Using the Birthdate Field in Salesforce to send relevant birthday messages

Sending a birthday email to your inquiries, applicants, or current students is a great way to let them know you care (and keep your institution top of mind). You may even decide to send a nice birthday postcard. Whichever medium you choose, there is not anything more embarrassing or a turn-off as sending a birthday message at the WRONG time. Students will instantly realize that you don’t know who they are.

Even if you are newer to the Salesforce world, if you are sending any sort of communications, you need to be able to accurately filter who should receive the message. We recommend storing birthdate information in the standard birthdate field on the Contact record. This standard Birthdate field does not function as a standard date field. Instead, it can smartly filter Contacts that have a birthday today, tomorrow, this week, or this month (even though the actual date is in the past).

If you are creating a Report and want to have all students with birthdays this month you can utilize a Relative Date filter of THIS MONTH. However, if you are attempting to do this and it is not working we can let you in on a little secret.

When creating your Report, if you use the Birthdate field in the default Date Filter that comes in your report, you will find that using a Relative Date does not yield the results you are looking for.

This Birthdate field does not function as other date fields in Salesforce, because of this you cannot use the default Date Filter for your report. Instead, you need to add the Birthdate as a separate Field Filter.

Now you can successfully use the Relative Date filter of your choice and the report filter will ignore the year to pull in all records that have a birthdate that matches your month/day options.