Salesforce

Overview

Salesforce is a cloud-based platform which Parkside uses to store and organize data. It allows for more efficient operations with all data being in one place and assessable to those who need access to it.  As Parkside’s first salesforce intern, I had the opportunity to work with and learn about Salesforce from Shelby.  Throughout the summer I helped integrate more departments into Salesforce and developed tools to help various stakeholders better utilize their data.

Work I Completed

There were five departments and teams that I completed work for: Marketing, Finance, Team Sellers, CRA, and Search Fund.

Marketing is who I spent the most time doing projects for this summer. I audited every marketing campaign to ensure that every invitee had the correct email and RM listed for a few weeks. I spent one week auditing the holiday and harvest gift list in salesforce and built a new checkbox to make the receivers of harvest gifts. During my last week working on Salesforce I audited the previous art fair invite list to ensure every invitee was correctly marked. I also completed a few smaller tasks for marketing throughout the summer such as figuring out why holiday cards were returned and updating Cora’s dashboard with my updated data as I completed other tasks.

In terms of work for the finance department the main thing task that I worked on was auditing the shareholder list. I made sure that every shareholder was a member of a household, had the correct effective date, and was included in the shareholder report on Salesforce. Once That was complete, I complied a knowledge document to give step by step instructions for anyone doing a future shareholder audit. Those were the main tasks I completed for the finance department, however I also removed the redundant columns in their task list and added the task list to their dashboard.

For Team Sellers, I built a new object in Salesforce which allowed them to select what their sponsors specialized in known as sponsor specialty. I also made requested changes to their dashboard and added a new graph showing the information sponsor specialties on the dashboard.

The work that I did for CRA was laying the groundwork and establishing salesforce infrastructure for them. I built reports for them highlighting CRA eligible loans this year, all loans this year, and open opportunities as well as designing filters to help Jessie better search for the information she needs. I think built a CRA dashboard using the reports I designed. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to build everything that CRA wanted yet. There is still more data that needs to be loaded into Salesforce which won’t be added until after the internship concludes.

Near the end of my time working in Salesforce, I did some work on a project for the search fund team. I added all of the search fund investors to the salesforce pages of every search fund client via a new button that Shelby built on business entity pages.

Book Club and Final Thoughts

While that summarizes most of what I did for the various stakeholders here at Parkside, theses one more thing I did during my time here, I read the book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. It’s about the use of new forms of data with a specific focus on internet data. It discusses how these new data sources help challenge our understanding of the world and the realities of human nature. Shelby, Drake, and Will also read this book, and we will have a book club discussion about it on Friday 7/25.  

While it’s impossible to truly record everything that I did this summer into one blog post, I think that this is fairly good overview of what I worked on and read here at Parkside. I felt that I learned a lot from working on these projects. Shelby was a great mentor; I’d like to thank her and everyone else here at Parkside for this wonderful opportunity.

- Henry Narkiewicz