Run the NPSP Health Check in Your Org

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain how the NPSP Health Check and Salesforce Optimizer tools can help maintain your org.
Run an NPSP Health Check.
Run Salesforce Optimizer.

Caring for Your Salesforce Org

Your Salesforce org is a living thing. It’s always growing and changing as your users add data and you work to streamline processes and features.

And, like any living thing, it requires care and attention.

In this module, we’ll review how to check the health of your org, prepare for major releases, use sandboxes to train and make changes, and contribute to the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) community.

Let’s get started!

Run NPSP Health Check

As with your own health, your Salesforce org benefits from a regular check-up.

Fortunately, there’s NPSP Health Check, a tool that scans your org for data and configuration inconsistencies and errors and reports back with descriptions of what seems to be wrong.

We recommend running a Health Check after any major data imports or updates—and, outside of those events, you should run a Health Check at least once a quarter.

Let’s follow along as Gorav Patel, admin at the (fictional) nonprofit No More Homelessness (NMH), performs a quarterly Health Check on his org and looks for problems in NMH’s record data.

Find and select NPSP Settings tab in the App Launcher (). It will take a few seconds to load.
On the NPSP Settings page, click System Tools and then Health Check.
You can select (check) if you’d like to Disable Record Data Health Checks, which will ignore records and look only at NPSP configuration. Because Gorav is looking for record data problems, he will leave this unselected.
Click Run Health Check.
The Health Check runs in real time and results are returned on the same page. If there are errors listed in your Health Check report, there will also be recommended actions to help you fix them.

Health Check Found Errors — Now What?

Gorav reviews his error list and gets to work. One of the errors tells him that there are two opportunities that both have more than one primary opportunity contact role, which can cause opportunity rollups (like Total Gifts) to be incorrectly calculated.

If you need help understanding or fixing an error, we recommend asking a question in the Nonprofit Success Pack group in the Trailblazer Community. There’s a link to this group in Resources.

Let’s follow along as Gorav fixes the error, starting with finding the records at issue through the NPSP Health Check report.

Click the Reports tab.
In the left menu, click All Folders and then click NPSP Health Check in the report list.
Click the Opportunities with Primary Contact Roles report. The report is limited to opportunities with a close date in the last 90 days by default, so you may need to adjust the date filter.
Click the menu dropdown () in the Opportunity ID column. Then click Sort By… and Sum of Primary to sort by that column so that opportunities with more than one contact role will appear at the top of the table.
To get to each opportunity, you can select to show Detail Rows at the bottom of the report, then click on the Opportunity Name in the column that appears.
Go to the contact roles related list. You should see a listing of all the roles marked as primary.
Edit or delete each extra role until you're left with a single contact role marked as primary.

Gorav could use the Remove Duplicate Primary OCRs utility in Bulk Data Processes in NPSP Settings if there were a large number of opportunities to fix, but, in this case, he corrects the opportunities manually in just a few minutes.

He also fixes the other issues on his list and runs Health Check again. This time there are no errors.

Remember, running Health Check and fixing errors is helpful, but you should always work to diagnose the root cause of the errors. In some cases, it could be a data integration creating an error and this may need to be modified. In other cases, you may find a user or users are entering data incorrectly, pointing to a need for additional training.

Run Salesforce Optimizer

In addition to NPSP Health Check, the Salesforce Optimizer takes a snapshot of your org to look for potential problems and gives you a detailed report on at least 55 metrics covering storage, fields, users, and much more. For each metric, Salesforce provides a blueprint to address problem areas or improve user adoption. Keep in mind this is for your whole Salesforce org, not just NPSP.

We recommend running the Salesforce Optimizer before installing a new app and before each Salesforce release. It’s also helpful to run Salesforce Optimizer at least once a quarter to get recommendations for feature improvement, clean up customizations, reduce complexity, and drive feature adoption.

Here’s how you run Optimizer.

Click the Setup icon () and select Setup.
Find and select Optimizer.
If this is your first time running the Salesforce Optimizer App, you'll have to click Allow Access and agree to the terms.
Once the Salesforce Optimizer App has access, click Open Optimizer.
Click Run Optimizer.
You’ll receive a message that Optimizer may take up to 24 hours to run, so you may want to step away for a break—let your manager know your work is done here for the day and head out to get donuts!
To see your results, you can refresh the page. If you leave the page while it’s running, you can find and select Salesforce Optimizer from the App Launcher ().

Now it’s time to review the findings and create a plan to address the issues. Running the report is the easy part!

Review the results, where you will find each element listed as a Feature.

The Salesforce Optimizer list view

Features, by default, are sorted by their status—from Immediate Action Required to No Action Required. Each row will also include the estimated effort required to fix or improve the feature. To learn more about any feature, you can click on its name in the Feature column to open a detail view.

The Salesforce Optimizer detail view

There’s a lot here, so let’s focus on two of the common issues that Optimizer flags.

Fields and More Fields

It’s common to see objects with hundreds of fields. While Salesforce Enterprise Edition allows up to 500 custom fields per object, Salesforce Optimizer flags any standard or custom object with more than 75 fields on one page layout.

When users have to scroll through too many fields on a detail page, adoption and usage suffers. Consider the mobile experience, too—scrolling through pages of fields on your phone can be painful.

The Field Usage feature in the report can help you see whether those fields are populated with data. This information can be incredibly helpful for understanding how people actually use your database and demonstrates that, even though users are always demanding fields, they don't always need them!

Too Many Admins

Salesforce Optimizer considers any user an admin if they have the permissions to modify all data and customize applications. Granting superuser permission level to lots of users is a recipe for disaster, so Optimizer looks for these users in the Critical Permission Assignments feature of the report. Doling out broad permissions is risky and should be avoided to protect against data breaches and prevent poor data quality—or worse. (Cue dramatic music.)

Remember that every user should have their own license and each should have the lowest data access possible to perform their jobs, known as the principle of least privilege. Check out Security Recommendations for Salesforce.org Products and 10 Reasons Every Salesforce User Needs Their Own License in Resources for details.

So what’s the right number of admins? It depends on the size of your organization, its complexity, and the volume of requests that come in.

Speaking of admins, one of their key responsibilities is keeping up with new releases and innovation. How should you stay on top of new features? We answer this question in the next unit.