A colleague of mine (Lisa Glass) recently began using encrypted fields in Salesforce. It turns out they are fairly simple to use. Encrypted fields need to be requested through the “Feature Activations Team” at Salesforce. You can just open a Support Ticket and put in a request for this. As per the documentation, this feature is available to all Enterprise and Unlimited edition accounts, which means all NPO’s should be able to access this.

How it works:

• It creates a new field type in your instance called “Text (Encrypted)”. This is fairly similar to a regular text field, except that the data is encrypted.
• In order to see data within an encrypted field, the user’s profile must have the “View Encrypted Data” option checked off
• Any user that does not have this permission in their profile will see a value such as “***-**-****” when they view the encrypted field. (Note: You can specify whether you want the Mask to be either a “X” or a “*”. You can also leave a portion of a field unencrypted, such as the last 4 digits of an SSN.

Limitations:

• Max length of 175 characters. (You can’t really use this to encrypt case notes.)
• Field value can not be Unique, External ID, or have a Default Value
• Can not search, filter, roll-up, query, or use the field value in a Formula
• Can not use in workflows and assignments

Overall, this is a very powerful feature and you should consider leveraging it in your instance if your are storing any sensitive data such as Social Security Number, Credit Card Number, Medical Info, etc.

There is a lot more information on best practices and usage examples within Salesforce Help.

At NPower, we have worked on a fair number of CRM projects and we are trying to figure out the question of CRM timing. When is the best time for an organization to implement a CRM solution? I have taken the OLC (Organizational Life Cycle) Model and mapped that against our experiences with CRM success.

Stage 1: Startup Stage – The organization is still figuring out it’s mission and funding streams. Operating procedures are in flux and can quickly change based on grants, board members or funders. Technology is not really a core requirement.
Stage 1 CRM Outlook: Investing in a CRM Solution typically doesn’t yield great results because many of the underlying assumptions will change over the next few years. A very simple fundraising CRM solution can be effective in this environment, however, using CRM for operational purposes may not yield a good ROI.

Stage 2: Growth – At this stage, the organization has proven that their mission is a sound business idea. They have proven that they have the operational know-how to execute on their mission. They have secured a stable base of funders and a good core of board members. Their attention has turned from survival to growth.
Stage 2 CRM Outlook: This is likely the stage at which a CRM solution can have the greatest impact on an organization. Implementing a CRM can provide substantial gains on the fundraising side, while also cataloging a history of all fundraising interactions. On the operations side the CRM can begin to model organizatonal procedures and collect valuable performance data. If the CRM solution is implemented in an intelligent manner, it can scale and flex as the organization grows and evolves.

Stage 3: Maturity – As an organization reaches a certain scale, it’s growth will slow. At this stage, the organization is very good at executing on it’s mission. It has an extensive base of funders and they have very specific expectations of this organization.
Stage 3 CRM Outlook: This is a very tricky stage for CRM deployments and a lot depends on the organizational culture and leadership. If the organization culture is receptive to change, then a CRM solution can serve as a great engine for operational improvements. If the org culture is not receptive to change, then a CRM solution will likely replace some existing systems and only provide marginal efficiency gains.

Stage 4: Decline – The organization begins to lose stable funders and board members. New startups take away fundraising streams and the organization is perceived to be less effective and not as innovative in a modern environment. The organization begins to cut back on programs, staff, and all non-essentials as it seeks to find a way to reach a stability point.
Stage 4 CRM Outlook: Surprisingly, this could be a great time for an organization to move towards a CRM solution. Organizations in this stage are often heading back towards stage 1. This leaves them open to process innovations and funding changes. This willingness to explore new paths can make a nimble CRM solution an effective solution to manage the massive changes that the organization must face. The difference between this type of organization and a stage 1 organization is that they also need to carry forward the massive amount of data and relationships that they have amassed over their years.

The above is not meant to be hard and fast rules about good and bad times to get into CRM. They are just some observations from our years of CRM consulting experience. There will undoubtedly be many organizations that are exceptions to the above rules for a variety of reasons.

It may take years to fully understand the impact of the CRM solution, however, the clear winners so far seem to be those organizations that are in a growth stage.

I’ve been busy writing Apex, so no time to post to the blog. One thing I’m learning is that once you have some useful Apex code, like the lead conversion and payment processing tools we’ve created, it is easy to deploy it to multiple organizations — and that is just what we’re doing. However, in every case there are small tweaks to make, and more test methods to write, and more debugging, so it important not to underestimate the time needed to reuse your solutions.

We currently have two open positions in in our growing CRM consulting practice here at NPower Seattle (and many clients ready for help!). If you have Salesforce expertise or other relevant experience and are looking for a opportunity to work with nonprofits on a great team of developers and implementors, please take a look at these.

NPower Seattle serves over 450 nonprofit clients each year by providing technology consulting, education and training. Our clients include arts and environmental groups, human services agencies, food banks and youth-serving organizations.

Find full job descriptions at http://www.npowerseattle.org/get-involved/jobs. Submit resumes and cover letters to Resumes (at) NPowerSeattle.org.

I was having a great discussion about Salesforce yesterday with Sonja Okun, the Executive Director of Exalt Youth. Exalt Youth, in her words, “acts as a prevention for justice system involvement to youth at risk of getting caught in it, and as a catalyst for integration into our economic mainstream for those who have already entered the system.” Exalt Youth has been using Salesforce for the past few months as part of their daily program operations. Unlike other nonprofit organizations, she isn’t currently using the donor management functionality at all, although she plans to use that in the future.

Sonja and I were specifically talking about all of the fields that she wanted to add to Salesforce once she saw the possibilities of the system and the ease of reporting. Again, in her words, “I just wanted to add everything, and why don’t we track this…and this too!” It’s pretty trivial to add custom fields in Salesforce, so when the project started she had quite a few fields that she wanted to add. However, as the project progressed, it became clear that she wasn’t going to use the data in a structured way. She wasn’t going to report on it to funders or even internally. This led to a simplification of the data model and the creation of extremely useful reports and dashboards (nice job, Lisa!.

The lesson here is to start with the reports that you would like to generate, drill down into each of those reports, and make sure each of those fields exists somewhere in your data model. You can’t get the data out if it’s not in the system. Conversely, don’t put extra data in the system if you’re not going to report it out! This becomes painfully true if you have line staff who have to enter reams of data into a system at the expense of actually serving their clients. If no one is looking at the data that they are spending so much time entering, it can really hurt user adoption of the system, and that’s when you’ll start hearing the “I hate our new database” comments.