Impact Measurement and Outcomes Evaluation Using Salesforce For Nonprofits: A Guide To Data-Driven Frameworks 1st Edition Dustin Macdonald

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Impact Measurement
and Outcomes
Evaluation Using
Salesforce for
Nonprofits
A Guide to Data-Driven Frameworks
—
Dustin MacDonald
Impact Measurement and
Outcomes Evaluation
Using Salesforce for
Nonprofits
Dustin MacDonald
Impact Measurement and Outcomes Evaluation Using Salesforce for Nonprofits:
Dustin MacDonald
Sigourney, IA, USA
ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-9707-0 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-9708-7

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9708-7
Copyright © 2023 by Dustin MacDonald

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the
material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
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every occurrence of a trademarked name, logo, or image we use the names, logos, and images only in an
editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the
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The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not
identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to
proprietary rights.
While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication,
neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or
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Paper in this product is recyclable
Table of Contents
About the Author�� xi
About the Technical Reviewer�� xiii
Acknowledgments��xv
Introduction��xvii
Chapter 1: Introduction to Salesforce for Nonprofits�� 1

Introduction to Nonprofit Cloud�� 5
Nonprofit Cloud Case Management�� 6
Program Management Module�� 11
Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)�� 12
Soft Credits�� 12
Manage Households�� 13
Engagement Plans�� 13
Gift Levels�� 14
Gift Entry Templates�� 15
Recurring Donations�� 15
Rollup Summaries�� 16
Reporting and Analytics�� 16
Outbound Funds Module�� 17
Accounting Subledger�� 17
Other Salesforce Tools�� 18
Getting Started with Salesforce�� 18
Understanding the Power of Us (P10) Program�� 19
Signing Your Contract�� 20
iii
Table of Contents
Getting Access to Your Organization�� 20

Installing Other Salesforce Tools�� 20
Conclusion�� 21
Chapter 2: Introduction to Impact Measurement and Outcome Evaluation�� 23

Common Definitions�� 24
Impact Measurement�� 26
Outcome Evaluation�� 29
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)�� 30
SMART Goals�� 30
Identify Outcomes�� 32
Define Success�� 32
Select Measures for Each Element of Success�� 33
Set a Target�� 34
Begin Measuring�� 34
Assess Results�� 35
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)�� 35
Return on Investment�� 37
Social Return on Investment�� 37
Establishing the Scope and Identifying Stakeholders�� 38
Mapping Outputs�� 39
Demonstrating Outcomes and Giving Them a Value�� 40
Establishing Impact�� 42
Calculating the SROI�� 43
Reporting, Using, and Embedding the SROI�� 44
Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA)�� 44
Pre-Post Comparison�� 45
Conclusion�� 45
iv
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: Creating Logic Models and Theories of Change�� 47

History�� 48
Steps to Creating a Theory of Change�� 51
Issue Analysis�� 51
Stakeholder Analysis�� 53
Final Outcome�� 54
Intermediate Outcomes/Outputs�� 57
Inputs and Activities�� 58
Change Methods�� 59
Sequencing and Diagramming�� 60
External Factors�� 62
Assumptions and Risks�� 63
Conclusion�� 65
Chapter 4: Developing an Impact Management Strategy�� 67

Strategic Planning�� 67
Selecting Indicators and Metrics�� 70
Collecting and Managing Data�� 71
Establishing Baselines and Targets�� 73
Ensuring Data Quality and Reliability�� 74
Conclusion�� 75
Chapter 5: Creating the Framework in Salesforce�� 77

Creating (or Documenting) Your Data Model�� 77
Example Data Model�� 81
Data Model and Your Theory of Change�� 83
Creating reports�� 83
Report Types�� 84
Custom Report Types�� 84
Report Formats�� 86
Fields�� 86
Filters�� 87
v
Table of Contents
Cross Filters�� 89
Subscribe to Reports�� 96
Export Reports�� 99
Einstein Discovery for Reports�� 101
Creating Dashboards�� 101
Dashboard Filters�� 103
Using Formulas and Validation Rules�� 104
Formula Fields�� 104
Intermediate Examples�� 107
Advanced Examples�� 109
Formulas in Reports�� 109
Validation Rules�� 112
Other Considerations for Data Input�� 113
Certifications and Additional Learning�� 114
Strategies for Collecting Data�� 114
Conclusion�� 116
Chapter 6: Evaluating Impact�� 117

Evaluating Impact Qualitatively�� 117
Analyzing Qualitative Survey Results�� 118
Collecting Case Studies and Testimonials�� 123
Facilitating Interviews and Focus Groups�� 127
Interviews�� 127
Focus Groups�� 127
Evaluating Impact Quantitatively�� 128
Entry and Exit Assessments�� 128
Analyzing Quantitative Survey Results�� 130
Statistical Measurement Techniques�� 131
Making Changes to Improve Impact�� 136
Improving Survey Results�� 136
Improving Assessment Results�� 137
Social Return on Investment�� 137
vi
Table of Contents
Reporting on Impact�� 138

Annual Reports�� 139
Social Media�� 141
Earned Media�� 142
Salesforce Standard Reporting�� 142
Other Issues in Evaluating Impact�� 143
Chapter 7: The Change Management Process�� 145

Step 1: Determine the Idea and Its Context�� 146
Step 2: Define the Change Initiative�� 148
Step 3: Evaluate the Climate for Change�� 149
Step 4: Develop a Change Plan�� 151
Step 5: Identify a Sponsor�� 154
Step 6: Prepare the Recipients of Change�� 155
Step 7: Create the Cultural Fit�� 156
Step 8: Develop and Choose a Change Leader Team�� 157
Step 9: Create Small Wins for Motivation�� 158
Step 10: Constantly and Strategically Communicate the Change�� 159
Step 11: Measure Progress of the Change Effort�� 161
Step 12: Integrate Lessons Learned�� 162
A Case Study of Change Management�� 163
Determine the Idea and Its Context�� 163
Define the Change Initiative�� 163
Evaluate the Climate for Change�� 164
Develop a Change Plan�� 164
Identify a Sponsor�� 165
Prepare the Recipients of Change�� 165
Create the Cultural Fit�� 166
Develop and Choose a Change Leader Team�� 166
Create Small Wins for Motivation�� 167
vii
Table of Contents
Constantly and Strategically Communicate the Change�� 167

Measure Progress of the Change Effort�� 167
Integrate Lessons Learned�� 167
Chapter 8: Case Studies�� 169

Case Study 1: Nonprofit Crisis Line�� 169
Introduction to the Organization�� 169
Current Technology�� 170
Planned Technology�� 171
Old Data Model�� 172
New Data Model�� 172
Impact and Outcome�� 172
Case Study 2: Chamber of Commerce�� 175
Final Outcomes�� 179
Case Study 3: Homeless Shelter and Food Pantry�� 180
Final Outcomes�� 182
viii
Table of Contents
Chapter 9: Advanced Techniques�� 183

What Is Einstein?�� 183
Einstein Next Best Action (NBA)�� 183
Einstein Prediction Builder�� 185
Einstein Discovery (Tableau)�� 186
Einstein Bots�� 186
Ethics of Einstein�� 187
Using Einstein Prediction Builder�� 190
Define Your Use Case�� 190
Identify the Data That Supports Your Use Case�� 190
Create Your Prediction�� 192
Review, Iterate, and Enable Your Prediction�� 197
Monitor Your Prediction�� 197
Deploy and Use Your Prediction�� 198
Updating the Prediction�� 198
Collecting Survey Data via Experience Cloud�� 198
Leveraging AppExchange Solutions to Better Model Outcomes�� 201
Chapter 10: Conclusion�� 205

The Future of Salesforce and Program Evaluation�� 205
Next Steps in Your Learning�� 206
Salesforce Certifications and Accredited Professionals�� 206
Trailmixes�� 211
Degrees and Certificates�� 213
How to Implement What You’ve Learned in Your Organization�� 214
Remembering What You Learned�� 214
Putting It into Practice�� 215
Index�� 217
ix
About the Author
Dustin K. MacDonald is 10x Salesforce Certified, Nonprofit
Cloud Consultant. He holds an Accredited Professional
in Einstein Prediction Builder and is currently a Senior
Consultant at a midsize Salesforce implementation partner
that focuses exclusively on nonprofits and public sector
organizations. He is a former Affiliate Professor in Data
Science at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania,
and holds several degrees: Bachelor of Professional Arts in
Human Services, Master of Science in Data Science, and
Master of Business Administration. Dustin was motivated
to write this book because there are no books available on
Nonprofit Cloud for nonprofit users who may lack technical knowledge, and the timing
is right as Salesforce is increasing its focus on this vertical.
xi
About the Technical Reviewer
Jesse Brown is a self-taught Salesforce architect, evangelist,
and fanboy based in Indianapolis, Indiana. As of the
publication of this book, Jesse has 16 certifications in the
Salesforce platform and is eyeing the Certified Technical
Architect examination. Jesse works as the Director of
Solutions Architecture at Provisio Partners.
xiii
Acknowledgments
I am incredibly grateful to everyone who helped bring this book to fruition: the Apress
team including Susan McDermott, Laura Berendson, Gryffin Winkler, Shobana
Srinivasan, and others who helped behind the scenes and supported this book
throughout its development.
I am also thankful to my colleagues at Provisio Partners and RedTag.pro who inspire
me each day, especially my supervisor Hillary Dale, Chief Delivery Officer Kim Collins,
CIO Erica Cox, CEO Travis Bloomfield, and some of my amazing coworkers including
Frank Nichols, Tom Overland, Sergii Korolivskyi, and Volodymyr Monchak who make
magic happen daily.
Thank you to Professor Greg Longo, whose support during my time at Eastern
University was invaluable in giving me the confidence and knowledge to pursue
this work.
A special thank you to my technical reviewer Jesse Brown, who teaches me
something new every day and took time out of his extremely busy schedule to ensure the
technical accuracy of this book.
I am grateful to my brother, Jonathan MacDonald, who has always been there to
bounce ideas off and who supported this book when it was nothing more than a few
bullet points on a notepad.
Finally, the deepest appreciation and thanks go to my wife, Melissa, and my kids, Ray
and Rose, who put up with endless late nights and review sessions.
xv
Introduction
If you’ve picked up this book, it’s probably because you find yourself in the role of a
nonprofit manager, outcomes and evaluation specialist, consultant, architect, or other
professional who is required either to directly perform outcomes measurement and
impact evaluation or to set up and supervise systems that do.
Before beginning this learning adventure, it will be helpful to understand how this
book came to be. I hold a variety of Salesforce certifications, Accredited Professional
badges, a bachelor’s degree in human services, and two master’s degrees. In all that
education, I have never had the opportunity to complete a formal course in outcomes
evaluation.
After spending years in all areas of nonprofits and helping them use Salesforce
as a consultant, the decision to distill those years of learning in one place about how
nonprofits use Salesforce – and there are a lot of them – has led to this book about how
you can build a proper impact measurement system.
After completing dozens of implementations across all areas of the nonprofit
spectrum including housing, homelessness, economic empowerment, poverty
alleviation, intimate partner violence, mental health, crisis intervention, suicide
prevention, and more, it’s become clear that a well-designed impact and outcomes
measurement system quickly pays for itself in your ability to tell a better story to your
funders.
During the research process, it has become clear there is a lack of written material for
Salesforce. Part of this is a function of the fact that the tech world moves fast, and written
material is often out of date by the time it is published. Another reason is that the people
busy doing work often don’t have the time to sit down and write a book.
There are a few reasons not to be discouraged by this reality as you begin to work
through this material.
First, even as specific technical implementation details get out of date, the core
functionality remains unchanged. In our case, the principles of outcomes measurement
and the process of building a rockstar impact measurement system are the same
whether you’re using Salesforce, an Access database from 1995, or a completely
pen-and-paper system.
xvii
Introduction
In this book, you will learn the skills and how to apply them. Salesforce will help us
by making it quicker and more efficient, but rest assured that nothing about the core
work of impact measurement and outcome evaluation will be out of date by the time you
read this.
Second, although blog posts, website articles, and presentations at Dreamforce
(Salesforce’s annual conference) are a great way to get information, it is often presented
with too little detail to immediately act on it. A book gives you the opportunity to dive
deep into both the theory and the practice of the subject at hand so that you have a
strong foundation to apply what you learn. That’s the purpose of this book and I’m
confident you will agree that it is met.
About This Book

Before writing this book, certain assumptions were made about the audience. Making
this book useful to the widest group possible without also making it too high level that it
would prevent quickly implementing the solutions presented is challenging. Adding the
additional hurdle of not making it so technical that a Salesforce end user or even a non-
Salesforce nonprofit executive would be locked out trying to read it is a difficult needle to
thread, but I think it has been achieved.
Although this book assumes little to no Salesforce knowledge before you begin,
many are likely reading because you’ve been using Salesforce for a while and now
want to supercharge your impact measurement. For that reason, the basic Salesforce
knowledge needed is presented early, and we dive deeper as the book goes on.
If you are actively using Salesforce and are familiar with Nonprofit Cloud, you can
safely skip this first chapter which is an introduction to these topics and walks you
through each step from first contacting Salesforce to installing the Nonprofit Cloud tools
you will use throughout this process.
At the speed that nonprofits must work, it’s rare that you get the opportunity to
design a system from the ground up with outcomes in mind. For that reason, all the
advice and solutions provided in this book will include options for updating your system
to move toward best practices without losing your previous data or work.
The rest of this section will review each of the following chapters. Chapter 2 is a high-
level overview of the theory and practice of impact measurement and outcome evaluation.
This is a primer for those who may be new to this role or a review for those who may be
experienced practitioners that may have been away from the basics for a while.
xviii
Introduction
Chapter 2 also reviews common impact measurement and outcome frameworks

to help you decide how to proceed. We review Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). We also look at a traditional fundraising model of
return on investment (ROI), a special method for social value called social return on
investment (SROI), and cost-benefit analysis (CBA).
Chapter 3 explores a key aspect to building a new evaluation program. The terms
logic model and theory of change are used interchangeably in outcomes measurement,
but these are slightly different. They refer to a visual and hypothetical map showing how
clients move through one, several, or all your programs or services to achieve the desired
outcomes.
Along the way, you will provide inputs such as staff and materials to deliver your
programs, and the client will realize outputs which are immediately observable effects
from the service(s) you provided. Those outputs translate in the long term to outcomes.
We’ll spend more time going over outputs and outcomes later in the book.
It might seem that because the logic model comes before other work, it should be
placed earlier. This chapter is deliberately placed after the common impact and outcome
measurement frameworks chapter because it’s helpful if you understand where you need
to end up (with a decided-on framework) before you start building your logic model.
It’s a bit like deciding your driving directions. As the paraphrase from Lewis Carroll
indicates, “If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.”
In Chapter 4, we focus on the elements of a strategic plan and discuss how to identify
indicators, collect data, establish baselines and targets, and ensure your data quality and
reliability.
In Chapter 5, we take our logic model and outcomes that we decided on earlier
and begin deciding how to build them in Salesforce. We won’t get too technical in this
chapter, but we will talk about some basic Salesforce functionality like objects, fields,
and reports. See Figure 1 for a view of the Salesforce Object Manager used for managing
objects and fields.
xix
Introduction
Figure 1. The Salesforce Object Manager
Later in the chapter we move from the theoretical to the practical as we look at
strategies for collecting data. We’ll talk about techniques like paper surveys, Salesforce
assessments, Experience Cloud portals, and other methods of getting your output data
into Salesforce. We’ll also discuss best practices to make sure the data you’re collecting is
the most robust and reliable.
In Chapter 6, we take the data we’ve collected and examine how to report out
on it. We discuss how to meet the needs of your board, your funders, and the wider
community. Integrating your nonprofit impact into your grant proposals is also covered
here, as is how to seek out earned media when you have particularly compelling results
to share.
In Chapter 7, we focus on the complete change management process, which is
used to ensure that individuals are prepared for the changes that your organization
implements.
In Chapter 8, we begin wrapping up with three end-to-end case studies to help you
understand and apply the concepts throughout the rest of the book. Each case study is
based on the outcomes and evaluation work I’ve done in my career with organizations.
The first is a crisis line, the second is a nonprofit Chamber of Commerce, and the third is
a homeless shelter and food pantry.
xx
Introduction
In Chapter 9, we incorporate advanced techniques like Einstein Prediction Builder,

Experience Cloud, statistical analysis, and AppExchange solutions to extend the work
that you’ve done by leveraging next-generation technologies.
In Chapter 10, our conclusion, we examine everything you’ve learned throughout
the book and opportunities for you to continue your learning. Good luck and happy
learning!
xxi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Salesforce
for Nonprofits
This is a book about conducting impact measurement for nonprofits. If you’re reading
this book, I assume you work for a nonprofit or an external evaluator or are a consultant
like me and are interested in using the power of Salesforce to improve your impact
measurement and evaluation. If so, this is the right book for you.
Combine the lack of reading material on subjects related to Salesforce with the
lack of resources for nonprofits using Salesforce, and you have a recipe for numerous
organizations to not take full advantage of the technology that they’ve paid very good
money for.
This book will help you supercharge your impact measurement and outcome
evaluation by developing an understanding of what it means to have an impact and how
to measure it. Then we’ll learn how to set your Salesforce organization up so that you’re
automatically collecting the information that you need to be successful. And finally, we’ll
explore the technologies and techniques you have available to you to best demonstrate
the impact you’ve identified.
By tracing a straight line from your logic model or theory of change, which shows you
how the work you do with the people you serve, through to the outputs and outcomes
that your clients see, you can tell a more compelling story. And we’ll finish by exploring
how you can leverage this newfound impact measurement skill to improve fundraising
and ensure your organization’s long-term success.
We’ll close with a set of case studies to demonstrate this process based on several
real-life nonprofits I have worked with, including a telephone crisis line, a homeless
shelter and associated food pantry, and a Chamber of Commerce.
1
© Dustin MacDonald 2023
D. MacDonald, Impact Measurement and Outcomes Evaluation Using Salesforce for Nonprofits,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9708-7_1
Chapter 1 Introduction to Salesforce for Nonprofits
Salesforce as a platform has been around since 1997. It was created by Marc Benioff
with the original slogan – still used today – of “clicks, not code.” The Internet was still
relatively nascent in the 1990s, and when you wanted most kinds of software, you
needed to get them on a CD or, worse, a mainframe. Computer software was big, bulky,
hard to use, and often slow to operate. In contrast, Salesforce made the promise of a
decentralized workforce something closer to reality by allowing individuals to work from
anywhere and allowing sales staff to work at a new office just by visiting a new website.
That original version of Salesforce, called Salesforce Classic, is still available (see
Figure 1-1). Eventually, Salesforce transitioned to a new layout and set of code called
Lightning. While Salesforce Classic and Lightning work on the same underlying
database, Lightning (sometimes also called Lightning Experience or LEX) is a total
rewrite of the Salesforce code that takes advantage of modern web standards that, true to
its name, often allow you to do things much quicker than you used to.
Figure 1-1. Salesforce Classic
Salesforce considers themselves a PaaS – a platform as a service. You might hear

this referred to sometimes as Software as a Service or SaaS. This refers to an individual
software that you can subscribe to, like the Dropbox file storage service.
In contrast, Salesforce provides hundreds of services and technologies inside their
platform, like Flows, the Apex programming language, and Experience Cloud Builder, to
allow you to create your own extensions to the out-of-the-box functionality.
Each Salesforce product exists as something called a Cloud. When you first subscribe
to Salesforce, you will be given access to one of these Clouds. The very first Cloud was
called, appropriately, Sales Cloud.
2
Sales Cloud allows you to do things like add sales leads into the system; record
phone calls, emails, and tasks against those leads; convert those leads into Contacts
when you’ve made sales to them; track the Opportunity pipeline from start to end as you
make sales; and more. Sales Cloud also includes deal forecasting, which uses the past
data you’ve collected to understand the likelihood of a similar deal closing and allows
your sales staff to be as efficient as possible.
Over time, Salesforce added additional Clouds. Some of the most popular include
Service Cloud, Health Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Nonprofit Cloud. Service Cloud,
one of the earliest Clouds to be launched after Sales Cloud, is designed for service-based
organizations or departments. If you are a manufacturer of air conditioners and you
use Sales Cloud for your sales staff to work with your suppliers and distributors, your
customer service staff can use Service Cloud to help manage customer support.
Service Cloud includes functionality like ticket management via email or through
your website, internal and external knowledge bases that can help provide articles and
information, and an “OmniChannel” that can allow your support staff to take phone
calls, emails, text messages, web-based chats, and more.
Service Console even features AI-powered chatbots using Einstein, which is
Salesforce’s name for their proprietary artificial intelligence/machine learning
technology. These chatbots can reply to common customer issues, and only if it appears
the customer’s needs lie outside these frequent topics will the chatbot send the chat or
text over to a live agent. This all helps to make Salesforce as efficient a tool as possible for
support staff.
Health Cloud is another innovative Salesforce Cloud. Developed for the unique
needs of healthcare providers like doctor’s offices, pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics,
Health Cloud allows you to manage the full spectrum of healthcare management
including generating 835 and 837P medical billing files, integrating with Electronic
Health Record (EHR) systems, and a variety of workflow management tools like
Intelligent Form Reader which can read a scanned document and convert it directly to a
Salesforce record.
Finally, the Cloud that will be the focus of this book is Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
You might also hear this product referred to under the umbrella of Salesforce for
Nonprofits. This Cloud, like the Clouds mentioned earlier, is made up of a variety
of features. Unlike many other Clouds, however, Salesforce for Nonprofits is broken
into a few groups of features that Salesforce calls packages. One of those packages is
the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). NPSP provides full spectrum donation and grant
management to replace or augment donation management software like Raiser’s Edge.
3
Note We will leverage Nonprofit Cloud for the demonstrations and examples in
this book, but you don’t need to have Nonprofit Cloud to take advantage of many of
the items in this book. The principles and techniques apply equally to all Clouds.
Another package under the Salesforce for Nonprofits umbrella is Nonprofit Cloud
Case Management or NCCM. Most of the time when people talk about Salesforce
Nonprofit Cloud, this is the big package they are talking about. NCCM provides
nonprofits with all the standard case management functionality they need including
intakes, checklists, assessments, case plans, and service delivery.
To further add confusion, NCCM is made up of the case management components
(sometimes called pure NCCM) and another package called Program Management
Module (PMM), as seen in Figure 1-2. PMM is free and provides the ability to add
programs and services into Salesforce and track them as you provide support to clients.
If you’re a small nonprofit, you might use only NPSP and PMM and not need the larger
NCCM package.
Figure 1-2. Program Management Module
The final components of Salesforce for Nonprofits include tools like Outbound
Funds, a free add-on used for managing things like administering grants or scholarships
on behalf of other people, and Accounting Subledger which is a paid add-on that
produces ledger entries for your nonprofit accounting system, shown in Figure 1-3.
4
Figure 1-3. AppExchange listing for the Outbound Funds product
Throughout this book, we’ll look at how you get NCCM/PMM or NPSPS (as your
situation dictates) and then how you can leverage these tools for impact measurement.
If you happen to use NPSP or another Salesforce Cloud, all is not lost! Most of the things
that we discuss are Cloud-agnostic meaning you can learn from them and apply them
into your own Salesforce organization.
In addition to these common Clouds, Salesforce has numerous Clouds that go
beyond this including things like Auto Cloud for automotive dealerships and GovCloud
for federal government customers who have specific compliance requirements. Each
Cloud has very specific features. By adding additional Clouds, you can also access
new features. For example, Net Zero Cloud includes features and functions that help
support organizational efforts to pursue net zero carbon emissions and environmental
sustainability.
To choose the right Cloud for you, you’ll need to consult your Salesforce Account
Executive (AE). Because Salesforce’s offerings change all the time, you, and a neighbor
who works in Salesforce, even on the same Cloud, may have a different set of services
depending on which add-ons you selected.
Introduction to Nonprofit Cloud

This section reviews both Nonprofit Cloud Case Management and the Program
Management Module, two major components making up the Nonprofit Cloud in
Salesforce.
5
Nonprofit Cloud Case Management

Nonprofit Cloud Case Management or NCCM is the big behemoth in the Salesforce
nonprofit case management world. Before NCCM was released, numerous solutions
existed to provide this support. Salesforce was even split into two parts: https://
salesforce.com was the corporate partner, which licensed the Salesforce platform to
business customers.
A separate California Benefit Corporation called Salesforce.org was responsible
for distributing discounted licenses to Salesforce for nonprofits and educational
organizations. In 2019, the two organizations merged. Salesforce brought the nonprofit
components under the aegis of the “mothership” as it’s been called.
That same year, Salesforce announced the release of NCCM and Program
Management Module (PMM). Until this date, people who wanted to do case
management in Salesforce needed to use the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP, discussed
later) which had no case management functionality and then extend it using a third-
party tool from the AppExchange (Salesforce’s answer to your phone’s app store).
Examples of those third-party tools include Birdseye by Provisio Partners and Exponent
Case Management by Exponent Partners.
With NCCM and PMM, nonprofits finally had a solution with the weight of Salesforce
behind it, and after the merger, nonprofit clients were no longer considered second
class citizens. NCCM has continued to evolve, like all Salesforce products in active
development, through three-times a year release cycles. These release cycles allow the
company to build and trial new features and then release them to all organizations all
at once.
In its latest evolution, Salesforce has rolled out a new version called NPC, or
Nonprofit Cloud. For more information on NPC, see Chapter 10.
If you’ve never used NCCM before (or only scratched the surface in your
organization), you may be unfamiliar with all the options that it provides.
• Inbound Referrals: You can record inbound referrals to understand

where clients are coming from and what information you’ll need
to collect from them before they move to the next stage of working
with you.
6
• Outbound Referrals: When you send a client to a community

partner, you can track where they went, which program they were
referred to, and the person they were referred to. You can also track
the status of the referral (was the person able to connect with the
agency) and the outcome of the referral (did they get what they
needed).
• Intakes: Most nonprofits are familiar with the stack of papers that
comprise their organization’s intakes. An intake is sometimes
your first opportunity to collect data from your client and begin
understanding their unique needs. In Salesforce, intakes still exist but
NCCM Intakes lets you pull data from across your Salesforce system
into one page, so you can quickly access it. See Figure 1-4 for an
example of an intake.
Figure 1-4. A screenshot showing part of an intake
7
• Intake Checklists: As part of your intake, you may have a set of digital
and paper processes for a client to complete. For example, the client
needs to provide you with a paystub or a copy of their ID in addition
to filling out some forms. With Intake Checklists, shown in Figure 1-5,
you can track these tasks right on the Intake and follow them through
to completion.
Figure 1-5. Example of an Intake Checklist
• Case Plans, Goals, and Action Items: Case Plans are a staple of case
management work, allowing you to record the goals a client has and
their progress toward them. NCCM allows you to create multiple case
plans for each client, add goals to them, and then add action items to
each goal. You can see an example of a Case Plan in Figure 1-6.
Case Plans allow you to break down overwhelming goals like “get
a driver’s license” into achievable steps like “bring in your birth
certificate,” “read the driver’s manual,” and “study signage for the
written driving test.”
8
Figure 1-6. Building a Case Plan for a housing organization
• Client Notes: Client Notes are another common case management

requirement. Salesforce supports client notes, which you can save
as drafts and submit them later, as well as tagging them so you can
quickly find important notes again.
• Assessments: Assessments, shown in Figure 1-7, represent

a standardized way of collecting information about a client a
repeatable basis. Salesforce assessments can be scored, with the
results charted over time, compared, and aggregated. We will discuss
several examples of assessments later in this book.
9
Figure 1-7. Completing a housing assessment
• Reporting and Analytics: Finally, Salesforce comes with robust

reporting capabilities. We’ll expand on the out-of-the-box reports
later in this book, but for now, know that Salesforce allows you to
slice, dice, and report whichever kind of data you need. An example
of a report is shown in Figure 1-8.
10
Figure 1-8. An example report
You’ll notice in that list that there was nothing included about programs or services.
This was deliberate, because while NCCM is a paid product, the Program Management
Module (PMM) is not. PMM is a free add-on to Salesforce that provides access to
Programs and Services functionality and is covered in the next section.
Program Management Module

Program Management Module (PMM) is automatically installed when you install
NCCM, if you don’t already have it. As a free add-on, however, you can install PMM
at any time in any org. PMM allows you to track programs, as the name suggests, and
services.
A program represents the service delivery you provide to clients. For example, you
might have a counseling program, a food bank program, or a housing program. A service
is the kind of support you provide to meet the needs of that program.
Your counseling program might provide mental health counseling or support group
sessions as a service. A food bank provides food as a service. And a housing program
provides shelter beds. Salesforce lets you set the type and quantity of each service
delivery, so you could add one hour of counseling, one group session, or one pound of
food to a client’s record. By putting clients into program cohorts, you can easily group
them, pull them up, email them, and report out on them.
Another major timesaver is a set of features that starts with Service Schedules. A
Service Schedule allows you to design a set of recurring service deliveries like a class.
You can schedule those and then RSVP people for the individual sessions. Then with a
click of a button, you can collect attendance for dozens or even hundreds of people each
session. Service Sessions makes managing batch service deliveries a snap.
11
Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

When people think of Salesforce and nonprofits, especially if they don’t work in
Salesforce, what often comes to mind is the Nonprofit Success Pack. This is the result
of the P10 (Power of Us) program that gives eligible nonprofits ten free licenses to
Salesforce with NPSP already installed. This makes it an attractive choice for small or
new nonprofits who are dipping their toes into the waters of Salesforce. P10 is discussed
later in this chapter.
Although it’s free due to the generosity of Salesforce – who hope to make up the
revenue as you add additional licensed products and services – NPSP is full-featured
and very powerful. It expands and transforms the Opportunity object used for recording
information on potential sales so that you can record all kinds of donations including
cash, pledges, matching gifts, and in-kind contributions.
Some of the major functionality in NPSP is detailed in the following section.
Soft Credits
By leveraging the power of Soft Credits and Partial Soft Credits, you can give credit where
credit is due. If you receive a donation from person A, but it was influenced by person
B, you can ensure that person B is counted in their donation totals by using Soft Credits.
See a picture of Soft Credits in Figure 1-9.
12
Figure 1-9. A Soft Credit from an influencer
Manage Households
The Nonprofit Success Pack allows you to work closely with your donors, who can have
situations as complex as the clients that you serve. One of the ways that you can do this
is through the Manage Household functionality. If you have two contacts in Salesforce
and they move into the same household, you can merge the households together. On
the contrary, if a child moves out of their parent’s house and is going to be donating or
receiving services separately, you can split the new household out from the existing one.
You can also configure settings like the default name of a household, a formal
greeting, an informal greeting, and some automation. When you add a new contact
into the system, NPSP will create the household using the naming convention you have
specified and create a formal greeting with the salutation (e.g., Mr. or Dr.) and full name
and an informal greeting using the first name.
Engagement Plans
Like all good fundraising and development staff, you probably have a plan for how to
reach out to donors. You’ll use this plan to decide when to reach out to new donors, who
will reach out to them, and when. For those who have donated in the past, engagement
13
plans can help you keep donors engaged and aware of your organization over time
so that you can retain and recapture donors. In development, this is called moves
management. In the development lifecycle (which can look like a set of stages from
Identification, Qualification, Cultivation, Solicitation, and Stewardship), you’ll use
engagement plan templates to coordinate and repeat those tasks consistently.
Engagement plans begin life as engagement plan templates (Figure 1-10).
Engagement plan templates are created and filled with tasks. Those can be independent
tasks that occur at any time and dependent tasks that must be completed in a specific
order. You can assign someone to be responsible for each one and tick them off as they
are completed.
Figure 1-10. An engagement plan template
Gift Levels
Gift Levels in Nonprofit Cloud have a few uses. The first is to help you manage your
budgeting and your donation activity. For example, if you run a small nonprofit that
needs to generate $200,000 a year to operate, you might set up gift levels of
• Gold ($25,000 or more)
• Silver ($10,000 or more)

• Bronze ($5,000)
• Supporter (under $5,000)
14
If you know that you have two gold level donors, five silver level donors, and ten
bronze level donors, you’ll know you have brought in $100,000. From your supporters
and the wider community, you will need to raise the other $100,000 that your
organization needs to operate.
In Nonprofit Success Pack, gift levels will help you track the contribution level of
each donor, so you can keep track of their contributions. You can also connect this with
automation so that as someone approaches a certain level, such as a Founder’s Circle,
you proactively reach out to them to encourage them to make that last contribution to
push them into the next contribution level and continue to support your organization.
Gift Entry Templates

Nonprofit Success Pack allows you to record all your donations, or gifts as they come
in. Because of the unique data that you need to capture for different kinds of donations
and different ways of entering those donations, Gift Entry Templates allow you to set up
processes that match your preferred workflows.
For example, when adding credit card donations, you might be interested in
recording whether those donations are recurring or one-time. If you’re adding a batch
of donations, you might want a more streamlined data entry process than when you’re
entering donations once at a time. Gift Entry Templates allow you to handle these
different situations to make your donation process the most effective it can be.
Recurring Donations
As a nonprofit, your most loyal supporters are often recurring donors. Whether they give
monthly, yearly, or some other frequency, you know when to expect their funds to arrive.
This is especially true if they make a pledge and then begin making donations to support
the pledge.
Nonprofit Success Pack allows you to handle these recurring donations with ease.
You can enter open-ended recurring donations for those donors that have set up a
recurring donation schedule or a fixed-length schedule for situations where a person or
an organization has committed a specific amount of money that will be disbursed on a
regular schedule.
15
Rollup Summaries
Rollup summaries (often simply called rollups) are one of the most powerful parts of
Salesforce. Many users of Salesforce are familiar with rollups from their experience with
Master-Detail objects. In a Master-Detail object, one of the objects is the parent and one
is the child. By defining a Rollup Summary on the Master object, you can capture the
Sum, Count, Minimum, or Maximum of the child records.
For example, if you use Cases to track your inbound and outbound referrals, you
might have a Custom Object called Referral Resolution Details that you use for each
person who works on that Case to provide information such as the length of time
each staff member spends working on the referral by filling out a number field called
Duration_of_Work__c with the number of minutes.
If you wanted to know the total number of minutes that all the staff members had
spent, you could use a rollup summary to do so. To do this, you would create a field
on the parent object, Case, called Total_Minutes_Spent__c, with the field type Rollup
Summary and the type set to Sum and the rollup field set to the Duration_of_Work__c
field on the Referral Resolution object. Then, for each Case, you would see the sum of the
minutes spent from the related Referral Resolution records. Fantastic!
Rollups are great and very powerful. Unfortunately, they have some major
limitations. The biggest is that you can only create rollup summary fields on master-
detail objects. There is a soft limit of 25 rollup summary fields that can only be raised to a
maximum of 40 by Salesforce. While you can have several options for how to summarize
(noted earlier), average is not among them.
The Customizable Rollups functionality of Nonprofit Success Pack avoids all these
limitations by allowing you to create a variety of rollups including new rollup methods
like Average, Distinct (unique values), and Donor Streak which are used to determine
the number of years in a row someone has donated.
Reporting and Analytics

Reporting and analytics are some of the most important elements of adopting a
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like Salesforce. By storing all your
data in Salesforce and using it as a single source of truth, you unlock the ability to do
advanced reporting to funders, creating and viewing oversight dashboards and more.
16
Although each component of Salesforce for Nonprofits comes with some pre-created
reports and dashboards, learning how to extend this functionality throughout this book
will allow you to have confidence that you are doing the right work and demonstrating
that to others.
Outbound Funds Module

Outbound Funds Module (OFM) is a newer part of Salesforce for Nonprofits. Started in
2017 and released in 2018 by members of the Salesforce.org community as a free and
open source product, it was eventually absorbed by Salesforce in 2020.
OFM remains as a free optional add-on today. It allows you to create funding
programs to represent scholarships or other kinds of outbound benefits where funds
are being paid directly to constituents. From there, an individual can submit a Funding
Request. Finally, you can track requirements such as documents needed, progress
reports required, or other steps to manage the funding process.
Finally, the Disbursement object lets you manage the actual payment.
Accounting Subledger
Accounting Subledger allows Salesforce and your accounting system (e.g., Sage or
QuickBooks) to talk to each other. When you use Accounting Subledger, the system
generates accounting records as standard journal entries. You can use cash or accrual
accounting and reconcile accounting periods inside Salesforce in the same way that you
do with your accounting system. When you’re ready, you can export those ledger entries
for import into that external system.
By having matching data in your accounting system and Salesforce, you can take
advantage of the power of both systems to be more efficient and have a more unified
view of your operations. An example of an Accounting Subledger report is found in
Figure 1-11.
17
Figure 1-11. An Accounting Subledger report
Other Salesforce Tools

Salesforce includes other packages from Salesforce Labs, which allows Salesforce
employees to build and share AppExchange tools with the wider Salesforce community.
Examples of apps from Salesforce Labs include Project Management Tool (PMT), which
as the name suggests allows you to manage projects, and Salesforce Field Service Starter
Kit which extends Salesforce’s Field Service product with new Flows and dashboards.
Other Salesforce Labs solutions are covered in Chapter 9.
Getting Started with Salesforce

If you’ve never worked with Salesforce before, this section will help. If you have, you can
safely skip this section. If you find yourself interested in adopting Salesforce, the first step
is to reach out to Salesforce. You can use the Contact Us page on https://salesforce.
com, or if you know an existing nonprofit using Salesforce, you can ask for the contact
information of their Account Executive or AE.
18
Either way, once you’ve established contact with Salesforce, you’ll be reached out
to by a presales professional who will guide you through the process of signing up for
Salesforce. They will create a trial version of Salesforce (also called a trial org) that will be
converted to your final version of Salesforce once you finish signing up.
Understanding the Power of Us (P10) Program

For many nonprofits, the Power of Us program, also called P10 for short, is the reason
they can afford Salesforce in the first place. This program provides ten free Salesforce
licenses to eligible nonprofits. In addition to these free licenses, nonprofits also receive
discounts on Salesforce training and events, access to nonprofit user groups to meet like-
minded individuals and organizations, and other benefits. The P10 application is shown
in Figure 1-12.
Figure 1-12. Salesforce’s P10 application page
You’ll need to provide some information to Salesforce to support your eligibility.

Although the exact eligibility criteria can be adjusted in the future, at the time of
printing, the requirements include being an officially recognized “charitable, nonprofit,
educational, or social change organization.”
19
You can establish this by pursuing recognition as a tax-exempt organization with

501(c)(3) status as recognized by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the United States
or registered charity status with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) in Canada.
You can learn more about the Power of Us eligibility requirements at www.
salesforce.org/power-of-us/eligibility-guidelines/.
Signing Your Contract

Before you sign your contract, you’ll need to meet some specific requirements from
Salesforce. These include having an identified System Administrator and authorization
from the Executive Director or Board Chair providing approval to sign up for Salesforce.
You’ll also need to provide proof of your nonprofit status and any other documentation
Salesforce needs for your specific situation.
After some back and forth with your salesperson and Account Executive, you’ll sign
a contract and be provided access to your organization. Salesforce contracts are often for
three or five years to give you the length of time you need to get set up and established.
Getting Access to Your Organization

Once your contract is signed and fully executed, Salesforce sends you the credentials
to your organization. These will come in the form of an initial System Administrator
account you can use to get into Salesforce. You’ll use that to create your other users and
do anything else you need to do, like installing Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), Nonprofit
Cloud Case Management (NCCM), Program Management Module (PMM), or any of the
other tools you’ll use.
Installing Other Salesforce Tools

When you first get into your Salesforce instance, you’ll have the licenses that you’ve
purchased or been given in the P10 program. Licenses are only half of the equation. You
also need to install the specific apps, features, or functionality that you need.
There are two ways you can do this. The first is using the Salesforce AppExchange.
The AppExchange is a marketplace which you can access, even while not logged in
to Salesforce, at https://appexchange.salesforce.com/. There, you can search
through apps developed by Salesforce and third parties, consultants, and lots of other
information.
20
The other way is to use a special Salesforce tool called MetaDeploy. MetaDeploy is
used to install specific collections of code (called packages). Salesforce distributes some
packages themselves, and some organizations install code using MetaDeploy.
You can access this using https://install.salesforce.org/.
Some of the more than two dozen tools included on MetaDeploy are as follows:
• Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)
• Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S)
• Project Management Module (PMM)
• Outbound Funds Module (OFM)
• Nonprofit Cloud Case Management (NCCM)
C
onclusion
If you’ve been following along, you should now have learned a little bit more about
Salesforce and the Nonprofit Cloud. If you don’t have a Salesforce org yet, you have
to sign up for one. Once you’ve been approved for the P10 program and signed your
contract, you’ve been issued your org with your licenses. Finally, after installing the
products you’ve signed up for, you are ready for the next steps.
In our next chapter, we will review the fundamentals of impact measurement and
outcomes evaluation to provide you with the foundation you need to be prepared as you
work through the rest of the material.
21
CHAPTER 2
Introduction to Impact
Measurement and
Outcome Evaluation
Before we can dive too deep into the practice of impact measurement and outcome
evaluation, we need to understand what these things are. We’ll start with a review of
common definitions, like impact, measurement, outcomes, and evaluation. After that,
we’ll go into the specifics of each framework that we will be using through the rest of the
book with examples. Even if you are someone who has used these frameworks before, it
will be valuable to read this chapter, so we have some common definitions to work from
as we proceed.
This chapter presents a high-level overview of the theory and practice of impact
measurement and outcome evaluation. This is a primer for those who may be new to
this role or a review for those who may be experienced practitioners but have been away
from the theory.
We will also review common impact measurement and outcome frameworks to
help you decide which one makes sense for your specific situation. We review Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). We also look
at a traditional fundraising model of return on investment (ROI) and cost-benefit
analysis (CBA).
23
© Dustin MacDonald 2023
D. MacDonald, Impact Measurement and Outcomes Evaluation Using Salesforce for Nonprofits,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9708-7_2
Chapter 2 Introduction to Impact Measurement and Outcome Evaluation
Common Definitions
The first step to overhauling your organization’s impact measurement and outcome
evaluation is to understand what those things are. Impact is the effect that your
organization’s services or benefits have on the people that you serve. If you are a food
pantry, your impact is the food that you provide. If you’re a counseling organization,
your impact is the counseling sessions that you deliver to community members.
Impact is the first link in a chain that leads to positive social change or difference.
If you drop a pebble in the water, that pebble is the impact that you are having on
the water.
The next link in this change is the outputs. These are the immediate effects that your
impact has on the individuals that you serve. In our food pantry example, we provided
food to individuals (impact) which caused a reduction in their hunger (output.)
For the counseling agency, the output of their counseling sessions may be a reduced
feeling of anxiety or distress or an increased feeling of belonging in the immediate
aftermath of the counseling session. Outputs are the first ripples in the water created by
the dropped pebble in the water.
Output is often confused with outcome, but these are different, and the distinction is
important, especially when we look at frameworks that rely on that difference like social
return on investment.
The final link in the chain is outcomes. These are the final results or long-term
effects of the benefits provided to clients. One way to think about the distinction between
outputs and outcomes is to imagine a medical treatment. After surgery, you might be
prescribed a painkiller by your doctor. Being prescribed the painkiller is one impact of
the physician. Taking the painkiller and having an immediate reduction in your pain is
the output.
The reduction in the pain is the part that we can measure and observe: your pain
level went from an 8 to a 2. You are feeling much better. The outcome of that pain
reduction is that you are now able to participate in activities that you never could before.
Even though participating in those activities is distinct from surgery and painkillers,
it is effectively the result of them. This is one of the most important concepts in impact
measurement and outcome evaluation. By carefully considering your outputs and how
they influence outcomes, you can develop a deeper understanding of your clients and
the role your organization plays in their lives. This can help you tell more compelling
stories and write better development or fundraising material.
24
Outcomes represent those ripples very far away; we can’t be certain at first glance
that they were caused by the pebble we dropped in the water.
It can also help you in your strategic planning because you may choose to focus
your organization’s activities on services you know are providing the best return on
investment or are most in line with the outcomes that you want clients to have, rather
than just on those that you are currently funded for, or that people historically with your
organization. For more information on strategic planning, see Chapter 4.
The power of having a strong framework and data to back it up is that you can make
decisions being confident that you are considering the whole lifecycle – from meeting a
potential client through to providing services and finally to them graduating or finishing
working with your organization and being better for it.
Other key words in the title of this book include measurement and evaluation.
Measurement is the process of associating numbers to something so that it can be
compared. When we count the number of counseling sessions we’ve provided or the
pounds of food distributed, we are measuring those services. We are also measuring
things when we ask someone to rate their level of distress, the amount of anxiety, or how
long they’ve been food insecure. Any time we are going from something that is vague or
undefined to a more precise quantity, we have measured it. Measurement is therefore a
quantitative process.
Evaluation, on the other hand, is more of a qualitative process. When we are
evaluating something, we are assessing its quality or importance. When you evaluate
your outcomes, you’re first determining if they are really the outcomes that trace back to
the outputs that you believe they are. A logic model or theory of change, discussed later
in this book, can help you determine that.
Second, you are deciding whether those are the right outcomes. Sometimes a
nonprofit can achieve outcomes that are good, but not necessarily the ones that they are
looking for.
For example, if you are a counseling agency that provides support to people exiting
incarceration, you might find that program participants report feeling better positioned
for success in their community and not so alone. That’s great! However, if the program
was funded to ensure people leaving jail or prison have employment and you are not
asking them about employment (or worse, you are asking and they are doing no better
with employment than people who had not been through the program), then your
evaluation has shown that changes need to be made.
25
Those changes could include seeking out a different funder, reorienting the
program around the outcomes that people are experiencing, or changing the nature of
the program to better target the desired outcomes. This last change could involve the
addition of job coaches, volunteering opportunities, or supported employment that
would better prepare those clients for employment.
Now that we have a common language for what we want to achieve and how we
want to go about it, we can review the general steps we’ll go through to measure our
impacts and evaluate our outcomes before we look at the specific frameworks that can
be adopted for this.
Impact Measurement
We’ve talked about impact measurement earlier, which is the idea of associating
numbers with a benefit or service. If your nonprofit has been operating for a while, it’s
likely you have some kind of impact measurement going on, but you may not. The first
step is to start counting.
Whatever services you’re providing, begin keeping a log or record of them, so you
can know how many people you are serving and how many staff are doing this. If you
have access to Salesforce, Program Management Module (PMM) can be a great help in
this because you can create Programs and map them to Services, as shown in Figure 2-1.
Figure 2-1. A program record with associated services
26
For example, your Counseling program has services called “Counseling Session,
Telehealth” and “Counseling Session, In Person.” Each time you provide a counseling
session, you can record a Service Delivery which includes the details of the counselor,
the client, the date and time the service was provided, and other details.
When you are ready to count how many services you have provided, you can use a
report like Service Deliveries by Provider Last Month, shown in Figure 2-2, to see how
many you’ve provided.
Figure 2-2. Sample Salesforce report
Another way to begin measuring your impact is by distributing surveys or

assessment tools. We will cover these more in depth later in the chapter. For now,
understand that there are numerous validated assessment tools that have been shown to
accurately measure different things like anxiety, depression, self-sufficiency, and more.
By integrating these tools into your service provision, you can understand the effect
that your services have on a person over time.
Examples of these tools include the following:
• Anxiety: Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI)
• Depression: Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II) or Patient Health

Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9)
• Self Sufficiency: Arizona Self Sufficiency Matrix (ASSM) (see

Figure 2-3)
27
• Most in need of housing: Vulnerability Index - Service Prioritization

Decision Assistance Tool (VI-SPDAT)
• Suicide Risk: Ask Suicide-Screening Questions (ASQ)
Figure 2-3. The Arizona Self-Sufficiency Matrix
Some of these tools, like the PHQ-9 or the ASQ, are screening tools that are designed to
alert staff of those at higher risk of danger, so they can be provided with more support and
deeper assessment. Others like the BDI-II can be administered throughout service provision
to understand the improvement in their symptoms over time.
Survey tools are another option. Unlike assessments, these are not necessarily
validated tools to collect standardized information on someone’s struggles but are
instead requests for personal opinions and feelings about the care they’ve received.
One example that many people have experience with is receiving a customer service
survey after they’ve called a tech support line or reached out for some other kind of
assistance. The goal is to collect information about your experience with the specific
person or people you worked with and to understand more broadly if there are ways that
the experience could be different.
The first written recorded feedback that we know about is from 1750 BCE, when
Ea-nasir, a copper merchant, was alleged to have provided substandard product to a
customer named Nanni.
28
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“Be careful who you get and what you tell him,” Robin warned.
“Steele suspicions me now. He don’t make no breaks but I know he’s
thinkin’.”
“I wish it was ten years back.” Mayne’s anger rose again. “I’d ride
to the Block S an’ shoot that dirty thief like I would a mad dog. But
the country’s got so God damned civilized you can’t even kill a thief
unless he pulls a gun on you first. They’d bury me in Deer Lodge for
life. Adam Sutherland’d never let up. He’d spend a barrel of money
to convict a man that shot that pet snake of his. Don’t you let him
provoke you, Robin. If he thinks you know too much he’ll pick a row
with you an’ make you start somethin’. Then he’ll put your light out
an’ it’ll be a clear case of self-defense for him. Or he’ll make you quit
the country.”
Robin didn’t need Mayne to tell him these things. It was only
putting in plain English just what had been gathering in his own mind
—just what he felt to be the secret thought Steele nursed. So he
didn’t discuss that phase of it at all. He had said his say, had done
his duty. He rose.
“I’m goin’ to see Ivy,” he told Mayne. “Then I guess I’ll split the
breeze.”
An hour later he was loping steadily through the night, Ivy’s
farewell kiss on his lips, but with his mind strangely divided between
his sweetheart and May Sutherland.
May was beautiful and so was Ivy Mayne, each in her own
fashion. But May’s liquid, throaty voice lingered like an echo of faint
music in Robin’s ears. Robin was unread in the nuances of feeling
but no man can escape the subtle thing called charm. May was so
utterly free from archness, little coquetries. She was so honest and
direct. If she had challenged something dormant in him with all the
weapons of her sex, it was an unconscious challenge.
Spaces and freedom! Robin looked up at the stars and wondered
how she would have described that luminous, silver-spangled sky,
what feelings would have moved her and what she would have said
if she had been riding knee to knee with him across those rolling
plains, guided by the Big Dipper and an instinctive sense of location.
He knew quite well what Ivy would say, but what she would feel he
doubted if she would know herself, because Ivy was a curiously
dumb soul. Expression was strangled in her. She could only act, and
act often with the driving impulse terribly obscured. In all their
companionship Robin had been compelled to gauge Ivy’s deepest
thoughts and feelings by outward manifestation alone.
It seemed to Robin a wonderful thing to meet a girl who could talk
in clear simple words about what she thought and felt about such
puzzling sensations as came over a man when he looked at the
vastness and wonder and mystery of the world he lived in. That
quality of wonder, of space and time in which man danced his little
turn and danced no more, in which there seemed much disorder but
in which there seemed also a Law and a Pattern and a Purpose if a
man could only discover what it was, had troubled Robin for a long
time.
She had been glad to sit there on her horse talking to him, to ride
with him a few miles when she could just as well have ridden the
other way. Robin knew that May wanted to see him again. She
wanted him to come to that dance. There was no conceit in that
certainty. He felt it. And he was troubled just a little. He wasn’t sure it
would be wise for him. His future, the immediate future which should
logically extend into the remote, was linked close with Ivy Mayne’s,
and as he rode toward the Block S Robin did not dream of it being
otherwise, did not even harbor the secret wish that it should be
otherwise. He could admire anything that was lovely without any
sense of being fickle or faithless. But he did have a faint
apprehension that it would not be well for any of them if he should
admire May Sutherland too long or at too close range.
Still, Robin had his due share of masculine curiosity along with
other male virtues and he did wonder why May seemed to like him.
Since most of the mental experience of his life had been objective
rather than introspective or analytical, it didn’t occur to Robin that
neither wealth nor education nor a considerable knowledge of the
world beyond the cow ranges made any great difference to a
woman’s feelings as regards a man—not if that man was young,
straight as an arrow, as blithe as Pan on a holiday and rode like a
centaur for sheer joy of motion. Nor did Robin know that both men
and women liked him for qualities it would have taken a May
Sutherland fresh from a university to grasp and define. He only knew
that people did like him, trusted him—he had never felt the venom of
ill feeling until he came up against Mark Steele. Robin had gone
joyously up and down the length of three states without ever drawing
a gun or striking a blow in anger. He had seen both happen. He had
never been so involved. Trouble had always passed him by until
now.
Well, men did go wrong, and the up-and-coming kind like Mark
Steele went to hell with bells on when they did go wrong. He would
have to be careful. And if trouble came he would have to cope with it
as best he could.
That was the philosophic reflection Robin took to bed with him in
the Block S camp somewhere near midnight.
CHAPTER VIII
“ON WITH THE DANCE”
Without incident the Block S trailed its bulky herd across the
rolling country between Eagle Creek and Big Sandy. Late September
was on the land. The days were still and warm, the air full of a
tenuous haze. When the riders went on guard there was a sharp
coolness in the night wind, a harbinger of other nights to come when
they would grumble and wipe the hoar frost from the seats of their
saddles before mounting.
But as yet summer held on. The grass waved yellow where it grew
tall in the foothills, curled like a brown mat on the wide reach of the
plains. Out of these unfenced pastures the Montana beef herds went
to market daily in their tens of thousands from a score of shipping
points, rolling east to feed a multitude in urban centers and to fatten
the bank accounts of the cattle barons. To this stream of outgoing
stock the Block S added its quota on a bright autumn day, a week
after Robin rode in the twilight with May Sutherland.
They did not tarry in town. There was a rising market in Chicago
and it was a season of prime beef on the range. Twenty-four hours
after the last steer clicked his polished horns against the walls of a
slatted car the Block S pitched camp at sundown on Little Eagle, two
miles below the Sutherland ranch. The cowboys were going to a
dance. It was not to interfere with their work. They would dance
instead of sleeping, that was all. A few hours sleep more or less——
Robin didn’t wait to eat supper. When the last tent stake was
driven he mounted and bore away for home, a matter of ten miles.
Twelve miles from Mayne’s to the schoolhouse. He would ride that
twenty-two miles, dance all night, take Ivy three miles above the
schoolhouse to a neighbor’s where she could sleep till noon and ride
home at her leisure. He, himself, would get to the roundup in time to
swallow a cup of coffee, catch a fresh horse and ride again. And he
would enjoy every minute of it. So would Ivy Mayne. Music and a
smooth floor. They both loved dancing. A dance in the summer was
rare. There was always the important seasonal work of the range in
summer. Winter was the time for play. Robin would not have missed
that night’s fun for a month’s pay. And Ivy would never forgive him if
he let her miss it. She wouldn’t go with any other man, and it wasn’t
the thing in the cow country for nice girls to attend dances
unescorted. So Robin rode his best horse, Red Mike, and whistled
as he burned up the miles.
A little after nine o’clock he was helping Ivy off her horse. Other
saddle ponies, a score of them, were hitched to the rail fence that
kept wild cattle out of the schoolhouse yard. Buggies and spring
wagons loomed in the darkness. Light shone in the yellow squares
from the windows. No one could ever accuse range folk of taking
their pleasures sadly. Within rose a cheerful clatter of voices,
laughter, the tuneful blend of a fiddle and a piano, the slither of feet
on a floor made smooth by candlescrapings.
They hurried in.
While Ivy went into a sort of side room to change her riding boots
for a pair of slippers carried in her hand, Robin stood in a short
entryway, looking in. As a practiced cowman sweeps a bunch of
stock and at a single glance notes marks and brands, so he took in
the different faces, most of which he knew—the Davis girls, from the
ranch nearby where Ivy’s small brother and sister lived while they
attended school, the whole Santerre family from Sand Creek, a
sprinkling of small cowmen and ranchers from within a radius of
twenty miles, even a contingent from Big Sandy.
Over in one corner, bulking large, his big face rosy like a rising
sun sat Adam Sutherland, one leg crossed over the other,
conversing with another man. Down at the far end Robin marked two
couples just a little different, very subtly, indefinably so, from the
general run of the crowd gathered for this merry-making. Of the
quartette Robin knew one—Sutherland’s girl. The other three, two
young men and a girl of twenty, he had never seen before. They
were waltzing. As they came down the length of the floor May saw
Robin in the doorway. She smiled, nodded over her partner’s
shoulder. Just abreast of him the music ceased. May turned to him.
“Hello, Robin Tyler.”
“Howdy, Miss Sutherland.”
“Let me introduce you—Mr. Stevens, Mr. Tyler.”
Robin took a second look at young Stevens.
“You happen to be connected with the Long S down in the Larb
Hills country?” he inquired.
“Well, sort of,” young Stevens grinned. “My father’s outfit. You
know anybody with the Long S?”
“Oh, I expect I know some of your men,” Robin said. “But I wasn’t
thinkin’ of that. It just struck me that it’s kind of funny to come across
you. Bob Terry is a cousin of mine.”
“The dickens he is! Then we’re kin by marriage. You’re a Texan
too, then?”
Robin shook his head.
“My father was. I was born in the Black Hills; grew up there.”
“Wonder you never showed up round the Long S.” Stevens gazed
at him. “Or are you on your own here?”
“Uh-uh. Punchin’ cows. I was with Bob one season over on the
Big Dry.”
“You know my sister, then?”
“Oh sure. Liked her a heap, too.”
Young Stevens smiled at May and Robin impartially.
“You’ve heard about Bob Terry chasing all the way from the
Panhandle to kill young Joe Stevens, haven’t you?”
May laughed.
“Certainly. I was a little girl here when it happened. Is there any
one on the range in Montana who hasn’t heard that story about Bob
Terry and young Joe Stevens? And Mr. Tyler is Bob Terry’s cousin,
eh? Since Joe is your sister, what ‘in-law’ relation does that make
you two?”
“Give it up.”
“Too complicated,” Robin murmured. “I’d have to go to school
some more to figure that out.”
“As usual,” May changed the subject, “there aren’t enough girls to
go around. Did you bring one?”
“Yes. She’s getting organized,” Robin answered.
He looked around. Ivy stood just inside the door of the little side
room looking at him. He beckoned. She didn’t move, except to lift her
hands and finger her hair with deft little patting touches. The
handclapping brought an encore from the fiddler and the coatless
pianist who pawed the ivory with gay abandon even if his technique
left something to be desired. Stevens and May went on with their
dance. Robin joined Ivy where she stood. He was impatient to get
his feet on that smooth floor.
“Who was that towhead you were talkin’ to?” she asked—it
seemed to Robin a trifle resentfully. That amused him, perhaps even
flattered his vanity a trifle. He had known Ivy to be jealous before on
slight grounds, or none at all.
“Oh, that’s Adam Sutherland’s girl,” he said carelessly. “Come on.
Let’s dance.”
“I never knew you knew her,” Ivy said.
“I met her once. What’s the odds?”
They moved out on the floor. Mark Steele passed them with the
schoolma’am clasped in his manly arms. The school-teacher was
very good-looking, a vivacious person with a mass of dark auburn
hair and gray eyes and Mark was supposed to like her rather well.
He smiled and spoke to Ivy over his partner’s shoulder and Ivy
bestowed on Mark her sweetest smile and a pert reply.
Robin looked down at her. Her dark head didn’t come more than
halfway up his breast, so he couldn’t see her eyes. But he felt a
strange stiffness in her attitude, a resentment. Robin had a faculty of
gauging Ivy’s moods without a word from her. Almost at once the
anticipated pleasure of the evening began to wane. Ivy was sore
because he knew May Sutherland well enough to speak to her. She
would go out of her way to make him feel her displeasure. She would
want to hurt him, and she would be extremely nice to Mark Steele, or
some other man, just to spite him. More than likely she would
choose to use Steele as a foil. With what Robin knew of Mark’s
raiding Mayne’s stock and Mark’s attitude toward himself Robin
foresaw some unpleasant moments ahead. For a fleeting instant he
wished he hadn’t come. Then he felt ashamed of himself for such a
weakness, annoyed at anticipation of trouble and a wish to avoid it.
Time enough to worry when trouble lifted its ugly head.
“Floor’s good,” he remarked to Ivy. “I feel like I had wings on.”
“Yes,” she drawled with a rising inflection. “Look out you don’t fly
too high.”
“Wha’s a molla, hon?” he wheedled. “You’re not goin’ to have a
grouch about nothin’, are you?”
Ivy looked up at him. It happened that at that precise instant
Robin’s gaze was on May and her partner. Ivy’s dark eyes glowed.
“I will if you dance with that stuck-up thing,” she whispered
tensely. “Promise me you won’t.”
“Ivy,” he protested. “What the dickens has got into you all at
once?”
“She thinks she’s so darned smart,” Ivy muttered.
Robin had fully intended to dance with May Sutherland because
dancing with her would afford the only opportunity they would have
to talk and he had scarcely realized how eager he was to talk to May
Sutherland until Ivy began taking measures to forestall anything of
the kind. Robin was both irritated and puzzled. But he had a nimble
wit and a touch of diplomacy. He was willing to concede a point, to
make a concession.
“If I give her the go-by will you promise not to dance with Mark
Steele?”
“Why, how can I,” Ivy manifested surprise, “if he asks me?”
“You can tell him you got another partner,” Robin suggested, “or
say you’re tired. Any darned fool thing girls say when they don’t want
to dance with a man.”
“I can’t,” Ivy declared.
“You mean you won’t. What’s the difference in you dancin’ with
Shinin’ Mark when you know I’d rather you wouldn’t and me dancin’
with Miss Sutherland?”
Robin kept his tone gentle although he had an impulse to shake
soundly this morsel of perverse prettiness he held in his arms. He
even managed to get a jocular note into what he said.
“Lots of difference. I’ve often danced with Mark. You never kicked.
You never said you didn’t want me to dance with him.”
Robin was dumb. He couldn’t tell Ivy why. He couldn’t explain to
her that he had never liked Mark Steele, nor why that dislike had
suddenly become acute.
“Well,” he said unhappily, “what’s fair for one ought to be fair for
the other. If you’re dead set on being mean, go ahead.”
“I suppose you will dance with her?” the storm tone was growing
in Ivy’s voice.
“I didn’t say I was going to.”
“I know you. You never do anything I want.”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake let’s not spoil this with a row,” Robin
pleaded. “You know darned well I love you too much to bother my
head about any other girl. What’s wrong with May Sutherland more
than any other girl here? You never asked me not to dance with
Minnie Davis nor Bessie Santerre nor the school-teacher.”
“I don’t like her. I don’t like the way she looked at you,” Ivy
muttered sullenly.
“Neither do I like the way Mark Steele looks at you, old girl,” Robin
lowered his voice. “And he looks at you that way every time he’s
around you. I never kicked about it before. I never acted like I
wanted to put you in a glass case. I give you credit for havin’ sense
about men.”
“Aw, pouf!”
There was an angry finality in Ivy’s exclamation. They finished the
waltz in silence and it was not a particularly enjoyable Terpsichorean
effort for Robin Tyler. When they sat down he tried to talk about
different matters but Ivy confined herself to “yes” or “no” or an
occasional sarcastic “you don’t say” until Robin gave up in despair.
When the music began again Mark Steele slid across the floor and
Ivy rose to dance with him. There was a defiant sidelong flicker in
her eyes toward Robin as she got up.
His first impulse was to go outside and smoke a cigarette. Robin
was disturbed and uneasy and resentful. He knew that was no frame
of mind for dancing. The night, the stars, and a cigarette would drive
that mood away. Like a wounded animal Robin instinctively sought
solitude when he was hurt. All his minor victories over whatever
griefs and disappointment had come his way had been won by
thinking it out alone, on the plains, in lonely camps, in night watches
under a quiet sky.
But as Robin rose to go his glance, taking in the room, fell upon
May, sitting by her father. She was looking squarely at him.
Moreover, from the other side of the room a large, ungainly stock
hand from the head of Sand Creek, who had taken one drink too
many before he came to the dance, was staring earnestly at May,
evidently meditating descent, since she was the only woman not
already on the floor.
Robin’s mood changed in the flick of an eyelash. If Ivy wanted to
—well, let her! He strode over to May.
“I thought you were going to beat a retreat,” she murmured, when
they were on the floor. “You aren’t shy, are you?”
“You don’t know me very well,” Robin replied. “The only time you
ever saw me I didn’t act very shy, did I?”
“That was different,” she laughed. “A cow-puncher on a horse, on
his own ground—that is different. Some of these nice-looking boys
act as if they weren’t sure it was safe to approach me.”
“A fellow hates to get turned down,” Robin observed. “You’re a
big, strange toad in the puddle—oh, darn it, I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s a perfectly proper simile,” she hastened to assure him. “I
know what you mean. I am. But no one need be afraid of splashing
me. I like to dance. I like fun as well as any other girl in these hills.”
“I expect you do,” Robin somehow found it easy to talk to her. “But
you cut a lot of ice in this country, or your dad does, and it’s the
same thing. I expect after the kind of dances you’re used to and the
people you’ve lived among this don’t exactly look like no Fourth of
July celebration to you. A cow-puncher may be wild and woolly but
he’s no fool. He knows when he’s outclassed—as far as a girl is
concerned.”
“You are a rather wide-awake young man in some respects,” she
said thoughtfully. Then after a momentary silence she changed the
subject. “Who is the pretty little dark-haired girl you brought?”
“That’s Ivy Mayne.”
“Oh, so that’s Ivy. She doesn’t seem to know me. Well, I don’t
suppose she would.”
“You know Ivy?” Robin pricked up his ears. He had never heard
Ivy so much as mention May Sutherland.
“Why, we began school together right here in this room. At least I
had been going a couple of years when Ivy commenced. There were
only six pupils. I attended this school until I was twelve. Then I went
away to boarding school.”
“Were you two chummy at all?” Robin inquired.
May wrinkled her brows slightly.
“It seems to me we agreed to disagree on various occasions,” she
replied. “I was a good deal of a spitfire in those days. If I remember
correctly I used to flare up and then Ivy would sulk. What silly things
girls do when they’re kids,” she laughed reminiscently. “I shouldn’t
have known her. She’s awfully good looking, isn’t she? Perfect
features and beautiful eyes. How has she escaped capture here in
the Bear Paws where there are six men for every woman? Dad says
no schoolteacher has ever taught more than a single term. They
always get married. How has Ivy kept her freedom?”
“Hard to catch, I guess,” Robin made a noncommittal reply.
He did not say that he had tentatively captured Ivy. Here, to-night,
for the first time in the six months they had been formally engaged
he had a doubt of his capture being complete. And besides that
doubt he did not want to talk about Ivy Mayne to this fair-haired girl
who floated in his clasp light as a feather.
When that dance ended May left him to go straight to Ivy. Robin
saw her shake hands and sit down beside Dan Mayne’s daughter
and talk with a gracious smile. He didn’t stay to see the outcome of
that. He was a little uneasy. He knew Ivy. She could be gracious
when she chose, but she could also be very difficult with members of
her own sex. Robin let his desire for a smoke take him outside.
There, as he leaned against the building he overheard a snatch of
conversation just around the corner. He knew one of the voices—Tex
Matthews. The other was strange. Robin would have moved
instantly, but the first sentence held him.
“Who was the good-lookin’ kid dancin’ with Sutherland’s daughter.
I don’t mean young Stevens or the other one—the boy with the wavy
hair?”
“Robin Tyler. You know—I told you.”
“I see. An’ that was his girl Shinin’ danced with. Say, they make
well-matched couples paired that way, eh? Looked to me like the
blond princess likes the kid. An’ I don’t reckon the red-headed
school-teacher better be too sure of Mark, eh? Two pair, queens up.”
The man chuckled at his fancy.
“Queens all right,” Matthews drawled. “Well, I’ve seen two pair,
queens up, hard to beat before now.”
“Old Adam Sutherland could beat any two pair in the deck with an
ace in the hole, the way he’s fixed,” the other man laughed. “I don’t
suppose old Adam aims his girl to marry no common cow hand. Still,
you never can tell. I’d play that curly-headed kid for a king any time.”
“And the other one’s a jack—a measly jack,” Matthews said
harshly. “Remember that old jingle ‘The queen of hearts, she made
some tarts upon a summer day. The jack of hearts, he stole those
tarts and carried them away.’ Well——”
“Say,” the other man lowered his voice discreetly, “don’t talk like
that out loud, Tex. Cracks like that can make trouble. I guess we
better not hit that bottle again.”
“It wasn’t whisky made me say that,” Tex replied. “And I don’t ever
talk in my sleep. There won’t be no trouble until—well, until I know
better where we’re at. Then maybe I’ll start her myself.”
Robin withdrew softly, a little ashamed for listening, a little
disturbed by what he had heard—and puzzled also by the last
exchange of sentences. But it seemed to have no bearing on his
affairs. There was a two-step playing now and Robin sought a
partner.
By midnight he had been unable to claim more than a couple of
dances from Ivy and these she quite patently danced under protest,
refusing to smile at him, scarcely condescending to talk. This sullen
resentment she kept for him alone. With every other man she was
bright as new-minted gold, even gay. And she danced oftenest of all
with Mark Steele. Slowly there grew in Robin’s breast a curiously
mingled ache and anger. She wouldn’t play fair and he was impotent
to do anything about it.
For the supper dance Ivy flatly turned him down.
“Go dance it with May Sutherland,” she said tartly. “I got a
partner.”
“What you tryin’ to do to me, Ivy?” he asked soberly.
“Nothin’ at all. I’m just having a good time. Isn’t that what we come
to a dance for?”
Go dance it with May Sutherland! All right, Robin said to himself.
He would—if he could. If it was to be everybody for himself and the
devil take the hindmost, why not be in the van? He knew what
partner Ivy meant. He knew what construction every man and
woman there would put on Ivy’s eating supper with Shining Mark.
They would infer that Mark had cut him out, and there would be just
the faintest anticipation of trouble. Robin grimly promised to fool
them there. He would never jump Mark Steele over a woman’s fickle
whim. If Ivy was fool enough to throw herself at Shining Mark in a fit
of groundless jealousy—she could! No, if and when he clashed with
Mark Steele it would be over something more serious than a girl’s
favor.
So Robin stood by and when Mark did claim Ivy for the supper
dance he looked about for May. On second thought he expected to
find her dancing with young Stevens or young Harper. But Stevens
was paired with Miss Rose Barton and young Harper had
appropriated the auburn-haired school-teacher. Robin had in the
course of the evening been introduced to all three. He had danced
with Rose, a gay and lightsome damsel from Helena, who confided
to Robin that she had come there in some trepidation since she had
never before seen the cowboy on his native heath. Having been told
sundry tales by Adam Sutherland and young Stevens she half
expected the Block S riders to take the floor in woolly chaps and
jingling spurs, to make the welkin ring with shouts and perhaps
occasionally fire a shot through the roof in their unrestrained
exuberance.
“Too bad,” Robin had sympathized mockingly. “And you find us a
tame outfit wearin’ store clothes and collars and patent leather shoes
and actin’ like anybody at any ordinary dance. Maybe some of the
boys might put on a little wild west specially for your benefit if you
mentioned it.”
But Miss Barton hastened to assure him that she wanted no such
displays. The Block S men were good dancers. She liked cow-
punchers, she informed him archly, if several of those present were a
fair sample.
For the moment the rest of the Sutherland crowd had vanished.
He didn’t see Adam anywhere. Looking about he got a flash of May
in the lean-to helping two or three older women arrange sandwiches
on platters. The smell of coffee floated out of this room.
Robin went outside. He didn’t want to dance. He didn’t want to
eat. He was acutely uncomfortable. He boiled within and the
accumulated pressure of emotion was a long time yielding to the
solace of tobacco and the quiet night. Under the dusky pines, the
high hills that walled in the little valley, the soundless velvet sky,
Robin presently regained his poise. He knew Ivy through and
through. She was acting like a fool. She knew it and to-morrow or the
next day she would be sorrowful and contrite. Since he could never
hold a grudge against her it would be all right. No use getting all “het
up,” as old Mayne would say. Robin was no philosopher. But he did
have certain qualities of mind which made him patient, resourceful,
an unconscious practitioner of the saying that what cannot be cured
must be endured. He could wait and hold on, without losing heart.
The lilt of the fiddle and the thump of the piano presently apprised
him that supper was over. He thought he might as well go in. There
was a chilly comfort in the reflection that no one would have missed
him, or wondered where he was. So he lingered to smoke another
cigarette. Strangely his mental images were not of Ivy and Shining,
nor of May Sutherland, nor indeed of anything pertaining to the night
and the hour. His mind went back to the day he lamed Stormy by
Cold Spring and what he saw in the Birch Creek bottom. He thought
of cows dead of sudden death, of stolen calves, of many other trifling
incidents which somehow all seemed to be falling into a definite
sequence that must lead to some sort of climax in which he was
bound to be involved. He knew what desperate chances rustlers take
once they embark on the quick road to a bigger herd than comes by
natural growth. Theft led to killing, as the cornered highwayman kills.
That was the history of the cattle thief all the way from the Staked
Plains to the forty-ninth parallel. Robin wondered where this unlawful
venture of Mark Steele’s was going to lead all of them, more
particularly himself. He knew, moreover, as matters stood, that if Ivy
gave Mark Steele a definite impression that she could be his for the
taking—and Mark wanted her—he and Mark Steele couldn’t live in
the same country. It wasn’t big enough.
He threw away his cigarette and went back to the schoolhouse.
There was a quicker tempo in evidence. There had been three or
four bottles of whisky cached around outside. No one was drunk, but
high spirits were being more freely manifested. That was a custom of
the country, seldom lacking observance.
In the entry-way, a sort of lobby, Robin met Ivy. She had on her
riding boots and coat.
“You going now?” he said in surprise. “Wait till I get my hat.”
“Never mind,” she answered stiffly. “Mr. Steele is going to take me
up to Davis’s.”
For a breath Robin literally saw red, a red mist that momentarily
fogged his vision. By an effort he shook that off. That gust of
unreasoning fury had a double effect. It was like a physical pain—
and it frightened him. He understood in that moment why men
strangely run amuck. Yet in one corner of his brain a small, weak
voice seemed to be saying, “Don’t act like a damn fool. Don’t act like
a damn fool.”
He forced himself to say with a smile, “Oh, all right.”
Then Steele appeared, hat in hand, jaunty. He flashed a look that
Robin read as amused triumph—and Robin let that pass.
“Good-night,” he said to Ivy quite casually and went on in, straight
to where he saw May Sutherland talking to another girl. He wouldn’t
give either Ivy or Steele the satisfaction of looking back, though he
knew instinctively that both were watching him while Mark leaned
against the wall buckling on his silver spurs.
“Will you dance this?” Robin asked May.
She didn’t say she would. She rose with a faint smile and put her
hand on his arm. As they turned the first corner of the room Robin
saw the other two pass out, Ivy flinging a last glance over her
shoulder.
“If they think I’m going to care a curse——” he didn’t finish the
sentence in his mind. It wasn’t true. He did care. His pride as well as
his affection was involved in that episode. Any other man but Shining
Mark! Then he put it resolutely aside and talked to May.
“I’m going home after this number,” May told him presently. “Some
of these men have had one drink too many. I’m a little bit tired. I’ve
danced everything but the supper dance.”
“They do get lit up once in a while,” Robin admitted. “How did you
come? Buggy?”
“No, we all rode up. Dad and Bill Harper went home before
supper. Billy doesn’t care much about dancing, and I think he had a
little tiff with Rose.”
“I’m about ready to go myself,” Robin said. “I’ll ride down with you
if you like.”
“Didn’t you bring a girl?” May looked at him curiously. “Isn’t it
proper to take her home?”
“Sure. But she’s gone home already,” Robin answered evenly,
“with another wild cowboy.”
May said nothing to that for a minute. Then: “All right, if you are
going. Rose and Joe are having too good a time to leave yet.”
“I’ll find your horse and bring him to the door.”
“Thanks. It’s the chestnut I rode the other day. Will you know
him?”
“Sure. I’d know your saddle anyhow, by those funny little
tapaderos.”
The music stopped. Robin got his hat and went out. When he led
the two horses to the steps in front May was waiting. Rose Barton
and Ed Stevens were with her. Three or four other dancers had
come out for a breath of air. They stood chatting and laughing in the
light from the open doorway. Robin suspected that tongues would
wag freely about himself and Mark Steele and Ivy and May. But he
didn’t care—if May didn’t. It struck him that probably May would
never know that people were wagging their tongues, and that she
would only be amused if she did know. If a king—whether a king in
cattleland or a monarch by right divine—could do no wrong, a king’s
daughter wore no lesser mantle.
“Take care you don’t get lost,” Rose Barton teased. “You’ll see that
bandits don’t carry her off and hold her for ransom, won’t you, Mr.
Tyler?”
“Oh, sure,” Robin flung back, as he swung into his saddle. “If we
meet up with outlaws I’ll be the cowboy hero. Good-night,
everybody.”
They rode down that dark creek bottom. Little Eagle muttered in
its pebbly channel between lines of drooping willow. Smells of pine
came down from hills black against the paler sky. They rode silently,
side by side, each seeing the other’s face as a pale blur in the
darkness.
It wasn’t far to the Block S. They crossed a horse pasture, came
into another enclosure where loomed a diversity of dim buildings, a
great monument of a barn. Beyond these on a little knoll rose the
king’s castle, a one-story structure sprawling in three wings added
from time to time in the last fifteen years as the Sutherland fortunes
expanded. A light glowed in one window.
“Have a good time?” Robin asked when they dismounted.
“Oh, splendid,” she murmured. “Everybody seemed to enjoy it so.”
“They generally do.”
“And I was lucky besides,” May laughed. “I got through the whole
evening without having to dance with the Block S range foreman. I
wonder if that man affects anybody else the way he does me? When
I look at him I’d as soon have a snake touch me. It’s queer.”
“I guess there’s others don’t like him much,” Robin agreed. “And I
don’t suppose he cares. Will I put your horse in the barn, Miss
Sutherland?”
“Oh, no, don’t bother. Just lay the saddle by the steps and turn
him loose.”
Robin did so. May stood by until the chestnut went free.
“Well, I reckon you want to get in your little trundle bed.” Robin
lifted his hat. “So, I’ll ramble.”
“Good-night,” said May softly. “Take care of yourself, Robin Tyler.
Don’t let any bad horses fall on you so you won’t be able to go to
dances in the Bear Paws this winter.”
“No fear,” Robin shook the extended hand and turned to his
stirrup. “It won’t be bad horses that’ll keep me from dancin’. Good-
night.”
In twenty minutes Robin was in his blankets, in a camp still all but
deserted. Sleep came slowly. When he did fall asleep he dreamed a
lot of fantastic stuff in which Mark Steele, Ivy, himself, May
Sutherland, dead cows, lonely sage-grown bottoms, herds of T Bar
S’s and dancing couples mixed and whirled in a disorderly fantasy.
And somehow he seemed to move amid these scenes and persons
with his hands tied behind his back, the sport of all the others.
CHAPTER IX
A DIFFERENT SORT OF DANCE
The first circle the Block S made the next morning covered that
portion of the Range between the home ranch and Shadow Butte.
Afternoon saw the outfit camped on Little Birch a gunshot above
Robin’s homestead. That evening Steele assigned him to “cocktail”,
range slang for the short watch on herd between supper and dusk.
Then he was slated for middle guard. Even if he had desired to ride
down and see Ivy, Robin had no time. He was not sure he should go.
Ivy’s anger did not always evaporate like mist in the brightness of her
lover’s smile. In another day or two she might be able to laugh at
that tantrum. To-night the sun might still be setting on her wrath.
When they rode at dawn they passed within a hundred yards of
the house. That afternoon the chuck wagon rolled down Birch to a
point near Cold Spring. For four days the Block S worked in the heart
of Dan Mayne’s range, without Mayne once appearing at the round-
up. Usually when the outfit worked his territory the old man rode with
them. Robin guessed that Mayne kept away because he couldn’t
stand close contact with the man who was stealing his stock.
Anyway Robin had his instructions and he knew marketable beef
when he saw it. A third of the cattle in each round-up carried the Bar
M Bar. Robin cut over a hundred prime beeves into the day herd for
shipment.
Well below Cold Spring a sprinkling of T Bar S stuff began to
show. There was no shipping beef in that brand. But every cow had
her calf marked. Once or twice Robin noted a T Bar S calf without a
mother, a little bit lean and scraggly—orphans. There would be
others, he surmised, which he did not see. One man couldn’t see
everything over a territory fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long.
Not once in that region did he spot a Bar M Bar cow with an
unbranded calf at side. Nor did Robin again have opportunity to see
what Steele and Thatcher did when they took the outside circle by
themselves. That happened less often. Robin knew Steele would be
wary now anywhere within a few miles of the Mayne ranch. The man
might take long chances but he was not a fool.
As they worked east of Chase Hill the T Bar S cattle grew more
plentiful.
“For a man who lives in Helena, who don’t have no rider, who
don’t ever show up himself, this here Jim Bond sure gets his stock
well looked after,” Tex Matthews remarked to Robin one day. “He’ll
do well in the cow business, I reckon.”
“How?” Robin inquired.
Tex shrugged his shoulders.
“If I didn’t know you, kid, I might think maybe you were asleep.
There’s awful good care took in this country to see that all Jim
Bond’s calves get branded.”
There was a slight emphasis on the “all.”
“You don’t reckon he gets branded for him more’n the law allows?”
Robin hazarded.
The Texan looked hard at him for a second. Then he smiled.
“If it was anything to me; if I had stock in these parts, I’d be mighty
curious about this T Bar S,” he drawled. “I sure would. As it is, it ain’t
a Block S man’s business to be curious about anything but Block S
stuff.”
“Even if Block S calves should happen to grow a T Bar S on their
ribs?”
The Texan sat sidewise in his saddle and gazed at Robin with a
faint uplift at one corner of his thin lips.
“Well,” he remarked with seeming irrelevance, “I reckon the Bar M
Bar ‘rep’ don’t go to sleep at the switch. Say, did you ever know a
man get ambitious and figure out wise little schemes to make him
rich off his neighbors?”
“Seems like I’ve heard of such.”
“So’ve I. I have an idea somebody not a million miles away might
know more about this T Bar S than we do. No, sir. I shouldn’t be
surprised. Only,” he added thoughtfully, “you needn’t mention I said
so.”

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Impact Measurement and Outcomes

Evaluation Using Salesforce for

Impact Measurement and Outcomes Evaluation Using

LEARNING ANALYTICS : using talent data to improve

Learn Selenium Build data driven test frameworks for

Salesforce Platform Governance Method: A Guide to

Data Driven Decision Making using Analytics

Practical Business Analytics Using R and Python: Solve

Data-Driven Alexa Skills: Voice Access to Rich Data

Research on Student Civic Outcomes in Service Learning

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-9707-0 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-9708-7

Copyright © 2023 by Dustin MacDonald

About the Technical Reviewer������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xiii

Chapter 1: Introduction to Salesforce for Nonprofits����������������������������������������������� 1

Getting Access to Your Organization�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 20

Chapter 2: Introduction to Impact Measurement and Outcome Evaluation������������ 23

Chapter 3: Creating Logic Models and Theories of Change������������������������������������ 47

Chapter 4: Developing an Impact Management Strategy��������������������������������������� 67

Chapter 5: Creating the Framework in Salesforce�������������������������������������������������� 77

Chapter 6: Evaluating Impact������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 117

Chapter 7: The Change Management Process������������������������������������������������������ 145

Constantly and Strategically Communicate the Change������������������������������������������������������ 167

Chapter 8: Case Studies���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 169

Chapter 9: Advanced Techniques�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 183

Chapter 10: Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 205

About This Book

Chapter 2 also reviews common impact measurement and outcome frameworks

Figure 1. The Salesforce Object Manager

In Chapter 9, we incorporate advanced techniques like Einstein Prediction Builder,

Figure 1-1. Salesforce Classic

Salesforce considers themselves a PaaS – a platform as a service. You might hear

Figure 1-2. Program Management Module

Figure 1-3. AppExchange listing for the Outbound Funds product

Introduction to Nonprofit Cloud

Nonprofit Cloud Case Management

• Inbound Referrals: You can record inbound referrals to understand

• Outbound Referrals: When you send a client to a community

Figure 1-4. A screenshot showing part of an intake

Figure 1-5. Example of an Intake Checklist

Figure 1-6. Building a Case Plan for a housing organization

• Client Notes: Client Notes are another common case management

• Assessments: Assessments, shown in Figure 1-7, represent

Figure 1-7. Completing a housing assessment

• Reporting and Analytics: Finally, Salesforce comes with robust

Figure 1-8. An example report

Program Management Module

Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

Figure 1-9. A Soft Credit from an influencer

Figure 1-10. An engagement plan template

• Gold ($25,000 or more)

• Silver ($10,000 or more)

• Supporter (under $5,000)

Gift Entry Templates

Reporting and Analytics

Outbound Funds Module

Figure 1-11. An Accounting Subledger report

Other Salesforce Tools

Getting Started with Salesforce

About the Technical Reviewer�� xiii

Chapter 1: Introduction to Salesforce for Nonprofits�� 1

Getting Access to Your Organization�� 20

Chapter 2: Introduction to Impact Measurement and Outcome Evaluation�� 23

Chapter 3: Creating Logic Models and Theories of Change�� 47

Chapter 4: Developing an Impact Management Strategy�� 67

Chapter 5: Creating the Framework in Salesforce�� 77

Chapter 6: Evaluating Impact�� 117

Chapter 7: The Change Management Process�� 145

Constantly and Strategically Communicate the Change�� 167

Chapter 8: Case Studies�� 169

Chapter 9: Advanced Techniques�� 183

Chapter 10: Conclusion�� 205

About This Book

Introduction to Nonprofit Cloud

Nonprofit Cloud Case Management

Program Management Module

Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

Gift Entry Templates

Reporting and Analytics

Outbound Funds Module

Other Salesforce Tools

Getting Started with Salesforce

Understanding the Power of Us (P10) Program

Signing Your Contract

Getting Access to Your Organization

Installing Other Salesforce Tools