In conversation with a staff person at a local Boston-based nonprofit, we were talking about wanting to hire a consultant. Her initial reaction was strongly negative, based on a past experience she’d had. But when we started talking things over, it became clear that hiring a consultant might make her life considerably easier, and finally move forward a long-standing under-resourced project (their Salesforce.com implementation) forward. So here are a few reasons why it could make sense to hire someone:

• Buffer – the consultant can have those tough conversations and ask the probing questions that sometimes it’s not so easy to ask, especially to senior staff ( and maybe even your boss!).
• Facilitator/Project Manager – any good consultant worth his or her salt will have a system to manage deadlines and deliverables. They can also push things forward by saying “if I don’t have your information by next Tuesday, then we’ll move forward without your input.” That can be a powerful motivator to get people moving!
• Detective – the scope of a project can sometimes be like a mystery novel: you get clues to what people want, but the “body” isn’t lying in the cellar waiting for you to find it (sorry for the mixed metaphor). They can play that detective role, sniffing out what you want the system to do and why.
• Coach – very often the consultant will have more knowledge of the system than you, so try to think of them as a coach rather than “high priestess” or “guru”. That enables you to work more effectively together towards a common goal, getting the system working for you and your team.

I hope that helps people think about the different roles a consultant might play if you decide to hire them. As a reminder, the list of Nonprofit Salesforce Consultants is on the Foundation’s website. You can also find consultants on the redesigned AppExchange, but I don’t think that list is vetted by the Foundation. In a future post, I’ll talk about the process of finding and vetting a consultant.

FYI, this came across the inbox from a nonprofit I work with:

9/14/09
Constant Contact releases InfoTransfer for Salesforce Plug-In – Good news for our customers who use Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management service! We now offer a plug-in that makes it a breeze to upload and synchronize contacts in Salesforce.com with your Constant Contact account. You can rest assured, knowing your contacts are up to date, and comply with CAN-SPAM unsubscribe guidelines. Log into your Constant Contact account, click on the “Contacts” tab, and under “My Contacts” you’ll see the “Import Tools” link.
After a call to their support line for more info:

• opt-outs synchronized back to SF
• add leads and contacts in SF to a list in Constant Contact
• does not yet work with SF Campaigns or Reports (“they’re working on it”)
• email updates in CC don’t yet propogate back to SF (“they’re working on it”)

So that’s the info.  Not sure if this sways anyone off of Vertical Response, but it will be nice to have another mass-email option, especially for orgs that are already using CC.

Ever since this feature was requested by our old pal Steve Andersen, I’ve been waiting to play around with this.  This feature makes looking at a specific Campaign wayyyy more useful. First thing you should do (if you haven’t already) is add  the CampaignMember Related List to the Campaign Page Layout.   Ta-da!  You can now see which Leads or Contacts are members of your Campaign without running that sucky, uncustomizable Campaign Call Down Report.  But wait!  You can now customize that Campaign Call Down Report too!  Woo-hoo!

Okay, so now you’ve got the report of your Campaign Members.  Wouldn’t you love to indicate payment information on each of those members?  Of course you do!  Sure, you could customize the Campaign Member statuses to indicate RVSP, Paid, etc.  But I’m sure you’d love to capture their payment details.   Well, now you can go ahead and add custom fields to the Campaign Member object, like a Check #, Credit Card #, Amount, etc.  Then, whenever you have events that you want to see if people have paid for, you can use the Campaign Member customization you just did.  There are all sorts of ways to use this, and I’ve only touched on one.  How are you using Campaign Member customization?  Do you like the new Campaign Membership Management?

(With apologies to Stanley Kubrick)  We’re about to begin a Salesforce rollout to a new team of users and I thought I’d share the steps I’m taking to prepare everyone for the big change that’s about to happen:

• Communicate early and often! We let people know months ago that this was coming, and kept reminding them every few weeks.  Not in a nagging way, but just to keep it from going completely off their radar.
• Enlist the “difficult” users first! You know who these people are, they’re the ones who won’t want to touch Salesforce with a 10 foot pole.   You’ll get their buy in by making them feel invested in the outcome, and letting them know that you’re really listening to their concerns (by  making changes to your training documents or Salesforce to make their lives easier).   Once the “difficult ones” see the light, they’ll be your biggest evangelists.
• Beta test with a user or set of users first.  That way they can give you feedback on what’s working and what’s not, and you can make changes accordingly.  Don’t forget to REWARD your beta testers too – candy or booze always works well for me.  And thank them publicly too.
• Use help text! Since Help Text on Standard Fields is now coming in Winter 10 (at last!), don’t be stingy with using these everywhere you possibly can.  It’s always easier to mouseover a little help bubble than to open a manual/wiki/screencast/sticky note/etc.
• Create documentation! This could be a Word or Google doc, a Wiki, a Screencast (I love Jing for these), whatever – just make sure this is something easily accessible to everyone who needs it.  I like to create a custom web tab (Called “TRAINING MANUALS” or something descriptive) that embeds links to everything on one page.  And make sure that someone knows how to update it when you’ve hit the lottery and moved to Kauai!
• Have a plan! Make sure that you’ve got all these steps written out, and a timeline to implement!  Salesforce rollouts are not an overnight process, and you should plan on things taking a while.

Stay tuned for a future post about monitoring user adoption.  For more on the topic of managing technology change in your org, I refer you to one of the best sessions at this year’s  Nonprofit Technology Conference, “Technology Ch-Ch-Change: Managing Technological Change in Your Organization” and to Dahna Goldstein’s chapter in the NTEN book.  Enjoy!

This is my first post after a long hiatus involving a move to a new city (Boston), and to a new job as Technology Manager at Root Cause, a nonprofit in Cambridge, MA.  One of my first and biggest challenges here has been getting our Salesforce database under control.  After 4 years, every user was a System Administrator, and nobody knew what most of the custom fields and objects were being used for!  It was a disaster.

big mess o' computers

Here are some of the things I did to get our database back under control:

• I talked to the currently active users, and got their buy in to make changes as long as they weren’t catastrophic to the way they were currently doing things.
• I formed a “data cleanup” team to start wrangling some of the thorny data issues.  One of the best things we did (thanks, interns!) was use DemandTools to create an Access database backup of our entire Salesforce database, then look at every single field in every single object and report on how much data was there!  We got some very surprising answers for fields we thought everyone was supposed to be using (they weren’t, or the data was inconsistent).
• I formed a “SF Training Team” to create a Salesforce manual and make some screencasts using Jing.
• I started getting definitions for all custom fields, and adding it to the Help Text balloons, so people were no longer mystified as to what went in a certain field.  (By the way, PLEASE give us help text for standard fields, Salesforce!)

Hope this helps any of you out there who are inheriting a database “of a certain age.”  Good luck, and any comments are welcome!

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this week and was able to meet with many organizations dealing with adopting these kinds of “2.0″ tools. I saw 2 common themes emerge:

• Almost every organization is struggling with adopting and effectively using these tools.
• Lots of these projects started in somebody’s basement (both metaphorical and literal) and grew exponentially as more people with the organization started to adopt the tools

One of the most interesting presentations was from the CIA’s “Intellipedia” team. Essentially they used the Wikipedia platform within the internal intelligence community to start sharing information better within and across the multiple government intelligence agencies.

Link: http://community.e2conf.com/community/sessions/tuesday/gs03?view=all

Take a look at these terrific points from the OSS Field Sabotage manual (sound like your organization?): http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/11/sabotage-manual-from.html

As we all know, Visualforce is going to be released this weekend with the full Summer 08 release.  Are you ready and up to speed?  If you have a Salesforce Developer Account (which you should because they are free!), take a look at http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Force.com_Tutorial:_An_Introduction_to_Visualforce

Also, there is a free webinar next week which you can register for here:

http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/events/visualforcewebinar/registration.php?d=70130000000E15w

Start kicking the Visualforce tires and post comments about your experiences here!

