This last week, the Salesforce Foundation announced they are kicking off the much anticipated development of version 2 of the Nonprofit Edition. This is exciting on many fronts:

• It’s happening!
• The brilliant and uber-sharing Steve Andersen will be leading the project.
• The sf.com Foundation is again making this an open and transparent process with the NPSF Community:

-The NPSF community has the domain knowledge necessary to serve nonprofits with Salesforce.com–the Foundation doesn’t have this expansive knowledge
-The Foundation can’t be successful or sustainable without a vibrant ecosystem of integrators and add-on tool providers
-The Foundation puts great importance on it’s ability to listen to the community, and wants this process to reinforce that

Read Steve Andersen’s kickoff email for more information.

This affirms for me again why I develop off of this platform: The vendor is truly committed to the nonprofit sector (do I dare say…committed to social change) and does not assume to have all the domain expertise to prescribe a solution to its customers.

Anand did a write up here on Microsoft CRM a couple weeks ago. Now (via Scott Hemmeter) it looks like both companies have agreed to a Configuration Shootout of sorts. I highly reccomend subscribing to PGreenblog to watch this all unfold…it should be interesting. Furthermore, I personally nominate Anand to be a judge and represent NPSF in this battle of the century. Stay tuned…

At ONE/Northwest we’ve been looking into Vertical Response (VR) as an emailing solution that is integrated with Salesforce.com. We’ve just completed our first implementations, and I wanted to share what we’ve learned about how VR behaves with Salesforce. I’m going to try to lay out what I know in as concise terms as possible. Some of this is already known to many of you, but it was surprisingly hard for me to get my head around. When I get something wrong please comment on this post and I’ll update as necessary!

First, VR for Salesforce.com is best thought of as an individual Salesforce user’s personal application for sending mass emails rather than a shared solution for an organization. Here’s why I say that:

1. Each Salesforce.com user has their own VR account, and it is impossible for those accounts to share lists
2. If one person starts a send, someone else can’t complete it
3. If one person sends an email, they are the ones who will need to pull the stats back to Salesforce
4. If a subscriber opts out, they are globally opted out of emails in Salesforce

Now that I’ve said that, let me say that VR accounts can share some important info:

1. By creating your email Templates as Email Templates in Salesforce.com, they are available to all Salesforce/VR users.
2. Salesforce Campaigns can be used to represent each send, and the stats get pulled back to them, so those are visible to all Salesforce/VR users. They can even be used for segmentation of future sends.
3. You can pool send credits ($) between any number of users, you just have to email VR and tell them which users.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since the links in our PowerPoint slide didn’t make it through to Scribd, I thought I’d add them all here so they’re in one place.

• NP Recruiter - recruiting app available from NPower
• Jing Screencasts
• Tecnology is an investment even when it’s free
• Salesforce.com Foundation
• Nonprofit Discussion Boards
• Find your local NPO user group
• AppExchange
• Salesforce.com Nonprofit Blog
• Submit your idea
• Advanced SF admin and NPO Consultant Google Group
• Steve Andersen’s blog
• Judi Sohn’s blog
• Allan Benamer’s blog
• Simon Fell, Salesforce Employee and Mac expert)
• This blog right here.

The OPML File is here:

http://www.nonprofitcrm.org/attach/google-reader-subscriptions.xml

To use this, you’ll need to right click (option-click on a Mac), and save this file. To import this file in Google reader, instructions are here:

http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=69982

To import in Bloglines, instructions are here:

http://www.bloglines.com/help/faq#import

Below is the slide show from our session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (or click this link: http://tinyurl.com/2578gp):

I recently spent some time learning more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM and I must admit the product looks very interesting! For those of you that are more familiar with Salesforce.Com, I will try and draw out some of the similarities and some of the differences. I haven’t had a chance to do a nonprofit implementation with Dynamics CRM, so this is very much just a first look based on information I have read and some online demos.

The first major difference between the two platforms is how they can be run. Salesforce is locked in to the On-Demand model. Microsoft offers the ability to run Dynamics CRM either as an Internal Application or as an On-Demand offering through their CRM Live service. At first glance, it appears as though Dynamics CRM would be more feature rich when run as an internal server based application. It derives its value from making the assumption that end users are most familiar with MS Office Suite of Products. It has very tight integration with MS Outlook and MS Excel. Below is a screenshot of how CRM Dynamics looks in a familiar MS Outlook Environment:
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to take a step back from all the technology talk to discuss process.  How you do what you do, whether it’s fundraising, member management, or email blasts, is equally as important as what technology you use to do it.  When you’re implementing a new system, whether it’s Salesforce, eTapestry, Constant Contact, etc., it’s a great opportunity to review how you’re doing these things, and, more importantly, make changes to improve.

I recommend using some kind of process mapping tool (Microsoft Visio on the PC side, Omnigraffle on the Mac side) to help you visualize how to do this kind of stuff.  I like creating Flow Charts (people have usually seen these before) with Swim Lanes because people seem to intuitively "get" those more than other types of Business Process Modeling diagrams. It’s important to get all the process owners in a room and talk through how things go. 

In one instance, it turned out that the Membership team categorized the same person differently than the Program team, and they were using different terminology, even though the relationship to the organization was the same!  Imagine how confusing this can be when you’re talking about 4 or 5 processes that you’re trying to map to another system.

Another benefit to walking through (and mapping) these processes is that lots of "hidden data" tends to appear, sometimes to the surprise of other people on the same team!  Another war story: someone in Fundraising had been recording all donations in a private Excel spreadsheet, even though there was an existing custom Access database supposedly designed to track donations!  When asked for information about donations, no one could get the right info from the database, so they would always go back to the Fundraising person who magically had the right info.  Once everyone found out the "secret", there was a collective sigh of relief, and then they were able to work on fixing their broken system.

Here’s a sample process map to take a look at:

For the past month, I’ve been collecting random tidbits to share via this blog. Multiple projects in full force tend to keep tripping up my best intentions. My fellow nonprofitcrm bloggers Evan and Anand - who are both far busier then me - have essentially shamed me into getting my act together. My intent is to do a weekly monthly roundup of salesforce.com news relevant to nonprofit practitioners and users. An aside: I’ll continue to add interesting articles I come across to the Google Notebook above if you want to subscribe to the RSS feed.

NTC

The big news coming up this week for NPSFers is NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans March 19-21. As usual there are several Salesforce happenings at the conference:

• Salesforce.com User Group(s)
• Salesforce Foundation at the Science Fair (I’ll be there, come visit me)
• NTC Salesforce After-Party on Thursday night at Tipitina’s (Really, this party transformed NTC into a truly fun event)
• Using Salesforce for Good not Evil - An intro to using sf.com for nonprofit functions. Brought to you by the good folks at NPowerNY (yeah yeah, I’m one of them).

Please come find me, email me, Twitter me, whateves - I’m always looking for a good sf.com geek out.

NPSF Group

There’s been some raucous discussions on the NPSF Google Group this past week on the direction of the NP Template and a benchmark sf.com data model for nonprofits in general. In my opinion, this discussion is a long time coming and is essential for the long term sustainability of nonprofits using sf.com. On the next NPSF conference call on March 27, we will begin to hammer out issues.

Bloggers and Developers

Buzz

There’s been all sorts of buzz about sf.com being bought out by Oracle or even Microsoft (I have to admit, this scares me a bit when thinking about the sf.com Foundation’s donation to nonprofits). There was even some speculation about CEO Marc Benioff looking to buy Zoho because of of the competitive threat they pose (if you’ve ever seen the Zoho CRM offering, its an amazing rip off of sf.com). Techcrunch went further to wonder if Zoho’s new HR product People upped the ante in threatening sf.com dominance of the business SaaS market.

Google Apps Integration

Well perhaps this is sf.com’s answer. Steve noticed a couple weeks ago some interesting new things popping up in sf.com that suggested integration with Google Apps may be on its way (I saw this too and thought one of my co-workers had added a new app at first). It looks like there is proof on the Google App side that integration is on its way: http://tinyurl.com/2269zz

Fundraising

As always, Steve Andersen is kicking ass developing killer functions in sf.com. Checkout his latest Jing Screencast of how he’s using Apex to roll-up donation summary info onto the Contact and a formula field to qualify their donor level based on their giving history. Kudos my friend.

Reporting and Dashboards

The sf.com Reporting and Dashboard Blog is invaluable. R&Ds can be trying components of sf.com, but these guys really help understand what’s possible (and more importantly, what’s not).

