November, 2021 | Advanced Communities

7 Features of Our Salesforce Event Management App You Should Try Right Away

Posted on November 26, 2021May 27, 2024 by Stas Dunayev

We live in a fast-changing world and the base of these changes accelerated in the last two years with a pandemic. That brings many challenges to any company.

People spend a lot more time online on their smartphones and laptops as everything becomes digital.

At the same time, with digitalisation, there are new opportunities coming for companies to be more effective in what they do, to understand better members, customers, students, partners, volunteers and donors, to bring them value and engage with them in new ways.

Events are one of the main ways of engaging with partners, members and donors and the importance of event management can not be underestimated.

From our experience, pretty much all of the non-profits that we worked with do events in one way or the other. And we see much demand for quality event management software among big and small organisations using Salesforce.

AC Events Enterprise app is a great event management solution, 100% native to Salesforce, that helps you to engage with members, donors, partners, customers, volunteers or students using the Experience Cloud platform.

You can define which events your members will see based on the industry or different event pricing based on the location or any other parameters you might need. Any customisations, business approaches and adjustments could be made inside Salesforce and Experience Cloud environment.

Features of the AC Events Enterprise You Should Try:

Online, In-person and Hybrid Events

Built-in integration with Zoom for the org-wide account or per user event hosting supported out of the box.

You can also provide hybrid events using embedded streams from YouTube, Vimeo and other platforms.

Custom Reports and Dashboards

You can monitor your event management KPI in real-time as we provide a bundle of reports and lightning dashboards.

You can keep track of event metrics like revenue, donations, registrations, most popular events by type, packages and other parameters.

It is also possible to adjust reports and create new ones to meet your business logic.

Different Types of Events

We support any type of event from a single short meeting or webinar to multi-day activities like multi-track and multi-session conferences with different venues and speakers.

Flexible Pricing Packages

Furthermore, you can create any type of event ticket with several clicks to motivate your users to participate in events.

For example: free, free with the donation, paid, and paid with donation package.

Using our Event Packages object, you can provide time-limited sales, group registration or group pricing, early bird or last chance tickets, voucher discounts, or user-specific pricing.

Payments Integration

We also integrate a payment system for collecting donations and income for your events. It’s already in the package so no additional integrations are needed.

In addition, the payment transaction data is stored inside Salesforce so you don’t need to collect revenue data from some other sources.

Customisable Questionnaires

During registration, you can use any custom questionnaires to get information from your attendees like dietary preferences and restrictions, vaccination approvals, or any other questions that can be implemented with a fieldset tool or custom lightning screen flows.

Member-hosted Events

This is our unique feature that allows your users to create their own events. This functionality could be crucial for member-driven organisations.

For example, students can run some campus activities, volunteers can organise meetings or partners can create events for their customers and employees right from the Experience Site.

Roadmap for Future Implementations

Our AC Events Enterprise package has multiple features to help different companies run and manage their events more effectively and provide users with an easy and intuitive environment where they can go through event registration and track the schedule of activities.

But the Advanced Communities team doesn’t want to stop improving our product and make it more convenient for you.

We’re planning to integrate with FinDock which provides payment capabilities for non-profits (donations, fundraising) for Europe and the USA.

The next thing we want to implement in our package is the hotel booking system to run offline events more effectively.

We also want to add a Session feedback feature so attendees can rate speakers and sessions and you will be able to analyse your events better and improve future activities. These and other delightful features are coming soon!

Follow us on social media to stay tuned for our product updates and exciting information about Salesforce and Experience Cloud.

How to Get More Data From Your Customers with Custom Fields in AC Ideas Ultimate

Posted on November 22, 2021February 1, 2023 by Stas Dunayev

Dear friends,

We’re continuing the series of videos about AC Ideas Ultimate and today we’re going to talk about how to collect additional information about ideas from your users.

Collecting extra information from your customers and partners could be crucial for your ideation management. Because with a flexible idea posting form you may gather more specific idea details for your business needs. Collecting clearer requirements will provide a more efficient ideation process.

By default, users can create ideas within three fields. There are the Title field (how they want to name the idea), the Category field (where they want to post the idea) and the Description field.

But sometimes this information is not enough and you want to collect more information from your customers. Let’s see how you can do this.

Gettinng more data from your customers with AC Ideas Ultimate

First of all, you need to go to Object Manager and find the AC Idea object. Then go to the Fields and Relationship tab and add new fields according to your goals.

It can be any type of field: number field, currency field, checkbox, and we also support lookup fields. For example, we’ve added an Account field, Design link, Influence (which is a picklist) and Deadline (which is a date field).

