Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

Whoo hooo! Great news from the folks at Vertical Response today!

One of the things that we’ve found administratively complicated was that your mail credits for VerticalResponse were connected to your Salesforce.com login - so I might have a $100 credit, use $10 - but then my colleague Evan would ALSO have to purchase credits to send his mail.

Well - they’ve fixed that. I haven’t implemented yet - but I’m delighted - here’s the "how to" from the VR Blog:

Linking Accounts to Share Credits

True story:  I actually was a VerticalResponse customer before I was an employee.  And, I sometimes found myself wishing that I could share my email credits with other folks in my company.

Did you know that with VerticalResponse for AppExchange you can?

All users of your Salesforce org can share one common pool of credits.  That means that  any Salesforce user can purchase the credits, and all of your VerticalResponse accounts will be linked together to use them.

This is even better news for those of you who work in a company where several different people or departments are sending out VerticalResponse emails, as you can take advantage of bulk pricing, and save some of that precious budget - I’m sure you can find somewhere to use all of that money you’ll be saving!

Do you want to link accounts so that you, too, can share VerticalResponse credits?  Simply email vip@verticalresponse.com with the user names / email addresses for the acounts that you want linked together, and we’ll make the magic happen.

It’s easy to assume (at least for me) that most if not all of my nonprofit customers have been able to acquire a nice broadband connection. So I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been!) when one of my customers wanted to know what the bandwidth usage would be like if they moved their work to Salesforce. They have a shared infrastructure and some stringent requirements for ensuring that a certain amount of their pipeline is available to their constituents.

We considered an onsite usage test - but we would have had to reveal customer data - plus - we’d be making things up - what they really wanted to know was "how much bandwidth will OUR implementation of Salesforce use?"

So -we asked Salesforce -and they provided a LOT if information. Here’s the key points:

Bandwidth Required for Users
Salesforce.com is designed to use as little bandwidth as possible so that the site performs adequately over both high speed, dial-up, and over the air Internet connections.

• While average page size is on the order of 90KB, salesforce.com uses compression as defined in the HTTP 1.1 standard to compress the HTML content before it is transmitted as data across the Internet to a user’s computer. The compression often reduces the amount of transmitted data to as little as 10KB per page viewed due to the lack of image content. The site was designed with minimum bandwidth requirements in mind, hence are extensive use of color coding instead of images. Our average user also is known to view roughly 120 pages from our site per day.
• Our application is stateless, therefore, there are no communication requirements in the background once the page loads like traditional client server applications e.g. Outlook. Therefore once the page loads there are no additional bandwidth requirements till a user queries or writes information to salesforce.com.
• In short, it is difficult to specify customer bandwidth because of the nature of the Internet and individual corporate usage. Network latency, peering issues, bandwidth at upstream providers, users using their Internet connections for other use besides salesforce.com, etc. all affect the perceived performance of the connection and the amount of bandwidth required to keep performance adequate.
• A Salesforce.com deployment of 80 users with 75% of the users concurrently logged in with a think time between transactions of 2 minutes: Avg Bandwidth = 120 * 60 / ( 120 + 2 ) = 59 Kbits/sec

Obviously - your mileage may vary depending on the nature of your connection to the internet as well as what other internet related work you are doing. It’s likely more helpful to know your total bandwidth needs and to understand how they all fit together rather than to know what Salesforce uses by itself.

We’ve been customizing Salesforce.com for nonprofits for more than a year now - we’ve helped enough nonprofit’s customize, migrate data, integrate with payment tools, Vertical Response and more - and we have just enough information from all of those projects to begin to see what happens AFTER we’re done.

As most know - moving to a new tool of any sort provides benefits and challenges. When I upgraded to the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, I had to fight with the toolbar, and finding the “print” button was excruciating - I wasn’t used to where things were, wasn’t ready to explore new offerings - I just wanted to have all of the new features available so I could use then when I was ready. I’ve been using Word and the other Office tools since their inception - so I’ve been through this before, but I was reminded that even an updated tool, with a LOT of user and usability testing can pose adoption challenges.

Imagine what it’s like moving from MS Access, or FileMaker Pro, or eTapestry to Salesforce then? Add in a complicated data migration, some thinking about doing things in new ways -and all of a sudden Monday morning with that new tool can be grim. Here are some things that you can do to get ready to adopt and adapt!

• It can be easy to overlook some of the key players in your agency - the volunteer that enters data, the finance expert that reviews and reconciles donations, the program team that matches volunteers, the development officer that plans events. Using Salesforce successfully means that your WHOLE team uses the tool actively - not just for reporting. So - you’ll want to make sure their voices and need are heard during planning - so that when the tool rolls out - they know what they are getting!

• Every agency needs a product champion, a go get it, I love it, this is great, I can help you make it work for you. You don’t want to rely on your vendor for this - you need to OWN this expertise in house. This should be the person in the agency that is excited about Salesforce, participated in planning, has read the documentation, and isn’t afraid to try.

• We provide documentation for all of our projects, and you should expect that from a vendor. Make sure that it has both general information (how do I look up a contact) as well as information specific to your needs (how do I match a volunteer with a client). The information you need to “do it yourself” is probably in your documentation

• That’s right - no one knows better than you. Make a quick “job aid” - a one page tip sheet, a “I always forget this step” list, and more. You can help your team over the hurdles with some very targeted, agency specific help documents

• On launch day, have your vendor on hand. Sure, it will cost more -but if your team is frustrated on Monday, and doesn’t get help until Friday - you might not ever get them to use the tool

• This is an on demand, use it every day type of tool. It won’t add much value if you update contacts, create follow up notes and activities, and create opportunities only every once in awhile. Meet someone at a party that might support your mission? Add them to Salesforce, create a giving opportunity, and make a follow up note to call or write.

• Don’t forget the 70/30 rule - about 70% of your time and money will be in the planning, training, and retraining category, and about 30% in the actual implementation. That sounds like a LOT of money - but if your team can’t get a driving license - the care won’t help much.

It’s easy to always be sure that we know what we know, right? A lot of the time, what we know actually IS true - and sometimes - we walk around with something that we “know” that isn’t true anymore, or maybe wasn’t true, ever. I remember when one of my nieces told me that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. I humored her for a bit, cornered my sister to ask what was going on at my niece’s school - and then found out later that my niece was mostly right - better science means that we get to change our mind, we get to “know” more about the dinosaurs. And it looks like warm blooded might be the better answer to know.

There are lessons here in the nonprofit world, particularly when it comes to measuring your successes and failures:

• Make the time to periodically review what you think you know, and check your assumptions.
  • Who are your top donors?
  • How much time do you lose when your team can’t update you website?
  • What is the total cost of a new database?
  • Does your e-newsletter get more hits when you send on a Wednesday or a Monday morning?
• Take a step back and ask if you’re measuring the right thing.
  • Is the total number of records in your donor database tell you what you need to know?
  • Perhaps you should be looking at the inactive folks in that database to determine why they are inactive.
• Is your database really as terrible as you think?
  • Maybe it’s a training gap that you can fix quickly and easily.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for advice.
  • We all can’t know everything, and we all make mistakes.
  • Decision making by committee isn’t always a great idea - but I’ve rarely been disappointed with information gathering by committee.
  • Cultivate people with a different point of view, set of experiences, belief set. You’ll learn something, and so will they.

I love to be right, don’t get me wrong. But you know what? I can change my mind to be right, and often times, that’s even better: I’ll have learned something, acquired new and better information, and will be better equipped to find “right” the next time -because I checked some assumptions, I measured the right stuff, and I asked for help!

We’ve been implementing Plone and Salesforce for the last pair of years - and I was thinking about my early days at NPower. When I began working here 5 years ago - there weren’t a lot of software options from the open source community that we thought were a good fit. Sometimes, it was because the software wasn’t ready. Sometime it was because the software was great - but there wasn’t any documentation. And sometimes it was because there didn’t appear to be a strong enough community to support that software.

