of that mentality , to be more Ohana focused ?

I've won the core tenets of being a Christian is , you know , we talk about being like humble and faithful servants is one of the lines that we use , and the whole concept about that is basically , you know , because we've been given so much as Christians give back , and that kind of mentality has kind of always been there .

Since I came to faith as a Christian , I came to a very real , quick conclusion , like do you know what ? This , for me , is life-changing ? This belief system for me is life-changing . So I should be doing what I can to try and make the world a better place , even if that's just one again small group of people that gets affected by that .

So for me , that me , that was that for somebody else it might be something different , somebody something completely different . Um , I think the catalyst is going to be trying to like fight , trying to find the thing that gets you excited and gets you in a position where you go do what I . I would .

I wish everybody knew about this and if you get that , um , that will be a good catalyst to help you kind of get into that position for yourself as a sales professional . I think , like for me as well . You're like , when I started learning flow , you know , I spent a lot of time talking about flow .

I write a blog about flow , um , you know , um , for me I was like do what I , I love this , um , it's one of my favorite things to do . I'll sit on , uh , on my laptop outside of work and build floors , you know , on my own free time , just because I want to try something , uh .

And for me it's like like do what , if I , if what stuff I'm trying to do and and work and can help somebody else . That's , you know , let's try that .

tribulations of being a quote unquote full stack admin in this ecosystem . We don't talk nearly enough about like that catalyst and the , the effort it takes for you to find that catalyst . So , with that being said , knowing your background with everything , what got you focused and passionate about flows in particular ? You mentioned that and I know you also .

We'll talk about this in a second . But you also helped put on a wonderful virtual event called automation dreaming , which is where you and I met , and I spoke at that event a while .

A couple also helped put on a wonderful virtual event called Automation Dreamin' , which is where you and I met , and I spoke at that event a couple of years ago and can't recommend that event enough . Fingers crossed we get to see it in 2024 .

But what got you so interested in Flow ? To the extent , create that catalyst for you .

I'd obviously used like workflow rules and process builder , but I was at a conference that was tied to the organization I was working in . So I was working in the home sector and they use a third-party product for Salesforce , so they didn't use NPSB .

It was a third-party product called Inform and the people behind that would run a conference every year talking about the stuff that they were bringing into into their product . And I went to that one time and somebody essentially clicked a a new a button for to create a new record for what they call .

It was a custom object , they called actions and they clicked on that . But what it did is it popped up a list of the associated pairing record for each action that should be linked to . And this was an issue that I had seen several times over the course of my time as admin , where people would ring me and go .

Oh , they had what they would call timeline events , which was the custom object , which essentially just basically a record where every action was linked to , and I would often get calls from people in the organization I was working in where they'd go oh , we've connected the action to the wrong timeline , can you reparent it for us ?

And when I saw this person pull this up on the screen , I was like I want that . Yeah , can you tell me what that's called ? And the speaker said it was a floor , um , and this was like .

This was in , like uh , middle of 2018 , uh , and at the back end of 2019 , uh was when if I'm getting my timelines right , it might be a year out , but I think it was 2019 .

That was the time where the big update in the winter release winter 20 release was the ability to have record-triggered flows , store the prior values before save in that , and I just decided what the time was . Actually .

I've got an interesting use case for this , which was something I would never actually do for for a client , but I was just , you know , one of those ideas that comes to you goes . I wonder if we can do this yeah and what it was is . We used to have this thing called uh .

Basically it was like an evaluation record I'm forgetting the actual like verbiage they're using now , but it like an evaluation record I'm forgetting the actual like verb is they're using now , but it was an evaluation record that they would do with the clients , uh , once every six months or so .

And I can , with the use case to go and I wonder if I can essentially create a new evaluation by editing an existing one and then change it and then just shifting out the , the changes to a new record and then just basically just undoing the changes to the original one .

So it's a very strange use case , but it's like my house , like I wonder if I could do this . Uh , I would never recommend doing this , but that was the first flow I built , just doing doing that because I wanted to play around with these features . And from there things kind of started to to snowball a little bit and I build up momentum .

So I started building more and more floors , shifted a lot of the uh , the workflow rules , into flow uh , at that time this was even .

This was like even like a year , two years before the retirement was officially announced , I was already shifting workflow rules and process builders in the floor uh in terms of that , and spend a lot of time designing that , and I I fell in love with with the , with the interface .

I used similar tools in the past , so like , for example for it's not quite the same comparison like I used I did a lot of web development uh on the side as a hobby outside that , and I used , uh for a long time , a tool called wix , which is a drag and drop interface web builder .

But in terms of kind of , it does have some similarities in terms of the mindset behind how you do things like design the floor and stuff like that , where it's the drag and drop mentality , where you drag and drop your components , you edit them and you set them up how you want floors at a very base level fairly similar to that mindset uh .

So I just started building up ideas of how to do things and uh then started speaking on on floor uh about a year or so so later A lot of that actually started coming about , because when the retirement was announced , I started getting a lot more present around that , because I kind of sort of , I guess , explored a little bit in terms of being an automation

person , because at TDX not TDX , sorry Dreamforce that year Salesforce announced the timeline from a question that I posted out ahead of Dreamforce , so that , yeah , dreamforce was all virtual , apart from a select group people could attend .

And when they announced that they retired on winter 23 , I came back and was like well , salesforce , you can't just say this is being retired and not give us any kind of milestones or anything or any further information . You've got admins , like our nonprofit space .

We've got hundreds of thousands , if not millions , of workflow rules and process builders across just the nonprofit space , and you're shutting down shop . We need some information to kind of calm things , keep people calm , essentially , and kind of give them a bit of peace of mind .

It's like , okay , I've got like we know now the end of support is going to be 2025 in terms of that , but you're still going to be able to use the older automations .

So I started kind of probably exploring a bit around that and then I started writing more blogs , uh , doing stuff like coven release , readiness live , uh , which for a while been like one of my more popular pieces , just kind of recapping that , uh for those who maybe didn't watch it .

And then I found like people just on WhatsApp message and get in touch with me after I'm going oh , could you explain to me how to build this floor ? And that would often lead to me going , no , but let me go away and try it and I'll come back to you .

It doesn't have to be like , oh , it started off for you as ooh , I saw a flow , I want to grow and learn more , but then it became more of like there's use cases I'm speaking at events and it just snowballs and snowballs . The catalyst to get you so passionate about learning a new thing , speaking on a thing . Getting you is so involved in the community .

It doesn't have to be a quick yep . That's my thing . That's almost never a light bulb moment . It's usually a journey to get there . So I really liked your kind of overview of it's not a quick journey , but you'll get there .

So , and and even in just like you're just talking about , say , the automation space , like I've been a big component of trying to get like a , a certification for , uh , the cloud of automation , cause I would argue at this point in time of how much has grown .

It's essentially on the same level , knowledge levels of a of another cloud like sales or service or so that it is you know and I'm you know and kind of .

One of the principles I often talk about with people is you know , it doesn't necessarily take you long to learn the basics of salesforce , but if you want to get to the expert level , it does take more time and more investment in that , and that investment may be something like certifications for some people .

I didn't get certified until five years into my career journey and I feel the first time as well .

I don't think either of us truly know what that looks like in actuality , but knowing that so many of the components around flow automations , apex classes , those are being ingrained into so many new systems inside of the ecosystem and Sales Cloud is being the core driver and the core kind of framework for so many of these new systems being built on the Salesforce

platform . You're right , it's either looping into the admin and really say an admin has to be an automation expert or be its own bucket like developer or architect . But it's becoming especially as we dive so hard into the click not code mentality of things . I'm with you it definitely should be something that admins take more of a tune to .

But also , thinking through , what does that look like from a career path ?

So , like I , you know , although I'm still in , although I'm technically in a for-profit company , I still focus on on non-profits um , but for me , I was , you know , I was an admin for five and a half years and got to a position where I got to a point where I I've pretty much done everything that I can do in in the company that I'm in .

I'm in , you know , I still keep in touch with people from the organization , still , uh , very much support , support them , uh . But you know , your career journey will pop if you keep adding with sales , will probably eventually get to a point where you kind of go , okay , what's the , what's the next evolution of , kind of like , my knowledge and my skill set ?

Uh , for me that was moving to consulting , but for somebody else it might be , say , transition from being an admin into a developer . It might be moving from your developer into admin . It might , you know , um , and quite a bit of it could be quite organic as well .

That's that was my being , my experience with much of a lot of the stuff that I've been able to get into , involved in and there's largely come about organically yeah , and honestly , that's when you see , at least for me , I've seen the most growth when I just like keep it going with the flow .

It's not like I'm being told you have to learn this thing , cause if you don't you're fired , like that's . I don't enjoy learning like that and customers and help things go with . It's not like I'm being told you have to learn this thing , because if you don't , you're fired , like that's .

I don't enjoy learning like that and I don't think anyone's going to be able to comfortably grow in that type of environment . Pivoting a little bit , we are nearing the end of our time . I have about two questions left . The first , though , kind of goes back to the theme of the episode how admins can thrive in a nonprofit space .

One thing you had said earlier , which makes complete sense , but I didn't realize it until you had really called it out . A lot of folks in the nonprofit space are going to be part time admins . They're not . If they are working full time and they're not admitting full time , they are wearing a lot of hats or they are just part-time employees .

How would you recommend , outside of networking and growing in a community , for admins to thrive and find growth in situations where they aren't working 40 hours a week in a full-time gig ?

But , like , if you're saying like for me I would say working three days a week , uh , I actually , yeah , it's something we talked about in the non-profit space has not necessarily been the the best way at times of doing so , but I I actually volunteered at a another non-profit and helped them get set up with salesforce during that time .

Um , you know , there is some risks with that kind of . Of course , you know , like you know , we are talking about Salesforce and if you know , you know there are some horrors out there of people who volunteered and done some real damage over the years .

But volunteering , if handled correctly by your organization and you're volunteering for it , it can be a very fruitful exercise actually . But that does have to obviously be some good guardrails there . So that's a potential really good way of of getting involved .

But I would kind of , really kind of still drill home on the kind of network connections , uh , going to user groups that's so important because it's the it's a personable connection uh , outside of that , finding resources that will help you uh like , uh , I used to view a blog which doesn't actually run anymore , um , which , uh , I can't even remember the name for

now , but it's not , you know , it's it's gone , stopping being worked on anymore . But like blogs , like salesforce bandsents obviously a really good shout , uh , particularly for the non-profit space .

Well , I guess we'll probably be able to put this in the show notes , but there's a really good blog by michael kolodner who is a fantastic voice within the non-profit space . He writes a blog called free like a puppy , because he associates salesforce often .

So just to kind of backtrack a little bit for those who may not know fully , uh , salesforce can be free . In air quotes for non-profits . There was a scheme which is called the power power of us program where you get 10 free licenses for salesforce and then after that you pay , uh for that .

Um , and michael's blog kind of picks on the premise of going you might have got salesforce for free , but it's not free as in like a free gift , it's free like a puppy . Essentially , where you've got to , you've got to look after , you've got to care for , you've got to nurture it , otherwise it'll just make a mess all over the place .

Yeah , so that's a really great resource for non-profits , uh , and for me as well .

I would also say , if you've got the time , the capacity , getting involved with something like the the salesforceorg community commons program , which I'm involved with , is so good because you get to meet people from all sorts of different reamers , you get to spend time with developers , you get to spend time with admins , architects and all that kind of stuff and you

can , and there's a lot of different projects around different areas .

So , like I'm currently leading the one on uh ei , prompt engineering for non-profits , uh , but I've also been involved , involved in other groups as well and you'll you'll get , you'll find when you go to that you'll see like things , like tools that you will find will be so beneficial to you in your organization .

Tools like Salesforce indicators , for example , which is relatively new . Also declarative lookup , rollup summaries , or DLRS as it's known by . So many of these tools are coming out of the nonprofit space . So you get involved in stuff that you know .

If you you get involved in a project like that , it can really kind of almost like spearhead your knowledge growth and always put it on the on the steroids almost essentially , uh . So it's a really great way of potentially doing that if you've got the time and capacity totally .

I knew that it's been growing exponentially over the last four or five years but I didn't realize how much , and it's so amazing to hear and know that this space has finally has a place that is more than just like one or two user groups .

With that being said , in my user group the user groups I go to I always feel like there's a little bit of a stigma for the people who are in the nonprofit space to ask questions and get more involved in the non-profit in the for-profit space .

I was going to say non-nonprofit , but there's always like that little bit of a stigma for those , for the nonprofit admins , to try to like add value or add context in the for-profit space . I think that's garbage .

I think that everything you can do in non-profit cloud or even just as a non-profit admin , you can take those lessons into a for-profit space and be wildly successful . What is your opinion on that kind of stigma for those non-profit admins trying to be more involved in a for-profit space ?

You don't see as much on the non-profit space .

However , I would also say that and I'll sound somewhat flippant of it it's like if you , if you could , non-profit professionals because of how in sales , which is , because of how many kind of different areas they have to dip their toes into they're , by and large , non-profit professionals are going to be some of the most widely experienced people in the ecosystem

because they have to wear so many hats by default . So , even though they might not necessarily use tools like Marketing Cloud , for example , there's quite a significant chance you'll find someone who comes from a nonprofit space who will have marketing knowledge , because they also happen to be the person who's in charge of marketing .

You'll have people who knows finance quite well because they're also in charge of fundraising . You'll wear so many hats . And in terms of Salesforce as well , specifically , obviously there's so much scope within Salesforce We've already talked about that .

But core Salesforce is core Salesforce across pretty much every cloud , unless you go to something very bespoke like Marketing Cloud . But if you have a really good knowledge of core Salesforce at a nonprofit , you're going to come in and you're going to be able to pick up and probably learn quite quickly the additional stuff .

