Salesforce Spring ‘24 Release Top Highlights

January 11, 2024

This article was written by Allison Danderfer, Salesforce Consultant

As we prepare for the incoming Spring ‘24 Salesforce Release, I wanted to consolidate some key changes relevant to the Nonprofit space and highlight what these changes mean for your Salesforce configuration. Depending on your Salesforce instance, updates will be completed on Jan 12, 2024, Feb 2, 2024, or Feb 9, 2024. 

Tip: Check your instance of Salesforce by looking in “Company Information” in Setup, and find your release date on Salesforce Trust under “Maintenance”

The following general features have been automatically enabled in your org following the Spring ‘24 Salesforce Release. 

1. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) Auto-Enablement Concludes for all Remaining Orgs - MFA has been required since February 1, 2022, and to help customers meet this requirement the remaining orgs without MFA enabled will have MFA auto-enabled for them. If you haven’t read up on MFA yet, we recommend you to check out Salesforce’s one-pager on this topic to get you up to speed.

2. Faster Account Sharing Recalculation - This will increase performance when recalculating sharing rules, by determining implicit child shares at time of access rather than storing that information in the org.

Now, let’s dive into some exciting features from the Spring ‘24 Salesforce Release related to the various clouds: 

General Platform Enhancements

1. Analytics (Reports & Dashboards) Management - Salesforce is centralizing the management of reports and dashboards within the Analytics tab. Here you can access folder sharing and utilize bulk selection of items that need to be updated simultaneously, like moving reports to a different folder, changing owners or deleting files. 

2. Dynamic Forms - You can now add fields from related objects to dynamic forms. You’ll be able to drill into lookup relationship fields to access related object fields to add to your lightning record page. Additionally, you’ll be able to see a field's object relationship and API name right within dynamic forms. 

3. Scheduled Reminders - do you have email recipients who have not responded to your surveys yet? Use Scheduled Reminders to notify them via emails when specific criteria are met to increase your engagement statistics.

4. Flow - There are some cool features added to screen flow: text components can react to changes on the same screen at run time, and you can validate user entered values and provide error messages on the spot with more component types!

At Belmar, we look to identify common processes that our clients follow and introduce automation to reduce manual efforts. Screen flows can be useful for guiding users through an application or review process, to ensure no steps are missed in assessing eligibility to programs. With these new enhancements to Flow, we’ll have more opportunity to display meaningful error messages at the time of data entry rather than the end of the flow! This would save users frustration of going all the way through just to end up with an error and having to repeat steps. 

In addition to error messages, there are now ways to display text that reacts to changes within the same screen. Say you want to find out if an individual is eligible for a certain program partway through the application process. You can configure a text component to reference the output of a set of questions, and determine if you should continue the application, or provide feedback to that individual on what they need to consider to meet the eligibility criteria. 

Nonprofit Cloud

1. More Detailed Tracking of Donation Revenue Streams - Nonprofit Cloud adds the ability to split revenue on Gift Commitments between multiple Campaigns, and create Outreach Source Code URLs to be shared across multiple channels to tie an online donation back to your source code and track effectiveness of your efforts. 

A common pain point for clients in the nonprofit space is seeing which marketing efforts are most effective in their campaigns, and being able to quantify them. The above NPC addition will allow you to either have individual source codes for each campaign/stream, or if you’d prefer, you can still bucket certain items together. Think: social media could be split between Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn by using source code URLs instead of requiring a singular campaign bucket for each!

Nonprofit Success Pack

1. Fix Potential Duplicate Contacts Faster - NPSP gains an enhancement from IdeaExchange, where the standard potential duplicates component can be replaced by a new lightning web component that will take you directly to NPSP contact merge so you can find and fix potential duplicate contacts faster.

Public Sector

1. Complaint Intake - Guided Flows added to accelerate the process of receiving complaints.

2. Constituent Collaboration - Constituents can now access Experience Cloud to easily report changes of circumstances around their eligibility for benefits.

3. Referrals to Service Providers - Internal Users will have access to a Guided Flow to easily refer constituents to service providers. Constituent privacy is assured by only giving service providers access to the records they need to see through manual sharing.

4. Caseworker Productivity Analytics - Insights into caseworker workload and performance as well as community impact with new analytics elements.

At Belmar, we are very familiar with clients who have limited budgets tied directly to certain initiatives. Working with dedicated funding for various programs means you have to be able to report on the success and outcomes of how that money was used. With this new functionality, you can:

• Manage your budget easier by providing direct insights into

• how much work each case worker has on their desk

• how efficiently we are processing cases

• how many beneficiaries were assisted

• how funds were distributed

• outcomes resulting from people on the receiving end of the funds. 

• Display this data in a dashboard with key visual indicators to share with executives and reporting boards, to showcase your successes. Then, with those productivity metrics you can find areas for improvement in your internal processes, introduce automations (remember Flow?) where possible, and get more return on value!

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

1. Einstein Assistant - use generative AI to streamline your content creation process on forms, landing pages, and email body copy. 

2. Data Cloud Connector - Personalize marketing efforts by setting up a connector to Data cloud to use your email engagement data in new marketing campaigns

Experience Cloud

1. Grantseekers can Create Private/Invite only Funding Opportunities - Grantseekers can use Experience Cloud as a team by adding collaborators to help complete applications, and it's now possible to create a private or invitation-only Funding Opportunity. To follow up on the budget, look to the new variance column in the budget management table to see the difference between planned budget and actual spending.

2. Connect Outcome Management to Care Plans in Case Management - Enable increased visibility into strategy by sharing your outcome strategy on Experience Cloud to collaborate with grantees and partner organizations by setting targets and collecting results.

3. Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Leverage custom URLs for Custom Object Pages. By using “slugs” (SEO-friendly URL snippets), your Salesforce record ID is replaced with relevant and human-readable information so that your pages are optimally surfaced in search engines (previously only available for product and catalog pages)

Data Cloud

1. Leverage AI - Create your own predictive AI models, or connect to generative AI large language models (LLM) from OpenAI & Azure Open AI with Einstein studio.

2. Enhance Collaboration - Improve collaboration of internal teams by having Tableau data analysts send their segments to Data Cloud for marketers to activate and use!

3. Receive Data - You can now use Flow to send data to Data Cloud without using code.

At Belmar, we partner with clients to adapt new technologies in order to gain efficiencies in their operations. If you’re in the Nonprofit or Public Sector and are interested in exploring whether this is the right technology for you, our team of experts are here to provide guidance. Click on the button below to start your journey! 

About the Organization

Belmar Consulting is an award-winning Salesforce implementation partner, who works with various organizations and enables them to succeed in their digital transformation journey. We combine our intimate knowledge of the public sector and the nonprofit industry with Salesforce to create and implement innovative solutions for our clients. Belmar’s dedication to delivering successful client projects means our clients are more effective in their role to fulfill their organizational missions.