Salesforce Spring ’24 Release Highlights

Three times each year, Salesforce delivers new and innovative features through their Spring, Summer, and Winter releases. The Spring ’24 release brings some excellent quality of life changes to the platform. Below you will find a summary of the most important updates Sleek identified, starting with updates to the Salesforce platform, then Education Cloud and Nonprofit Cloud specific enhancements. You can find the full release notes here.

If you have any questions about this latest update, reach out to the Sleek team and we’ll be happy to help!

Display Fields Across Objects Through Lookup Fields

This change is going to save us from having to create a lot of formula fields in the future. In the past, if you wanted to display data from a parent record on a child record, you’d have to use a formula or populate a field via a flow. Say, for example, we want to display an Account’s anonymous giving preferences on a gift record. With the Spring ’24 release, we can simply add fields from related objects to Dynamic Forms-Enabled Pages. As long as there’s a lookup relationship between the two objects, you’re free to display that data without creating additional fields.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: New Email Building Experience

Organizations that use Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot) will have access to a new email building experience. If you’re used to the current email builder, worry not, because users will be able to choose which builder to use every time they design a Lightning email.

Account Intelligence View

The new Account Intelligence View is going to be a powerful way for fundraisers on Salesforce to view their major donor accounts, stay on top of upcoming activity related to those accounts, and manage moves. Think List Views but way more powerful. You can get a quick glance of opportunity metrics across a list of accounts, log activities, and more.

Switch Lightning Dashboard Ownership

The upcoming release will allow you to reassign dashboard ownership individually or in bulk. This quality of life change means that with staff turnover, you won’t have to clone dashboards created by a deactivated user.

Experience Cloud Enhancements

Salesforce is rolling out a number of upgrades to improve your LWR and Aura sites. See all your site publication changes in Experience Builder with the Change History panel. Use improved URL configuration options to make your URLs SEO-friendly and drive more traffic to your LWR sites. Experience Delivery (pilot) also gives you new ways to improve site performance, scalability, security, and SEO. Expression-Based Component Variations, now generally available, expand your ability to personalize content on your sites. It’s an exciting time to have a site built on Experience Cloud.

Salesforce Mobile Enhancements

Salesforce is rolling out updates for Mobile Offline in Salesforce Mobile App Plus containing improvements to the Offline App Developer Starter Kit, Offline App Onboarding Wizard, and the new Mobile Builder (beta). There’s a whole lot more you can do on your phone when you’re not connected to the internet and Salesforce app developers can do even more when it comes to building a Salesforce app to be used offline. You’ll also be able to enhance your Mobile Publisher for Experience Cloud app by incorporating a biometric ID check, adding more security and a convenient way for users to prove their identity. Lastly, another delivery on an IdeaExchange request: you can now use Dynamic Actions on all objects on mobile devices.

Education Cloud

Mentorship Program Management

Salesforce is rolling out an app that helps users track mentors, mentees, facilitators, and the programs they participate in. Taking advantage of Experience Cloud, organizations can offer a robust portal in which mentors and mentees can connect and enroll in programs. This is just one of the myriad use cases for Experience Cloud, which lets you build an external-facing site on top of your Salesforce CRM and let users interact with a select subset of your data.

Analytics Insights: Learning Programs and Course Insights Dashboard

Analytics Insights can perform an audit of your learning programs and analyze applicants, students, and faculty across the institution and through past academic terms to identify high-demand programs. This tool can be really helpful when you’re trying to allocate resources strategically and enhance efficiency.

Nonprofit Cloud

NPSP Contact Merge

The community asked and Salesforce delivered. In response to IdeaExchange requests, Salesforce has rolled out a new way to merge potential duplicate contacts via NPSP Contact Merge. This tool takes into account (pun intended) the Household model and when contacts are merged, instead of leaving empty households, accounts are merged as well.

Nonprofit Cloud Integrations Improved

The upcoming release will allow Nonprofit Cloud users to connect to third-party apps. Salesforce has always invested in facilitating partner tools on the platform, and this development represents their latest delivery on that promise. The changes included in this release will enhance the ability of users to connect to external payment platforms and create/match on donor records and track one-time and recurring donation data in Salesforce.

Sleek has selected the above features to highlight as especially important to higher education and non-profit organizations using Salesforce. There’s a lot more contained in the Spring ’24 release that isn’t listed above. If you want to learn more check out the full release notes or get in touch with us!