After that we need to create a fieldset, let’s call it Customer Ideas, and add your new additional fields into this fieldset. Then save the fieldset and copy its API name. Go to the General Settings tab on the Ideas Settings page and paste the API name into the Custom Field Set field, then save settings.

Right after you do this, users are able to create ideas with additional fields on the community. In our case, we can choose the Account, in the Influence field choose what this idea will affect, select the deadline date for this idea and paste any URL link into the Design Link field.

In addition to the fact that these fields are added to the Idea creation form, they also appear on the Idea detail page after the fieldset is created and saved.

Once again, we support any kind of fields that you might need: picklists, checkboxes, lookup fields, date and time fields, and multi-picklists so you can collect any information from your customers.

There are some profiles with creation permissions and they can create ideas and see all the fields. But if you want to hide some fields you can do this using the privacy settings so these fields will be visible internally only.

You can also create reports with all of your custom fields, filter them and use them as you need.

That was all the information for today. If you find this information useful please follow us on social media for more content about Salesforce and Experience Cloud.

Ideas Prioritisation with Impact/Effort Matrix in AC Ideas Ultimate

Posted on November 12, 2021August 24, 2023 by Stas Dunayev

Dear friends,

We continue the series of videos about ideation management with our product AC Ideas Ultimate. Today we’re talking about ideas prioritization.

Ideation management, first of all, is about ideas prioritization, because besides generating ideas they also need to be correctly estimated and selected.

We use ideas prioritization to bring the best ideas into reality: ideas that receive a great response from your partners and clients, ideas that everyone is looking forward to.

Imagine that you have hundreds or even thousands of ideas. Some of them are more popular than others. What ideas to implement right away? What ideas can be implemented later? What ideas are worth spending valuable resources which are always limited? These are the questions that product managers ask themselves every day

AC Ideas Ultimate features

Our AC Ideas Ultimate app can help you to make the right decision on the basis of objective indicators, not intuition. You can track votes, comments, the sum of opportunities.

We allow also to restrict the number of votes per company and estimate the cost of each idea in resources.

The first point is Voting.

This is the easiest and the most obvious way to prioritize ideas. Each user can vote for the ideas they like. The more people who vote for an idea, the more demand there is for the idea.

A more complex way – is to allow upvotes and downvotes, as with this method we can see the ideas that are rejected.

If your clients are big companies with many users, as well as small businesses with few users, you can equalize their impact by limiting votes by Account.

The second point is Importance = income.

Ideally, the implementation of a certain idea should improve the position of the company. Some people may consider success to be the number of users, the company image or something like that.

Others, including us, consider that implemented ideas should generate income. The fastest way to assess this is by linking to opportunities.

For example, you have a potential lead who says that he is ready to sign a contract with your company if certain functionality is implemented in your solution.

Therefore, we allow associating the opportunity with a specific idea. We can link the ideas with opportunities and the new “Sum of Opportunity” column appeared so each idea that was connected with the opportunity now has monetary value.

Further, ideas can be ranked and evaluated in monetary terms: how much income the embodiment of specific ideas can generate.

The next point is Effort.

Many people want flying cars, but they are difficult to make. In our package, we allow assessing the complexity of implementation of an idea. Each business has its own complexity that can be evaluated by various criteria (time spent, costs, human resources).

That is why we give you the opportunity to evaluate and assign the complexity yourself. We’ve also added an effort field from 1 to 10 to the idea for this.

To make sense of all the metrics in a clear and intuitive way we provide Effort/Impact Matrix.

Now, when we assessed the importance of a particular idea (by the number of votes or comments) and understand the complexity of the embodiment of the idea, we can look at the appropriate matrix that we have in the AC Ideas Ultimate package.

You can find this matrix on the dashboard that comes with the package. By default, the impact is calculated as the number of vote scores and number of comments received for this idea.

Here you can find the “low hanging fruits” – ideas that have high priority for customers and require minimal effort to implement. This matrix works with various ideas statuses, categories, and zones.

As we said earlier, you can calculate impact using different parameters. As parameters you can use the opportunities, the annual turnover of the accounts that voted for ideas, the potential of these accounts, are regular customers or not — any indicators that correspond to your business activity.

Go to the Dashboard component (which you can place as you wish) and override the impact using the formula field or any other custom field. For example, you can take the Sum of Opportunity field as a custom impact.

Save and activate this dashboard and now your matrix will display the income you can get from the implementation of an idea.

Once again, you can use ANY formulas and fields in this matrix with the AC Ideas Ultimate package.

Find your low-hanging fruits and make the most of the benefits of the ideation process with our app.