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 

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s an increasing amount of scuttlebutt regarding a “1-click donation” feature or “Giving Easy Button.”  I’ve thought about this through the SxSWi and NTC conferences, where the idea kept popping up.  (Hat tip to @katyaN4G who suggests using pictures instead of text, including one individual, and making sure that individual is a puppy or kitten.)

Here’s what I think would be needed to make that happen, and make it work well.  I’ve heard that some organizations are already trying this – is that true?  Who? Leave a comment!

Card On File

Card on File is the payment industry term for when your credit card information is stored somewhere for later use.  It is not the same as “recurring” or “scheduled” transactions, because the transaction amount is fixed in that case, whereas with Card On File, you can charge any reasonable amount at any time, as well as execute chargebacks, delayed captures, and other transaction types.

Not every transaction gateway supports Card On File.  If your transaction gateway doesn’t support it, One Click Giving is not possible.

Amazon’s Patent

Amazon has a patent on 1-Click Shopping.  Would they enforce it to prevent innovation in One Click Giving?  Could they?  Any patent lawyers want to weigh in on that?

Transaction Silos

1-Click Giving would be much more powerful if it did not have to be reimplemented for each website and service.  If Network For Good, Authorize.net, PayPal, VeriSign, and others each have their own 1-Click Giving solution, donors may be confused and frustrated that a seemingly identical service is not as convenient as it could be.  However, I think the number of people who give so often to so many organizations (where this would actually be a pain) is fairly small.

Security

1-Click Giving cannot work without trust.  Users must trust that only they can click a button that will store their credit card.  Some donors do pay attention to an https:// URL when submitting credit card information, but fewer would be concerned if they don’t type in their credit card information on that page.  If the 1-Click Giving / “Give Button” could be drawn in via an iFrame, SSL / HTTPS security could be maintained, the host page would not necessarily need SSL, and the transaction would be fairly secure.  I am not a security expert, please take this with a grain of salt.

What about fraud?  Would a copycat service ape the Give Button in order to capture credit card details?  Sure – but the credit card industry is exceptionally adept at identifying and preventing this fraud.  Convincing donors of this is another story.

Ubiquity

The Facebook Like button has an almost universal reach.  Most people are logged in to Facebook most of the time.  If 1-Click Giving could be tied to a Facebook, Twitter, OpenID or other ubiquitous login type, it would become much simpler and more effective.

Business Models

One of the best pricing models available for an organization building products and services around donations is to charge a percentage of the money moving through their system.  What’s good for the cause raising funds is good for the vendor, which aligns everyone’s interests.  In order to make 1-Click Giving truly cross platform, some extremely painful negotiations will need to occur, and keep occurring.

During the month of March, HelpAttack! is partnering with the American Red Cross for National Red Cross month to help support the many programs and services the Red Cross provides to people all over the country, and around the world. Recently, they’ve played an important role in responding to the victims of the earthquake in New Zealand

You can help support the Red Cross and HelpAttack!, two very worthy causes, by clicking here

My aim is to read, think about, and review everything in the book.  Please note that I am not an academic, or an expert of any sort in any of the fields discussed.  I’m just a big nonprofit technology junkie, and the stuff in this book has the potential to move the sector forward past 300B of annual giving.

Chapter One:  Feeling Good About Giving; The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior

Does giving and helping make people happy?  Do people also respond to guilt, sadness, and empathy when giving?  Is there a self-reinforcing cycle of happiness and giving?  The answers to all three, supported by the reviewed research, is yes.  The authors found, however, that not nearly enough work had been done investigating the effect of induced negative emotion.  Is that why I toss out the endless Plan USA mailings even though I’m already a donor of theirs?

Throughout the first few chapters, the interplay between self interest and reward, and selfless giving begins to take shape.  One interesting experiment shows that children who are prompted to remember happy or sad memories both help themselves to greater rewards during an experiment, but only those prompted with happy thoughts do more to help their classmates.

You might be familiar with the ‘dictator game’ experiment, where one participant has the power to distribute all the resources between themselves and one other person.  They can keep all the money for themselves, or not.  An experiment showed that people who self-reported being happy were more likely to give at least $1 to the other person.

So, happiness helps people give.  But does giving also cause happiness?  Yes: several experiments show that after being told to distribute a set of funds either for themselves or other people, those who gave the money away were happier at the end of the day.

My favorite section explores a tricky issue for donation messaging.  Should you tell people that giving will benefit them by making them happier?  People “erroneously believe that spending money on themselves makes them happier than spending money on others, suggesting that there is ample room for people to be ‘educated’ to the contrary.”  Should people be explicitly benefited when they give?  A discussion follows warning against monkeying with “behaviors that arise from intrinsic motivations.”   Rewarding children when they perform well can  undermine their natural motivations.  Furthermore, monetary incentives – matching, or gifts, and severely undermine socially motivated, altruistic behavior.

I’ve heard of this experiment at a day care center a few times now – when the center started applying fees when parents were late picking up their children (thereby grabbing a few extra minutes of free child care), parents actually started being late more often.  The fee moved the parents’ calculus from the social domain into a financial one, making it easier to break the social contract.

Read Write Web covered us and did a great job outlining some of the larger issues at work in the online giving space.  People we don’t know, and have never met, are talking about us on Twitter and on their blogs, which feels pretty amazing.  Our official press release is excerpted below.

Can you help us spread the word?  Even a mention on your social network of choice can go a long way.  You can pledge directly to Mobile Loaves and Fishes or Movember, or search for your favorite cause in our database.

HelpAttack!, a new Austin-based start-up, offers nonprofit organizations the opportunity to collect year-end gifts through Twitter. The online service allows social media users the ability to give to their favorite philanthropic causes, simply by updating their social status online.

Online fundraising is the most rapidly growing way for nonprofits to receive funds from individuals. According to Convio, 35-42 percent of online giving occurs in the last two months of the year. HelpAttack! supports nonprofit organizations’ fundraising goals by collecting donations through a stream that readily syncs with users’ daily activities. Furthermore, the unique platform encourages repeat monthly giving, catalyzing the shift from year-end gifts to year-long giving.

With over $1,200 already given through the HelpAttack! post-to-pledge system, funds are currently being funneled to nonprofits throughout the United States. There are nearly 6,000 nonprofits to choose from, and new causes being adding every day, so anyone with a favorite cause and a Twitter account can take part.

“This new way to donate is easy, fun and offers a layer of social responsibility to online activities,” said Sarah Vela, HelpAttack!’s CEO. “We invite all nonprofit organizations seeking new ways to collect funding through year-end campaigns to visit the site, add themselves if they’re not already listed, and share this new way of giving with their supporters.”

While the pledge system offers nonprofit organizations a new-found funding stream, it also raises the organizations’ visibility on social networks. Many users choose to promote their personal pledge to their followers, and once engaged, are apt to support their organizations’ messages focused around fund drives and special events.

“Right from the start, HelpAttack! expanded CASA’s awareness in the community by featuring us on their site” stated Callie Langford, Communications Manager of CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates). “HelpAttack! has really been a no-fuss way for us to receive additional donations, engage with new and old donors, and share details about our upcoming events.”

Currently focused on giving through Twitter, HelpAttack! has plans to soon engage with other social communities, allowing people the opportunity to pledge and give across multiple platforms.

• Custom SalesForce.com integration of contacts, organizations, and events.
• ADA (American Disabilities Act) Compliance
• Online payments with Authorize.net
• Custom Joomla modules showing upcoming SalesForce.com-driven events, as well as related content from Joomla and WordPress.
• A browser compatible, mobile friendly design, with Chrome Frame support for IE6

The Greenlights project was perfect for Prelude in several ways.  First, Greenlights is a wonderful organization serving other nonprofits.  We think that these kinds of capacity building entities within the nonprofit sector are critically important.  Second, our expertise with all three platforms – Joomla, WordPress, and SalesForce.com, meant we could address all the requirements of the project.  We also helped consolidate these websites, providing a uniform look and feel for each and moving their blog from wordpress.org to their own dedicated server.