Sf.com goes all mobile

For both Blackberries and iPhones

Almost every time we encounter an organization with multiple applications running their operations, we always hear the same request for a fully integrated real time data solution with a CRM solution acting as the glue holding everything together. While this is technically possible, we rarely end up delivering this type of solution after going through a cost-benefit analysis with the organization. Below is some of what we consider and cover in that decision making process:

Step 1: Determine the Value Proposition of Integration

The first and most important consideration is to determine the real value that this integration will bring to your organization. In most cases we find that organizations are already generating integrated views of information even if they come from separate applications. This is often done with some manual analysis using Excel and other tools. The real value of a systems integration project can be measured in the following ways:

• Costs Savings – How much are you saving in labor costs by not making your employees do the extensive manual analysis to reconcile data from multiple applications?
• Time Savings – What benefit does having this data in real-time or near real-time provide to your organization?
• Accuracy – Does systems integration result in more accurate reporting? If so, how much in savings are you achieving through better information.

Step 2: Evaluate the Integration Approach Alternatives

Generally speaking there are three integration approaches we often discuss with organizations.

• Manual Integration – Allows you to synchronize data back and forth between systems, however, it is driven by a manual process. This is typically done on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis often with several tedious steps.
• Uni-Directional Integration – In this situation, we make a determination that one Application will be the primary and another one will be the secondary. The Primary application always sends data to the secondary application(s), however, it never receives any data back. Uni-directional integration can either be real-time or conducted in batches (such as nightly updates).
• Bi-Directional Integration – This is the most complex type of integration and also the most often requested. In this situation applications transact data (often in real-time) in both directions. For this to work effectively rules must be in place to resolve conflicts. A conflict is a situation in which both applications attempt to update the same information at roughly the same time. In this situation, we need to be able to establish an order of precedence as well as a transaction log so we can correct any mistakes.

Step 3:  Perform an ROI Analysis of the Alternatives

For each of the integration alternatives consider the Return on Investment (ROI). While you can consider an investment over a longer time horizon most IT investments are often evaluated on a 3 to 5 year time horizon.

The above chart is meant to be a hypothetical analysis of cost/benefit and ROI for an organization. Actual costs will depend on the complexity of your existing applications and the integration solutions you decide to go with. The above chart is also not meant to be an endorsement of Manual Integration. For many organizations this might be the right approach, however, that determination can only be made after a careful analysis of your integration options and your internal cost structures.  

I was listening to a tech podcast the other day when they made reference to a story about Information Velocity. In this specific story, a CEO of an established tech company was transitioning to a new rising star tech company that was born in the Internet Boom. At the CEO’s first meeting he witnessed the senior staff arrive at the meeting with their laptops. At first, he was frustrated at the distracted focus in the meeting. Eventually he warmed to the idea that “Velocity” was so important in their business that laptops were sometimes necessary in meetings.

I often go to meet nonprofit executives to tout the values of a CRM solution. The value proposition that most often resonates with this group revolves around centralized information, information accuracy, flexibility, ease of use and reporting. We are not often asked about “Information Velocity”, however, that may be implicit in the requests and expectations of nonprofit executives.

In marketing, “information velocity” is a term used to discuss how quickly information about a new product disseminates through a target market. In the nonprofit context, “information velocity” can take on any of the following meanings:

- How quickly we act to reach out and convert a prospective donor once they indicate some interest about our organization or mission

- How quickly we identify and react to a distress indicator of a participant in our program

- How quickly we react to changes in our funding and operating environment

Nonprofit executives often tell us at the outset of a CRM Project that they hope the project will yield:

- Improved Productivity: Ability to serve more people or raise more money

- Improved Quality: Ability to serve people better or build more strategic relationships

- Reduced Cost: Doing both of the above while holding cost constant or reducing it

Information Velocity is implicit in all three of the aforementioned goals. The ability to more quickly transact information allows nonprofits to serve more people. NPO’s can also vastly improve their outcomes (both fundraising and programmatic) by more quickly identifying causal factors and acting on them. Information Velocity also saves money by reducing the time lag in responding to problems which are already in motion.

How can we achieve “Information Velocity” using CRM?

All the tools are available in CRM technology. It really is more a question of how the CRM is used.

In closing, consider Newton’s First Law of Motion which states the following:

Every object in a state of uniform motion (i.e. a steady state velocity) tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Your CRM Project represents an opportunity to apply a positive external force on your organization’s current state of Information Velocity. The end goal of which is hopefully a paradigm shift in your organization which allows it to operate at a much higher velocity.