My colleagues at NonProfitCrm have a terrific post explaining many of the factors associated with using a CRM. Here at NPower Seattle, that CRM is most often Salesforce.com - the Salesforce Foundation provides 10 free licenses to nonprofits - and that means we can focus our energy on making crucial customizations that work for your nonprofit rather than on building from scratch!

You should read the posting - it’s pretty short - 10 minutes or less. Some of the items they mention may not match your nonprofit. For instance - on our smaller projects, we don’t invest in a series of “how does this look?’ with our customers, because that can be expensive - I call that “moving the house around the couch”.  Some quick highlights - in no particular order!

• Data migration - getting you old data cleaned and in one spot for import. This can be the most expensive part of the process!
• Defining your business needs - how do YOU define a top donor? A certain amount of lifetime giving? A certain amount in the past 18 months? We need to know that answers to these questions before we start!

Here’s my two cents, though. Make sure you plan first. You can do a lot of homework on your own, and a small investment in planning before you implement will save you time and money and will result in a better outcome!

Great news today from the folks at Vertical Response - they offer an enewsletter delivery system that integrates with Salesforce.com -so if you are using Salesforce and Vertical Response, you can keep all of that key information in one place.

They’ve just announced a “Non-Profits Email for Free” program - all of the details you need are here - but here are some of the key items:

What you get

VerticalResponse for Non-Profits is a program that enables Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) to effectively communicate with their supporters via email. Once accepted into the program, NPOs will be able to leverage VerticalResponse’s email marketing to send up to 10,000 emails per month. All for free!

How it works

Once you’re enrolled in the program, you’ll get 10,000 free credits at the start of each month. It’s a ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ system, so credits will expire at the end of that month. Not to worry – we’ll give you 10,000 more the following month. Simple, right?

Getting started

If your organization is a 501(c)(3), then you’re eligible. Simply fax us the application form, we’ll check to make sure that you’re not fibbing about your 501(c)(3) status, and flip the switch. You’re ready to start sending professional looking emails.

I’ve recently watched a lengthy exchange about this topic on a local nonprofit list. It’s pretty gripping, actually - there are a lot of thoughtful people asking great questions about profit, motive, business practice, tax status, efficiency, salary structure, board governance and more.

It’s a great conversation to have -and it can be polarizing - but it doesn’t have to be.

My colleague Jon at ONE/NW recently pointed out a pretty thoughtful essay on the subject by Paul Graham. You should read it - it will take just about ten minutes.

Here’s my take-away (and the title of the post, by the way): Be good. That’s right - be good - in the way you run your agency and treat your customers, in the way you develop your practice, consider creating programs. Paul suggests that this is more than just an attitude - but that it actually works.

One of the things I love about my work here at NPower Seattle is that if the tools and expertise we have to offer to the nonprofit community isn’t a great match for one of our customers - we do our level best to be the first to know and point that out! My team won’t be successful if we don’t keep our customers best interests at the top of our list!

One of the advantages of using a hosted solution such as Salesforce.com is that your vendor manages many of the update/backup/keep secure items that you’d have to manage if your software were installed on your computer or server.

Salesforce has a solid track record with all of those things and have a lot of redundancy -after all -their business model depends on you having access to your data!

At the same time - they’ve made it easy for you to get a backup of your data -and you should - that data most likely drives your important work, and having an additional layer of backup makes sense.

Some quick notes, though, about what you actually get (and what you don’t):

• You can request your data weekly in a CSV (comma separated value) file - but it isn’t incremental. That is, the data you get today is a full snapshot of your data. And if you get another snapshot next week - it’s also the whole enchilada - everything from last week, PLUS the changes. So you can’t “easily restore” just a few contact records without some hard work.
• We can’t help you easily integrate an older CSV file with your live data. If you remember your initial data migration process - this would be similar.
• We MAY be able to integrate a subset of data more easily.

Here’s how to request a backup:

1. Click on Setup | Administration Setup | Data Management | Data Export
2. Select the “Include attachments” check box (if desired).
3. Select any data that you would like to include by checking the box next to the name of the object. Selecting the “Include all data” box will include data from all tables.
4. Click the “Data Export” button

A confirmation email will be sent when the export has completed, with a link to the export files. Thanks to Chris Atwood at Salesforce for the how to steps!

When to Request a Backup:

• Just before you make a substantial change to your data!
• Weekly or monthly, depending on your internal IT practices
• Just before you ask a vendor to make modifcations or updates to your Salesforce instance.

Well it turns out that at least 1 person over at Microsoft has a sense of humor. And that would be the Crabby Office Lady. Annik Stahlhas been writing up great tips & tricks for the Microsoft Office programs since 2002 (according to her website).