That has changed a lot - and lately, I’ve been thinking about the different way some software is described - here’s a quick primer:

• Open Source: This is software that you can acquire and install and can modify the underlying code to make it do what you want. For example, Plone is open source, and Photoshop is not.
• Open Data Model: This has more to do with the vendor than the software - but when I think of “open” software, I think of if I can access and manipulate that software and if I can integrate it with other tools. For instance, both Plone and Salesforce have an open data model - they can exchange information freely (provided someone knows how to connect them, and we do!) without breaking a licensing agreement or paying an additional fee. Blackbaud products aren’t open - if you connect without purchasing an additional license, you void your contract.
• Open Pricing: This is admittedly fuzzy. But I think that if a vendor is selling a product, they ought to commit to a pricing structure, even if they best they can do is offer a range. Some tools are free or freely available. For instance, Plone is free to use (but probably not free to configure). Salesforce will grant you 10 licenses if you are a qualifying nonprofit - but you should probably find an expert to help you configure and import your data. And many Microsoft products are available for an administrative fee.

I’m pretty excited about the combination of all three of these “open” descriptions - some items are free or freely available, some are easy to integrate, and some are transparent about their pricing model. All told - this translates to good news for the nonprofit sector!

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.

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!

Just a quick note - I had a terrific meeting with one of our customers on Tuesday - we helped them move most of their nonprofit data into Salesforce, and they’ve really done a great job of using the tool. We’ve added a few features here and there, and a bit of support, but they have really been committed to using the tool - and it shows.

They are getting a new website, and we met to talk about modifications to Salesforce so that they could provide more information via the web. And while we were talking about one possible feature, the customer asked how much it would cost.

When we said we thought we could build that feature for about $500, she said to skip it - it wouldn’t add enough value.

I was delighted - that is exactly the type of conversation I want to have with my customers - are we adding $500 (or more!) worth of value by implementing something? If not -we shouldn’t implement!

So - next time you need an addition, or a feature, or a modification - be sure to ask - and make sure you have an internal sense of how that feature or addition will return value to your agency!

I’m a distance runner, and during my running career I’ve crunched a lot of numbers to determine how I can run faster and longer. And at NPower Seattle, I manage our web and database team, and help customers figure out what sorts of technology solutions they can implement that will help them better meet their mission.

Both of those areas of my life collide around looking at data - how much, when, how fast, how often, how much work, what’s the return on investment, how can I do better - those apply to both running and to donor management.

My running watch quit recently, and I had to send it back - so for the last two weeks I’ve been running without access to the real time data to which I’ve grown accustomed. So lately, instead of glancing at my watch, measuring my heart rate, checking how fast I ran that last mile - I’ve been thinking of what data is really important.

Before I tell you about what running data is important to me - you should take a few minutes to think about a few key questions regarding your donor management:

• What is the core set of data that you need easy access every day to measure your success?
• Have you made sure that the data you want to collect is the right data?
• Are you distracted from your everyday work by the data that lives on the fringes? The extra phone number field that you don’t really use, the summer mailing address widget, the “this donor is connected to that donor is connected to that funder is connected to my best friend Lou” feature? (Don’t get me wrong - that might be the data that you need to have a successful donor management practice - but you should make sure those features all add commensurate value!)

So - here’s what I re-discovered about the tools I need to help me run better:

• I need to know the total duration of my run
• I need to know how fast I completed each mile
• I need to know how hard I worked

And that’s it. I don’t need (but can be distracted by) multiple countdown timers, the altitude and temperature, the fraction of a second measurement in between heart beats, my pace in meters, miles per hour and so on. But if I pay the most attention to the duration, the speed of each mile, and the effort required - I’ll run better.

And those other things add some value around the edges, to be sure. And they’re fun. And frankly - on some days it’s easier to obsess about why my GPS unit didn’t measure the distance properly. But those things don’t help me achieve my running goals - measuring the time, the speed and my effort level do.

So - what’s happening in your donor management practice these days? Are you distracted by what your tools aren’t doing and is that preventing you from reaching out to your donors? Are you measuring the right things? And do you know how to use those measurements to further your mission?

If not, take a look at your tools, sure. But make sure you know what you want from those tools first!

Here’s a longer comparison - both from personal experience!

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