Prelude Interactive

SalesForce is a great platform, but getting started on it – especially without previous experience with a similarly complicated system – can be intimidating.  I thought I’d write up some suggested steps.  Overall, your goal should be to get a simple, small value out of SalesForce and build from there.  Don’t try to set up everything before you start using it – as soon as clients “finish” their planned configuration, they immediately want to implement and explore more.  Pick one process – billing, online donors, or volunteer management, and work on that first.

Day One

SalesForce is a platform of many different kinds of tools, but most of your day to day usage will be with things called Objects (glossary).  When you create a new “instance” of an object, that’s a Record.  Generally speaking, each Tab shows a “List View” – like a spreadsheet showing a list of Records of a certain type of Object.  If you click on the link to one of those objects, you’ll see the “Detail View” where you can edit field values and see data related to the Object.  ”Related Lists” of related Objects usually show up below the fields.  I like capitalizing words that are specific SalesForce terms, because many of them are commonly used words in English.

1. Create a few different Records – edit some fields, save them, and then delete the Records.
2. Do this on a few different Tabs.  Note that Account is a very commonly used Object (for business, organizations, and groups of Contacts), and must be created before a Contact or Opportunity can be.  Accounts will be central to most SalesForce implementations.
3. Try relating some Objects together.  For example, a Contact object has a “Lookup” field for an Account object.
4. Find the “Help with this Page” link and open it.  It will open to a page related to the screen you are on.
5. Create a calendar reminder – every day – to log into SalesForce at least once.

Day Two

More Resources

Most of the goodies – administrator features, customizations, and configuration options, are in the Setup menu.  Currently, you reach the Setup menu by clicking on your name near the upper right, and then selecting Setup.

SalesForce CRM Getting Started Workbook – has some good high level tips, but only has one small part related to importing data.

Online Courses – 15 to 45 minutes each, produced by SalesForce.  Good place to enjoy your coffee and learn passively.

SalesForce Foundation – Getting Started.  Good for nonprofits exploring their options.

YouTube

• http://www.youtube.com/user/mysalesforcetrainer
• http://www.youtube.com/user/salesforce
• Playlist of SalesForce training 

It’s only been public knowledge for around 90 minutes, so please take everything in this post with a grain of salt, especially as I have no first-hand experience using any Blackbaud products, or most of Convio’s.  At Prelude Interactive, we work quite a bit with SalesForce.com and the offerings surrounding that – like Convio’s Common Ground – so the nonprofit CRM / donor database market is one we watch closely.

So, what does this mean for the world of nonprofit technology?

• Immediately?  Nothing much: they have to continue to act as separate companies until the deal is closed sometime this spring.  Some ongoing RFP processes will no doubt be interrupted, as nonprofits will hold off buying and upgrading decisions until they know more.
• Both Convio and Blackbaud had been focusing, to their previously mutual frustration, on large nonprofits.  Large nonprofits have big budgets, big needs, and need big solutions.  This acquisition means that the mid-tier is now more open for their smaller competitors:  Sage Nonprofit, SalesForce.com, Artez, Affinaquest, CiviCRM, and others.  We might see some consolidation there as well in order to pool resources.
• Less competition is usually bad for customers.
• Austin will probably have a few, newly wealthy individuals casting about as angel investors, like the Dellionaires of yesteryear.  This could have a significant impact on Austin’s social entrepreneurship sector, which is already strong.
• I’ve heard through the grapevine that the SalesForce Foundation has been focusing more on licenses and making sure their efforts are sustainable.  If SalesForce.com notices what’s happening in the nonprofit market, and provides the right assistance to app vendors, consultants, and partners, they could gobble up some market share.
• Both companies can use this as an opportunity to shed legacy offerings, and more internal migration paths will be available to their clients.  It will take several years for this to happen – acquisitions and mergers usually slow down, rather than speed up, product development.

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this site as a guest blogger. For the last five years, VolunteerHub has done extensive writing and research on issues related to volunteerism and volunteer management. A few trends appear to be growing consistently, and most volunteer organizations will be sure to face them.

