Prelude Interactive

I stumbled into the SalesForce universe a little unexpectedly.  Kirk and I were starting to flirt with Convio’s Common Ground*, and I had some previous experience as an SugarCRM administrator and customizer.  I noticed a posting on the Nonprofit Salesforce.com Practitioners Group, Kirk reminded me to follow up on it, and six months later I’ve spent almost 500 hours very immersed in the platform as a developer and project lead.

Rather than ramble on like I usually do, I’d like to list the most significant pros and cons I see, from the point of view of a non-profit looking to beef up their…technology?  Business intelligence?  Data tools?  How about all of the above, because you can do damn near anything with SalesForce.

Pros

• SalesForce (through the SalesForce Foundation) donates licenses (10, I think), discounts training, and otherwise makes a significant commitment to helping non-profits afford the licenses, which otherwise are not cheap.
• While its soul is CRM (Client/Consitutency/Customer Management System), you can use it as almost any business process or web application administration tool.  The AppExchange is loaded with pre-built packages to solve a wide variety of problems – volunteer management, donor management, outreach, advocacy…
• It’s a hosted web application, so you don’t need a server or IT resources to make it run.
• SalesForce is a partially open platform.  You can use the buzzword technologies of VisualForce, APEX, an API, and soon Pages to extend the platform even farther.
• With a little finesse, you can attach almost any other system to it and interoperate.

Pons/Cros

• Like any powerful system, someone at your organization will need to invest time and energy into learning SalesForce and setting everything up.  The less you rely on outside consultants to do this, the better off you will be.  If you’ve never used any ‘enterprise’ or ‘platform’ style web applications before, the learning curve is very steep.  If you have, it is regular steep.
• There’s no guarantee SalesForce will remain financially committed to non-profits in a long economic downturn.  Still, donating licenses costs them almost nothing and I don’t think it’s likely they’d pinch pennies and risk a huge outcry from the non-profit realm if they were to start charging.

Cons

• When you do need outside help, for administration or development , skilled people are rare and expensive.  I found this out when trying to staff up the project.  Most developers don’t consider APEX and VisualForce to be good career moves, since they only apply to one product.  Most administrators don’t know how to program.  For technical people, it’s easy enough to learn, but I still had to trick some consultants into getting involved.  The only independent SalesForce developers I found after a long search were in India.
• This might be my personal beef, but ‘The Cloud’ is a bullshit buzzword.  You’ll hear it a lot from everyone who’s sipped at the Kool-Aid.  It means “hosted, managed web software.”  ’The Cloud’ is marketing shorthand which implies all the promise with none of the risks or difficulties.

I’ve had my frustrations with SalesForce – more downtime than they admit, unfortunate development handcuffs, slow response times and poor UI design in some places – but I would still recommend that any non-profit at least look into it, and ask the SalesForce foundation (or other SF knowledgeable entity) to review their current IT infrastructure and make some recommendations.

If one were to combine Kimbia as a front-end, and SalesForce as a back-end, I don’t see a reason for Donkey Kong (Blackbaud) and Donkey Kong Jr. (Convio) to exist.  They’ll have to keep one step ahead of free AppExchange offerings to earn their fees.  Paradoxically, the entry of a for-profit behemoth into the non-profit market may be a good thing, inspiring a new era of competition on features and service.

* If you do a Google search for Common Ground, Convio is on the SEVENTH PAGE (as of this writing).  Also, they don’t appear to have purchased any AdWords.  Good night!

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