I’ve heard of her, come accross all sorts of references & tips from her, and now have finally gotten around to bookmarking her page. I recommend you do to. You can find her at:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/FX101679371033.aspx

I’m always on the lookout for time saving feature when using Office. Recently I came across a couple of tricks that apply to Microsoft Word that I though were pretty cool.

Copying Formatting

Many of us know and use the Format Painter button in Word or Excel. Select the text you have already formatted and then select the text you want to apply that same formatting to. But did you know that there is a keyboard shortcut for that? I like this because there are times when the text I want to format is several pages down. Or there are several blocks of text I want to apply that formatting too. The Format Painter only lets you do one at a time. You have to keep going back to your original text to select its’ formatting.

Well if you use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+C you can copy the formatting of the text you selected. Then that formatting can be applied to multiple blocks of text using CTRL+SHIFT+V.  Very handy.

Filler Text

One of the things I like in Adobe InDesign is the ability to put in filler text as a place holder when I haven’t had a chance to write something or if I’m waiting for someone else to write it for me. I can format it how I want it and then put the text in that I want and it’ll take that formatting. Turns out Word can do the same thing! If you type =rand() into a Word doc it’ll put in random text for you. Use =lorem() and it’ll put in some nonsense latin instead. Check out how it works and the options you have on Microsofts website, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/212251/en-us

One of our most popular trainings here at NPower is the eNewsletter for Nonprofits class. We explore the why’s, how’s and what for’s in using enewsletters effectively. I’ve incorporated several articles that Laura Quinn over at Idealware has created. And she offers a nice online session about picking the right enewsletter tool for you.

Well recently on her blog she included a post, with a very informative graph, about the importance of knowing your volume when sending out enews. Services that started out as less expensive flip flopped as it numbers went up.

I’ll definitely be including this in the next class.

I’ve been using the not so new Microsoft Office 2007 now for about 5 months. It’s pretty cool, has a great interface and some cool features. But the rub is not everyone here at NPower has switched over. So I’ve had to set mine up so it would automatically save all my files in the old office format. One of the big changes Microsoft made with the new version of Office, other than that rascal the Ribbon, was the file format. Word for example saves documents as .docx now, instead of just .doc.

So I save in the older format, which strips out some of the cool formatting that I was using. While it’s not a big deal it can be disappointing. Recently I was was reminded that users of the older Office programs can download and install the Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility pack. This allows those users to open files created and saved in the new Office file format. Yeah!

This can be very helpful if you received files from outside your organization from people who have the new version and don’t realize you don’t. It let’s you open, edit, and save in the new format in Word, PowerPoint & Excel.

You should make sure your system is up to date and all high priority updates have been installed before you load this.

You can find the compatibility pack on the Microsoft website at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en

Salesforce and Google are in the news again -this time because they’ve announced new integration features. Information is still trickling in - but it looks like Salesforce will now integrate with Gmail. Additionally, Google Docs are also going to be integrated in Salesforce. I haven’t had a chance to dig too deeply here - but am generally excited about the possibilities. This may mean that some nonprofits could use those two offerings for all or most of their practice.

There are a lot of news stories this morning - here are links to a few:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080414/tc_nm/salesforce_google_dc_1

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080414/tc_pcworld/144505

No, not really!

That’s because databases really aren’t that simple. Don’t get me wrong - they might only do two or three things - but to make those things happen well requires a lot of behind the scenes work.

For instance, you may want to have volunteers sign up for a volunteer opportunity. Sounds pretty easy, right? And it should be - at least from the experience of the volunteer! But here are some things that you’d want to make sure you did well:

• Each user would probably need to login and have a user name and password, and you probably don’t want to have to manage all of those passwords - the system should!
• You probably want to make it easy for a volunteer to sign up for more than one event - so you’ll have to maintain an “inventory” of volunteer opportunities to include when, how often, how many can volunteer and so on
• You’ll likely need to view and print reports - who is volunteering, which opportunities are open or closed, how many hours of service are being delivered and so on.
• Your volunteers may also be donors - so you might want to consider importing, integrating or otherwise having a 360 degree view of those key people - so you might start to lean towards a donor tool, too.

Those are just a few small items that need to be addressed BEFORE you start. Add in maintenance, documentation and training for your staff and your volunteers - and you can see that a tool that only does a few things really well isn’t all that simple!

So - what SHOULD you do?

I recommend investing in a great planning process. This might be the best investment you make - gather your key stakeholders, find out what you have on hand, work with a professional to describe what you need (we call this a requirements gathering process) and get some budgetary estimates. The value of great information is enormous - and at the end of that planning process you should know if you should proceed, how - and how much it might cost to get that volunteer database up and running!