If I talk to , say , someone in the ecosystem who seems to be out , mark , have you Well ? For example , I had someone message me just the other day and go have you used Eventbrite in Salesforce integration ? And I'm like not for about five years , but give me half an hour I could probably figure it out or in enough detail to answer your question .

And that's the case with a lot of nonprofit professionals . You know they have . Again , I would say the nonprofit space is so skilled Only because , generally speaking , you know I was like I used to use when I did nonprofit dream and I used to see analogy from friends or like Joey with all the t-shirts on .

It was like your , each t-shirt's like a different role that you sit sits on top of you being the salesperson admin . You know it's like you're generally wearing all of the all of the hats yeah , I completely agree with that .

But it's there and you see it all the time , where you have these brilliant nonprofit users just not feeling comfortable raising their hand because they don't feel either that they will be taken seriously or that their use case and experience as relatable is going to be seen as applicable . So I agree with you , I love that where you went with that .

But with that being said , we are nearing the very end of our time . I have one last question . I always end the show on . You probably know what it is , but for me , I always love asking admins . Throughout your journey and you've had an amazing journey we've all heard today what would you say .

Your one regret is that you wish you could go back to your former self and say , hey , let's change it up , let's do something differently .

Granted , I didn't always think about until like a couple of years in , but still , if I had known that the community was a thing , I'd be able to set it up earlier than I did . That is kind of probably my , you know , if I would pick one regret , it's probably that that you know I didn't get involved in the community side of things sooner .

It's being involved and being a voice in the community . Being involved and being a voice in the community To your point . You got started and I was so incorrect at the very beginning of the episode when I just had assumed you hadn't done anything and you building your own group was like your first intro , but I mean it was .

So , whether it's you building your own community to get involved or it is you reaching out to the leaders of the community groups that you have in your area and asking what way you can get more involved and help out , I think it's more than just attending a meeting . It's it's finding ways to actively add value .

It's uh , I'm sure it transits over to to the earth and other countries as well , but it's , you know , if you give a man a fish , he'll eat for a day . If you teach a man a fish , he'll never go hungry again . And you're . It's that latter part which is where the where the real value . Value is , you know .

So , again , we talked about before , like , finding the thing that gets you excited and you want to and you want to share , share with and help other people learn .

You're , like , one of the biggest ways I found myself learning or , you know , seeing other people learn from stuff I've done is by attending those conferences , speaking those conferences , getting into those conversations , uh , attending , just attending news groups , like during the during the pandemic years , as as as rough as they were .

One of the real benefits of that , in honest , all honesty , is that when things went virtual , we were able to connect to people anywhere in the world , everywhere , and that is such a such a big benefit and that , you know , although some of it has died down a little in the last year or two , it's largely still there and you know , a lot of groups still meet

virtually and stuff like that . So , like , I'll every now and then just rock up to a group that's meeting virtually and just like , sit in there and just like , like , put comments in the chat and things like that . But those conversations often end up seeing you getting the connections on like LinkedIn or people following you on on on Twitter .

Uh , people find you on the Trailblazer community and you know , it's those kind of subtle ways that you tend I tend to find has often the biggest impact in the long term .

You're just those conversations where people just someone just found you on linkedin because you were at a user group event and you start having a conversation , having conversations over messages and stuff , and you see that communication grow . But that's kind of yeah , I would say that's where you get the real value coming in , just by , you know , attending .

And you know , one of the things that we sometimes see in sales in the sales space as well , which probably goes back to the stupid question is there's also no such thing as a as a stupid question or a stupid comment . You know , if you've got a thought , you know , share your thought and that'll open up a conversation agreed .

There are stupid questions out there , but to the extent of you being smart and intellectual and having common sense , it's very unlikely that a question about how you're going to grow or about a technical know-how in the ecosystem is going to be perceived as a dumb question .

We said it in the episode , but some of the best admins out there have come from a nonprofit background because ultimately , you're in a place where you have to wear so many hats and do so much work with limited resources . So if you're a new admin just getting started , maybe try to find some ways of how to get into the nonprofit space .

It's a great learning opportunity and you're likely going to be helping some amazing people in the process . So thank you again , mark , for being a part of the show and sharing your knowledge , as always . Thank you for taking the time to listen and support the show . If you have any feedback , questions or topic suggestions , we'd love to hear from you .

So don't hesitate to connect with us on LinkedIn or Twitter or email us at info at adminsoftomorrowcom . Also , as we mentioned at the start of the show , if you're going to be in Chicago or Austin , check us out at Connections or Texas Dreamin' at the end of May . We'd love to see you .

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Once again , I'm Jacob Catalano , your host , signing off . We appreciate you for listening to Admins of Tomorrow , trailblazing the Next Generation . Thank you .