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.

This has been posted about elsewhere, but this is a pretty big deal. VR and Salesforce are very nicely integrated, as you probably already know:

http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000000GI9FAAW

• If you already have Vertical Response, email nonprofits@verticalresponse.com to get it for free.
• If you don’t have it yet, go fill out this form and fax it to them directly. I found it at http://www.verticalresponse.com/non-profits/

More details can be found on the VR Email Marketing blog – http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2008/04/non-profits-ema.html, which I recommend heartily for all nonprofit communication folks out there. Janine Popick, who writes the blog, has a great writing style and gives lots of good tips around getting more people to actually read your emails.

Enjoy!

9:58 – U2 playing, pretty crowded.  Looks like a mini-Dreamforce.  Lights dimming…

10:06 I’m sure you won’t be able to see Benioff since the iPhone camera sucks, but I’ll do my best.

10:11 2 Powerbooks on stage.  Nice.

10:15 Here we go.

We have an exciting day for you.  Presentation, discussion with Morgan Stanley, new stuff from CODA, SFDC vision of the future.  Then Nick Carr – “Why IT doesn’t matter.”

Safe Harbor, blah blah. 

SF Mission is to create the SaaS market.  Moving from client-server to cloud computing.  Moving from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft to new vendors.

Talking about multi-tenancy, sharing with other customers.  Huge shift for industry and basis of SaaS. Subscription model, pay-as-you-go, like a magazine, cell phone, cable model.

Multi-tenancy can support very large companies to very small companies (big banks to public schools). Very scalable, 150 million transactions daily. Nice hockey stick graph showing transactions and page load time over several years.

Old way of writing software: 5.25″ floppy, send to a store, hope to meet someone years later who uses the product.

New way: immediate feedback and reaction time.  Development cycle to change product is now 90 days (3-4 releases per year), 25 releases in 8 years.

Industry recognitions: Forbes, Gartner, Business Week, Fortune, etc etc etc.

Salesforce.com Foundation.  [Editor: Yay!]  When we started, 1% time,1% equity ,1% product, model.  16 employees.  501c3, 16 schools using SFDC. 3,000 Nonprofits using it.  $12 million grants.  NY public schools got a $100,000 grant – applause.

Going for the first $1 Billion SaaS company.  1.1 million subscrbers, 40,000 companies.

Google Apps + SF Integration – “your business in the cloud”.  Currently free for standard Google Apps, enterprise version from SF for $10/user/mo.

Strategy: Force.com is the Platform as a Service.  Visualforce in production within 90 days.  (Editor: That’s news…coming with Summer 08 perhaps?)

Showing Microsoft’s .net being built on a house of “server/database/etc” cards.  Emerging countries can’t afford all the infrastructure.  

Which path will you choose: Software or Cloud Computing?

Force.com is Salesforce’s cloud computing offering.  Low cost, easy to use, low risk.  

[Taking a break from liveblogging the sales pitch/architecture - will resume when I hear something nonprofit-y.]

Bringing up Dan Marionni from Morgan Stanley.  Will note anything NPO-ish. 

Bringing up Narinder Singh from Appirio. Demo-ing Dolby, their customer. VERY cool live instance using Visualforce.  Doesn’t look anything like Salesforce, but is.

Bringing up Jeremy Roche from CODA, a UK finance applications shop.  A general ledger accounting app built on SFDC.  Pretty neat.

Adam Gross from Salesforce is now creating an App, “Cooking Show style”.  Using Eclipse and Visualforce.  Getting started: https://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Getting_Started

Nick Carr talking about “the big switch” to the cloud.  

[Battery running low, so going to sign off here.  Hope you all enjoyed this.] 

One more little bonus for you – me and Lisa Glass with GIANT STEVE: