Techcrunch announced yesterday the integration between Salesforce.com and Google Apps that we (or perhaps I should speak for myself) have been anticipating for sometime. There have been rumors and teasers for couple months now, but nothing substantive from either company. While this isn’t an official announcement and there are no details to the extent of the integration, something’s coming down the pipe and I’m psyched. (Please please please integrate Gmail with sf.com!).

What does this mean for nonprofit Salesforce users? As I’ve written before, I believe on-demand applications hold a lot of promise for nonprofits. The integration of these two enterprise class applications provide us yet more opportunities to tighten our workflows, increase collaboration, decrease our data silos, lower our ICT total cost of ownership and ultimately focus on delivering our services, not technology.

One real life scenario where I can see this integration being leveraged is with the grant writing and management lifecycle:

• An organization can collaboratively write a grant and budget using Google Docs and Spreadsheets and have those documents embedded directly in an Opportunity that tracks the grant submission process.
• Both during the selection process and if the grant is won, email conversations with the grants officer can be added to the opportunity directly from Gmail.
• Progress reports to the foundation can be tracked from both systems and related to the opportunity.
• If Gcal is part of the integration, you could possibly map out your grant submission calendar from Opportunities data directly to your organization’s Gcal.
• Additionally, I could see simple Google Spreadsheets surveys being embedded in Salesforce and perhaps even the data from the surveys being pulled into an Outcomes object (I know…pie in the sky talk here).

What are your thoughts about how this could impact your organization? What are ways in which you see this integration being beneficial?

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.

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Salesforce is so reliable and available, it is easy to forget to back up your data locally. Lately, I’ve was reminded that it is a good idea to back up your Salesforce data from time to time. Salesforce allows administrators to download a complete export up to once a week.

It isn’t that you have to fear for the Salesforce database crashing or being lost. I recommend downloading for a couple reasons:

• It could help if you ever accidentally make unintended changes to data and want to return to an earlier state.
• It could also be helpful in the event that Salesforce or your internet access ever goes “down” at a critical time – you’d have a way to access your data offline.

To download the backup, go to Setup (Administration) | Data Management | Data Export. Click the button – a while later you’ll get an email with a link to download your data file. Save it somewhere safe.

Alternatively, if you use Demand Tools, you can back up to a file as often as you like. I use this to create a copy of the database in a Microsoft Access file.

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:
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In a previous post, I talked about a few ways that I customize web-to-lead forms. One key change I make is to ensure that certain fields get filled in for every web lead. In a Salesforce page layout, you can require fields, but web-to-lead doesn’t allow you to do this - any web-to-lead form submission will create a lead, even if critical fields such as last name or email are left blank.

Most of our clients want to make sure their leads fill in a minimum amount of information, such as name and email. Moreover, you can catch spam by requiring sensible entries - since spammers don’t always fill in the fields.

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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: