Mass Action Scheduler, How Do I love Thee?

If you’re a Salesforce admin and not yet using Mass Action Scheduler, you’re probably missing out! The regular Salesforce automation tools are terrific, but MAS can round out your tool set!

The big way that MAS is different from your other options is that MAS makes it easy to take an action on a subset of records, rather than all of them. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but the biggest one to me is that I want as few things touching records as possible. Some things are unavoidable, of course, but I want to keep things simple and as lightweight as possible.

Here are some things I use MAS for. All of thes things apply to a tiny fraction of records, and so I love updating only those records.

1. If a donation fails, automate the next steps. (In my case, closing the recurring donation and creating a task for the membership manager to follow up with the donor.)
2. 2. If donations are created without a donor name (because the donor had previously been in our system as “subscriber subscriber” via Mailchimp) and I’ve updated the contact’s name, rename the donations to include the donor’s name.
3. 3. Update contact records after swag has been sent out. (Sweatshirt sent = true)
4. 4. Send out emails to donors who have a failed credit card transaction. (I know, you’re thinking why don’t I just automate that? We like to have a human review these before they go out, but if we’ve got a big group, like during our annual drive, it is great to be able to send them in one step rather than sending them individually.)
5. 5. Update an interest field based on a new campaign member record.

Douglas C. Ayers, who created this awesome app, supports it well and has already created follow-on versions. The setup takes a few steps, but it is well worth it!