Handling the Boom

When doing research in the field of volunteerism, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Baby Boomers are getting ready to retire. The eldest within this 77-million-strong cohort turned 65 in 2011, meaning we are just beginning to see a huge pool of potential volunteers. At first glance, this is great news. What volunteer coordinator doesn’t want fresh volunteers? This demographic, however, brings special challenges. First, the group is absolutely huge. If your cause becomes a popular one amongst boomers, the sheer numbers can cause logistical problems in a heartbeat. Second, this group doesn’t see themselves in the same light as previous retirees. They aren’t about to wilt away into retirement. They still have a lot to do, and they are educated, skillful, and tech-savvy. They expect to be put in meaningful positions. They also will expect any agency they help to be on top of things and give them tools to succeed. Being organized and having the ability to easily handle last-minute roster changes, wait-listing, and group registrations will put you in a favorable light with this group.

Greater Need for Documentation

Volunteerism, just like almost every field or industry, has seen a gradual increase in the amount of documentation required to run a program. For volunteer coordinators, everywhere they look there is another goal, statistic, or key performance indicator that needs to be tracked and reported. Most coordinators realize that these entanglements can hardly be avoided. Naturally, organizations connected with government programs in any way require quite a bit of oversight, but we are seeing that others are being asked to keep detailed records as well. Take, for example, organizations that don’t receive government money directly but accept mandatory volunteers (those forced by the courts or welfare-to-work programs to volunteer). The court or agency sending the volunteer to you will want to know some details about the volunteer’s work. Private funding sources, such as grants, are requiring more and more statistics to back up performance. Lastly, some organizations are choosing to raise their documentation standards on their own, simply because of the litigious nature our society has taken. For liability’s sake, they need to know when, where, what and why a volunteer was where s/he was. The ability to generate meaningful reports quickly and accurately is paramount to addressing this need.

Perpetual Contact

Among the many issues we’ve researched, another that stands out in volunteerism is the fact that people want more and more ways to stay connected, especially when taking young adults and Gen-Xers into account. Whether its Facebook, Twitter, texting, email, or who knows what’s next, people like to keep in touch, especially when it’s made easy by technology. As time goes by, volunteers are expecting organizations, no matter how big or small, to be able to send them correspondences via all of the before mentioned methods. If you’re not convinced that technology plays an important role in communication, consider this: Facebook alone has over 500 million users.

Similarly, people want to be able to sign up for events as easily as possible. Most people now consider a few mouse clicks much easier than making a phone call. Having the ability to sign up volunteers electronically has gone from a bonus to a “must have.” Most expect to be able to handle any paperwork required right there during the sign up. If you have the ability to offer things like electronic forms with e-signature functionality, you’ll be sure to make the volunteering process easier for most.

Obviously, these are just a few issues that are prevalent today. There are many others that your agency may be facing. We are constantly researching the field in an effort to keep our clients informed and our products relevant. Stay up-to-date with the latest volunteerism topics and trends by subscribing to our newsletter.

Shawn Kendrick holds an MBA from Ohio Dominican University and has over a decade of experience in the nonprofit sector. He enjoys researching and writing for VolunteerHub, a cloud-based volunteer management system that offers online registration, wait-listing, easy report generation, and more.

We’ve been working with Bike Texas to improve their implementation, usage, and return on investment from SalesForce and Kimbia.

Most significantly, we performed a significant migration of data from a legacy FileMaker database to SalesForce.  We created a mapping between data models, and performed the migration and followup.

Kimbia is an online donation widget and form creation tool.   While Kimbia provides a SalesForce data integration tool, some aspects of Bike Texas’ SalesForce implementation created additional restrictions on the structure of imported data.  We helped get to the bottom of these issues with Bike Texas, and identified several different approaches to work around the problem.

In the late summer and fall of 2011, we implemented a new website for the Girl Scouts of Central Texas (GSCTX).  As always, we had little to do with how good it looks, as Creative Pickle did another wonderful job with the design.

We used Joomla for the content management system and development framework.  Including:

• Online donation processing
• RSForms – Supporting volunteer interest forms, donation forms, and other interaction.
• A custom calendar component, allowing different GSCTX departments and staff to collaborate and maintain several different calendars.