Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

I just finished running the Seattle Half Marathon. It’s my third half marathon, and my 10th overall –and for grins, I thought I’d review my running log to see if different training patterns impact my speed.

Turns out –they do – by a LOT!

In both 1996, and 1998 I ran my speediest times.

And in 2006 and 2007 – a pair of my slowest.

I took a look at my total mileage for each of those years – and – no real surprise – here’s what I found:

• In 1996, I ran 1,487 miles.
• In 1998, I ran 1,215 miles
• In 2006, I ran 708 miles
• And in 2007, I ran 558 miles

Sure – I’m older – but I also trained at about half as much – and half of the effort resulted in a slower time.

So – what does this have to do with websites and databases? I think it means that you need to apply your effort to your outcomes. Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

• How much time have you devoted to fresh content on your website?
• How many new contacts have you entered in your database?
• Have you asked those new contacts to support your work?
• Have you reviewed your website traffic to see if you are attracting new visitors?

And – after each question – ask yourself how your results have turned out. I bet (just like my running) – if you didn’t add contacts, fresh content and so on – you didn’t do as well as you hoped.

In 2009, with a tightening economy – I think the smartest thing each of us can do is to tie concrete efforts to the results we want to achieve:

• If you are a fundraising professional – write more grants and ask more individuals for gifts. (Actually – ask for those individual gifts FIRST – studies show that corporate and grant funding is harder to get in a recession)
• If you manage communications or messaging or outreach at your agency – ensure that your website has fresh content, that you link to relevant sites (and ask them to do the same) and regularly review your site traffic to figure out how to do better. In short – write and publish great content more often!

Well - there’s a LOT - but the big news so far is about Sites, Facebook, and Amazon.

Salesforce has made partnerships and built tools for Facebook and Amazon - and also rolled out their Sites tool - a way to let you build sites using Visual Force, but connected to and powered by your data.

My friend Steve at ONE Northwest has a great blog posting up already, which you should read!

The possibility is enormous: Using your Salesforce data to power a website, using social networking to engage your customers, and using Amazon services to power payments, store data or to deliver web services.

The proof will be in the pricing model. Overall though - very exciting!

Well - there’s a LOT - but the big news so far is about Sites, Facebook, and Amazon.

Salesforce has made partnerships and built tools for Facebook and Amazon - and also rolled out their Sites tool - a way to let you build sites using Visual Force, but connected to and powered by your data.

My friend Steve at ONE Northwest has a great blog posting up already, which you should read!

The possibility is enormous: Using your Salesforce data to power a website, using social networking to engage your customers, and using Amazon services to power payments, store data or to deliver web services.

The proof will be in the pricing model. Overall though - very exciting!

Yes and no!

Here’s the deal: Salesforce does a lot of things really well. And while we’ve had terrific luck customizing and extending and so on - there are a few areas where we think that other tools are better. For instance - creating a financial accounting system in Salesforce, or a robust word processing tool would be duplicative. Those tools exist already, have decent price points, features and more.

We feel the same way about auctions. But you SHOULD invest in some integration - and here’s how:

Use Salesforce to INVITE people to your auction. You can create a campaign (or a series of them), you can segment that list, you can send email, or Vertical Response mail or snail mail. Salesforce (especially with Vertical Response) is a great way to evangelize your event and keep track of who has said that they will attend. Or give. Or volunteer.

Export that attendee list to your auction software. (I know - this might be easier said than done!). And then use your auction software to it’s full extent: Create seating charts, provide bid numbers, keep track of the difference between a paid ticket to the event, a fair market value purchase, and a donation, and check your guests out and process their payments. ALL of those activities (and more) are what auction tools can do (or should do!) well!

Import your results into Salesforce. Again - this may be easier said than done. Importing into Salesforce is pretty easy. But you might want something a tad more automated. For instance, you might want to import the total amount of giving, break it down by type (dinner, fair market value purchase, outright gift, other) and you might want Salesforce to de-duplicate on the way in. And if you have a lot of data - you might want to have Salesforce automatically create those giving opportunities, provide them with an appropriate status (closed - send thank you!) and so on.

You can see why we like this model: You use Salesforce to do what it is good at, and ditto for your auction tools. Someone might create an extensive widget for managing an auction directly in Salesforce someday. And if they do - you can be sure I’ll tell you about it. In the meantime - a simple (or, if your needs are more complex) integration ought to suit.

NPower Seattle is going to host the very first Nonprofit Salesforce Users Group on November 19th at 8:00 AM!

We have a nice conference room, I’ll pick up some coffee and some snacks to get us started, and we can work together to get our local group up and running!

I want to be clear that we’re NOT starting the group to drum up business! Our mission is to help nonprofits use technology more effectively - and the popularity and power of Salesforce.com is doing that in our community already. So - we want to convene, provide space, provide some leadership to grow our group - but we’ll be depending on you to help set the agenda. We hope to talk about:

• report from DreamForce!
• tips and tricks
• best practices
• problem solving
• demonstrations and show and tell

And much more.

Please join us  on  November 19th, at 8:00 AM here at NPower Seattle. Street parking is generally available, and we’re well served by  public transportation, too.  We’ll start and finish in 60 minutes, although I’ll hold the room until 9:30 in case folks want to stick around and talk more.

Yes it can - but that DOES mean that you’ll either get a little less, or will have to provide additional "sweat equity" on your own!

We’ve configured a basic donor management system that has all of the terrific things you’d expect from a CRM - great contact management, great activity tracking, great reminders. And we’ve modified or added in ways to manage households, to manage a giving pipeline (donation, major gift, grant, in kind gift) and have configured some reports, too - such as the ever popular "Last Year but not This Year" report.

So - if you’re starting fresh - you can have our template quickly and affordably - think a base install fee (depends on your budget size) and a few hours of training, coaching and documentation -and you’re off and running.

However - if you need us to:

• Migrate existing data - then your costs go up.
• Ditto for if we need to customize things - such as fields for income levels, or for items unique to your program.
• And if you need web forms for your website, help with using and configuring Vertical Response - those all take time and money, too. And most likely - will require some pre-planning.

So - you CAN have Salesforce for less -but only if a basic package meets your needs. You might be surprised to find that it DOES -and you might also be surprised to find that relentless attention to your core donor tracking needs will probably return the highest results!

I was getting ready to head out the door today for a run with my brother Frank. We’d chatted about if we needed new shoes or not, so I fired up my trusty running log, and checked a couple of things.

I started with total mileage - I wanted to see how many miles I’ve run this year compared to last year. At first glance - it looked about right - a lot more than last year. Thing is - Frank and I had also trained for a marathon, so warning bells didn’t go off in my head.

But when I checked my shoe mileage - WOW! The report said I’d almost 600 miles on my shoes, and I KNEW that wasn’t right. It didn’t take long to find the data entry that SHOULD have said 5.5 miles, but which was incorrectly entered as 555 miles!

When we help customers into a new database - we’ll set up some reports and so on. But we don’t know your data, you do. Over time, the reports we gave you to start may become less valuable for a lot of reasons:

• You have inaccurate or incomplete data
• Your needs have changed but the report hasn’t

So - you need to know before you click. You SHOULD have an expectation of what you are going to see BEFORE you press the go button - and - if you are going to make business decisions based on the data in that report - you’ll want to double check.

At NPower, we were reviewing our Salesforce setup, and noticed a couple of reports that didn’t seem right. Since I’m not deeply engaged in our fundraising - I probably wouldn’t have noticed. But our fundraising team? They spotted a pair of mis-categorizations right away - they knew that there must be data that was included in a report that didn’t belong.

It was easy to fix the report, but harder to fix the process. We’re tracking data differently than when we first began using Salesforce - and we’re due to update some of the ways we’ve configured our reports. The actual adjustments will be easy. Working out the business rules won’t be too hard - but will take some time. We’ll have to get the right people in the room, ask the right questions, think about how things are and how we want them to be, and then decide how much of our time and money to invest in making those changes.

So - a pair of important things to remember:

1. Know before you click! If you’re looking for event attendance reports - you should have a good idea of what you’ll see when you generate that report. And if you don’t - make sure that someone on your team does - or that you truth check the report carefully!
2. Plan to re-visit your processes and reports every year or two. For instance - your definition of a top donor might change over time, and you’ll want to make sure that your reports reflect those changes.

I wanted to outline one possible strategy for deciding which tool to use to send mail - many of our noprofits colleagues have THREE ways they can reach out to their stakeholders:

1. Sending from Outlook (or whatever else they use for a regular mail tool)
2. Sending from Vertical Response
3. Sending directly from Salesforce

All three of those tools have different layers/levels of integration - so it can be hard to figure out what tool to use. Here’s my recommendation:

• If the mail you are going to send is to a GROUP of people (say 20 or more) - I think you should use Vertical Response. They’ll handle spam laws and so on - and you can track your open rates and so on back in Salesforce.
• If the mail you are going to send is internal (say, to your co-workers) - I think you should send from your normal mail client - you probably don’t need a record of that correspondence in your CRM. Imagine the clutter if every note I sent to my team was recorded in Salesforce!
• If the mail you are going to send has information that your agency needs to know (this is the "hit by the bus" rule) and is going to a single person - then you should send it directly from Salesforce. That captures that knowledge for your agency, rather than silo it in your sent mail (or worse) in your brain. For instance - inviting a key stakeholder to a meeting, someone to join the board, or other information that your team may need to use.
• And if the mail you are going to send is incidental - say - inviting a board member to lunch, scheduling a coffee meeting, or something of that nature - you should send with your regular email tool.

It’s pretty likely that under any of these circumstances - your work won’t be finished! After that meeting, or after getting a response to that email - you might need to GO BACK to Salesforce to create an activity to record what happened! That casual coffee meeting might have generated a grant opportunity, your team might have mentioned a possible donor that you should contact, and your bulk email via Vertical Response probably generated follow up, too.

It’s easier by far to solve the "what email?" question with brain power, rather than with code. Despite the huge gains in technology - your brain can make that choice much more quickly and affordably than any code we could create - so - put your brain to work and create some protocol that suits YOUR agency!

One of the things I love about my job is working with smart people. Evan Callahan is one of those guys - he’s been leading our Salesforce for nonprofits program since its inception.

We were talking about Board Membership the other day - and he and I had very different thoughts about how to implement. I’m not convinced that we landed on a perfect solution - because - as in most database work - the right solution depends on the customer!

Here’s the deal: I love the opportunity pipeline. Tracking grants? Gifts you’re hoping to get? Volunteers? Event participation? In kind gifts? Sales? Yep. You can leverage the Salesforce.com opportunity to manage all of those things.

So you can imagine why I thought an opportunity would be great for board membership, too - you could:

1. Solicit members
2. Invite them through a screening/acceptance/courting process
3. Status the liklikhood that they would want to join
4. And that you would want them to join!
5. And then track their term start and end dates, maybe a reminder for when their term was going to be up, and perhaps even a board role (President, VP, Treasurer, and so on).

Evan had a different idea. He voted for a drop-down list on the contact record that would simply have these fields:

1. Blank
2. Current
3. Former

I have to admit - Evan’s solution is brilliant in its simplicity. Want a list of current board members? Just run a report on that field, looking for the ones where the field data = current. Want a list of anyone who as EVER been a board member? Same report - just look for those where that field isn’t blank.

Easy to use, easy to status, no futzing with start and stop dates and so on. When I think of how our customers are using Salesforce - I think - Evan’s answer wins for ease of use and simplicity.

My idea is still good - it’s just more (perhaps overly?) complicated. But it gets you more - you’d be able to report on the board membership from two years ago, for instance, and we able to report on terms, and when those folks were up for re-election and so on.

But I don’t know that many would use it that way. It goes back to the"what do you really need?" question. If you have a large board, complicated membership terms, a requirement to be able to re-generate board lists - then - my complicated approach might be right for you.

But if you need simple board tracking, can create a reminder (hint: create an activity) for when a term is up - then Evan’s solution is right for you.

So - here’s the takeaway: Don’t let me (or Evan) tell you how to do your work. Start by telling us what you need in your reporting structure - and we’ll tell you about the trade-off between simple, complex, and how that might impact your price point and your usability!

When I first started working at NPower Seattle - it was a bit more true than not that an agency budget was a great indicator for capacity to undertake a technology project.

For instance - the smaller the budget - the more likely that an agency wouldn’t be able to fund a planning, implementation, training and maintenance phase. AND - would also require additional help creating business rules, understanding how technology could help, overcoming knowledge gaps and more.

I don’t think that holds true any longer - or at least it holds LESS true. Recently, one of my customers (small budget, small staff) went through a small planning scope and asked some great questions. You should ask YOUR vendor these questions, too:

1. You’re right, the cost is a bit of a stretch for us; we were hoping to get it into the $ range. Can you give me any ideas of what could be cut to save money, and if we did cut something, what that would mean to the integrity of the project?
2. Since data migration is the most expensive thing, is there something that we could do here to take some of that on, like data entry for example, or is it just easier/more efficient to do it on your end?
3. Are you considering the grand total as a maximum that might go down from there, or as a median, that could go up or down? (Or, I suppose, a minimum that might go up?)

And they finished with a great comment, too:

We, of course have to be conscious of cost, but also want this project to be the best it can be, so please feel free to be frank with me about any drawbacks to cutting cost.

Here’s my takeaway:

• Help your customer ask great questions.
• Answer them honestly.
• Be transparent about your pricing
• Ensure that you’re delivering a product that is in THEIR best interests!