Technology, Tips, and NPower Seattle
We’re hosting a brown bag event where you can find out more about Salesforce.com.
This is a great “first look” event for anyone who:
Join us on December 12th – you can register for the Salesforce brown bag event here – and hurry – space is limited!
Oh. It’s free. That’s right – come and find out. Free!
I’ve recently begun reading The Economist - and while it is information rich and dense (not many pictures!) I’m finding that it is well work the several hours it takes to read each issue. (It comes every week!).
They recently published a 14 page section on Information Technology - and I think it is well worth the 30 minutes required to read. For anyone reading about this here, you’ll understand why: It’s all about The Cloud.
The Cloud is the going term for describing that combination of hosted tools (such as Hotmail and Salesforce) as well as hosted tools that offer additional services, such as those available at Amazon (storage and computing power) or also at Salesforce - using their computing power to build and integrate other hosted tools. Microsoft also recently announced a platform called Azure - so you can see that many major vendors are exploring how to make these "cloud" tools and services available.
The theory is that if your business needs can be supported without having to invest in physical infrastructure then you can save time and money.
I’ve certainly seen that here at NPower with our Salesforce practice. I think the jury is out, though, about if EVERYTHING can or will move out into the cloud.
So - head on over to The Economist and have a read.
(You can read Dreamforce Part One on my blog, too)
The other big news at Dreamforce this year resonates with my work in the nonprofit sector. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, has always been vocal about his philanthropic efforts, and coined a term for how to implement -it’s the 1-1-1 model - each 1 represents a percentage of what Salesforce is giving away:
So -it was pretty terrific to be in a room with 9,000 other folks, and to have the two keynotes (Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org, and Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink", "The Tipping Point" and a write for the New Yorker magazine) focus on the importance of corporate philanthropy and thinking in a new way.
Larry Brilliant was first up, and ended his presentation "today is a good day to save the world". Along the way, he talked about how Google.org has adopted a similar model as Salesforce.com (1-1-1) and highlighted some of the ways that Google is making a difference. Key to their success is leveraging what they know about technology - so it’s no surprise that some of their mapping tools have been put to use to spot early outbreaks of disease.
He was articulate, passionate, and- best of all - optimistic about the future. And, in an echo of some of the remarks made by Marc Benioff - he stated that ideas, flexibility, and entrepreneurship are as important as giving money.
He received a standing ovation when he was done speaking, which I found delightful - I’d have expected that at a nonprofit event - but at an event evangelizing tools to help you better connect with customers?
Malcolm Gladwell followed. In a quirk of coincidence, I had coffee with him about an hour before his presentation, and he cheerfully provided a quick overview. It’s connected to his newest book, which hits the shelves in two weeks.
In any case, he was equally eloquent, and outlined three areas where as a community we miss the mark on maximizing human potential, or as he calls it in his book, capitalization. (I’m paraphrasing here - I was listening and not taking notes, and the book isn’t out yet!)
In the first instance, sometimes it is simple economics that prevent people from reaching their potential, or what Gladwell describes as their human capitalization. He highlights a community he visited where no boys went to high school. Turns out they had to cross a gang line to get there - so they just didn’t go. It IS economics.
And in the second case, he highlighted how many of our rules (when you are eligible for playing on a soccer team for instance) and how that date factor appears to be the biggest contributor to success on soccer - not talent.
And in the final example, he told us about the hard work of Kenyan distance runners - and how maximizing effort (in this case a million kids running 10-12 miles a day) has produced most of the greatest distance runners of all time.
Gladwell also received a standing ovation, and well deserved. He closed by exhorting us to examine how economics, paying attention to rule making (and the assumptions we have about such items) and most of all to hard work -could make the world a better place by maximizing potential for more people.
All told, it was a pretty terrific 90 minutes.
Dreamforce was terrific - I haven’t been to a for profit conference before (I suppose that tells you something about my commitment to the nonprofit sector) so I was struck by both the size and the amount of goodies. Post meetings, there was great tasting snacks, there were a LOT of people there (about 9,000) and vendors were giving away nice things to attract customers, too.
Here’s part one - some notes about new features and partnerships:
Stay tuned for additional reports, including presentations by Larry Brilliant (google.org) and Malcolm Gladwell (author and NY Times writer).
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:
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:
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:
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: