It means that organisations can now manage even the most complex volunteering requirements all from the same system as their fundraising and contact management – offering a real 360 degree view of your supporters.

Features include:

• Web self-service for volunteers
• Match skills and attributes for volunteer and roles
• Manage from simple to complex shift patterns
• Link roles to Campaigns to easily track and communicate with volunteers
• Automatic tracking of financial value of volunteer time
• Link time and value to individuals or organisations
• Powerful reporting and dashboarding capabilities
• Much more!

We have a webinar on Wednesday 3rd of July at 1.pm – sign up here

At the Melbourne Salesforce 1 event, Leukaemia Foundation Australia were kind enough to demonstrate the fantastic work one of our team, Leon Flatters-Wright, has done over the last 2 years. Working closely with the LFA, he has overseen the building of a system capable of managing the highly complex and mission-critical services they deliver across Australia. You can see some screenshots here along with the Salesforce presentation. The system is now in use by 150 people all across Australia on a range of devices, in the office and out on the road making full use of all of the power of the Salesforce platform.

Without diving too far into the history, it seems like a miracle to have turned the LFA project into the success it now is and Leon deserves huge amounts of credit – as do LFA for their patience, allowing us the chance to turn things around from a far from ideal beginning…as some of you may know, our journey on Salesforce has been a turbulent one at times and in our early days in Australia we sometimes got it completely wrong. Salesforce is an incredibly powerful toolset that can revolutionise an organisation – in the right hands. It’s fair to say the opposite can be true as well.

The good news – having survived those early days – is that as an organisation we know better than anyone how not to do Salesforce (or any complex technology). The pains helped shape and clarify the decision that a product (supporter360) on Salesforce is the only way to tackle fundraising (and service delivery for that matter) without unnecessary risk. These are massively complex areas of an organisation that require great intellects + lashings of logical thinking to design properly – attributes that aren’t always to hand when you need them…as with any custom build of anything, you only get to really find out if you were lucky when you’re already massively committed.

So four years or so years since we started our journey on Salesforce, the lessons are banked and we’re very fortunate to have implemented supporter360 for some of the most important not-for-profit organisations on the planet. We now have amazing teams in Sydney & London doing fantastic work all over the world, all of us knowing that supporter360 is very much at the start of its 5, 10, 15 or 20 year journey – hope to see you along the way!

The security review is an incredibly thorough process that looks at every aspect of the application, every single line of code for security and best practise. Anyone who asks again about the security of the cloud can rest assured, there really isn’t anything like it with any other technology platform. We started the process a full 9 months ago and it was a long time before that we started the planning.

On that note I just checked my email to see when we first decided to build a product on Salesforce – originally called donorForce, it was the 25th of May 2010. After being through a number of quite big sales processes going up against Raiser’s Edge and other older-style systems, it was clear we were miles ahead from a technology perspective with the Salesforce platform…but if you couldn’t see what regular giving looked like then there was only going to be one winner.

Fast-forward 3 years and we haven’t lost since 2012 in a head-to-head situation with any provider here in Aus. We’re rolling supporter360 out to some of the biggest NFPs on the planet including one 29-country rollout to one of the (if not the) most famous NFPs out there. And one totally focused on individual fundraising, something we’ve built supporter360 to handle effortlessly. And there are many others like the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Botanic Gardens, Lifeline, SightSavers International, SolarAid, Leukaemia Foundation, Assistance Dogs Australia, Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation to name-drop a few.

One really exciting – possibly the most exciting – element of the last few months has been that as supporter360 has become more visible within Salesforce more people have taken a look underneath at how we’ve pulled the product together…and really liked it. Not just great to use with exciting functionality, the structure and design of supporter360 is such that it will work for the smallest organisation right through to the biggest organisation with hundreds or thousands of users. It took us a while to really understand how to design things properly on the Salesforce platform and our first attempts broke a lot of the basic rules and best practises but through those early learnings we’ve been able to really get it right now.

So exciting times ahead we hope…a massive thanks to our first 35 or so customers who have had to endure some of our learnings in the early days. We hope passing this massive milestone will enable us to really build on what we have done so far and keep repaying some of that early faith.

What’s there now is so good that over here in Australia we’ve not lost once this year where we’ve been able to demonstrate what supporter360 can do. Organisations like Lifeline, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, Australian Paralympic Committee, Youthworks, Nelson Mandela Foundation (NY), Voiceless and more have selected supporter360 in favour of the other options on the market. All while we’ve keeping our focus more on product development than sales and marketing. In the UK our team has been busy rolling out supporter360 to a number of international NGOs including some of the best-known fundraising organisations on the planet.

Want to see why? Check out some demos we’ve pulled together for some of the areas of the system:

supporter360 Segment Builder: 

supporter360 Form Builder: 

supporter360 Contact Record: 

The idea came from Brexit, one of our founders may have had to leave Spain until someone pointed out she could get an Irish passport due to her Irish grandmother…and the rest is history! We’ve made it easy for people to find those answers no matter what their background.

Visit wherecani.live for second passports, second citizenship and how to beat Brexit.

Assistance Dogs Australia

One of the areas of the system they’ve been making good use of is Lead conversion. Leads let them upload lists of potential donors they can market to without mixing them in with their existing donors. When a Lead responds to an appeal or makes a donation ADA are able to convert that Lead into a Contact record where all their main donors and other supporters sit in quick time.

supporter360 has built on the standard Salesforce Lead-conversion process to do a lot more including:

• No need to worry about a Company name
• Auto-creation of Quick Opportunity to process donations with minimal clicks
• If linked to a configured Campaign record, fund information is automatically pulled across
• Enhanced de-dupe facility allows to pop up a list to of potential dupes to select from

If you have supporter360 and aren’t making use of Leads, here are some of the steps to get you started:

1) You can upload a simple spreadsheet of Leads into Salesforce & supporter360 in many ways – there’s even a specific Lead Import wizard you can get to by clicking on the Leads tab circled in the image below

2) First click convert on the Lead to bring up the conversion window where you can set the various options3) In the event your Lead already exists as a Contact record, supporter360 gives you the option to review those potential dupes and open them up in a new browsers tab if you need to investigate further.

4) Once you’re happy you’ve got the right person or the Lead is indeed a new one, just click Convert and if there’s a donation to process and you ticked the ‘Quick Opportunity’ box you will get dropped into a fully-populated window ready to process your donation – all linked to the right Campaign source and fund.

Note: If you’re using supporter360 and can’t see all of the above options in the Lead conversion process you need to make sure you are on version 1.594

Followers of this blog may (hopefully!) have noticed it’s been a bit quiet the last few months…for good reason! We’ve been super-busy putting every ounce of energy into bringing supporter360 up as many levels as we could and to fill some of the gaps we wanted to fill. So what’s new?

Here’s a selection…

• Our Segment Builder which lets you select the contacts you want on a range of criteria – giving history, campaign history, regular giving status and history, relationships to organisations, funds given to etc etc
• Regular Giving 2.0 which is a massive leap forward in our regular giving engine – we’ve added facilities to process multiple funds, track upgrades, failures and much more!
• RUOLFI – our unique Reasonably Universal Online
  Fundraising Integration which has been designed to get your contact, transaction, relationship and campaign data from pretty much any online fundraising platform and into your CRM where so you can get maximum value from it
• Much more including improved donation / payment pages, payment gateway integrations with eWay (including Transparent Redirect on donation processing) and IATS, batch Opportunity processing, new enhanced relationship management, enhanced Lead conversion, enhanced giving history:

And some great things coming down the track that we’ll be rolling out over the next 6 months.

So after keeping our heads down for most of 2012 we’ll be back in our normal mode this year – we think we’ve got something to make a noise about and really do have a genuine contender as the donor and supporter management system of choice for the sector.

If you want to know more check out http://www.supporter360.net, register your details and we’ll be in touch.

Blackbaud took the decision to ‘retire’ Common Ground in favour of Raiser’s Edge and eTapestry (a system they bought some time back and some would argue mothballed to stop it eating into the main business of Raiser’s Edge).

Was it a surprise? Possibly…some people thought Luminate would go first due to the smaller number of customers but maybe they were the biggest customers that they didn’t really want to upset. By doing this Blackbaud know that all of those Luminate customers will now make their own exit over time and find other solutions to work with – obviously Salesforce is not somewhere Blackbaud want to be. That’s probably more appealing than giving them all their marching orders as well.

Like the other companies that have built solutions on the Salesforce platform aimed at the not-for-profit sector we’re obviously here with open arms. From a supporter360 perspective the timing couldn’t be better as we’re just starting to make major inroads into some of the biggest not-for-profit names on the planet. Hopefully we can offer a good alternative home and one that is about to get a major facelift with a new managed package that’s been designed to specifically with the larger environments in mind.

Want to know more? Have a look at http://www.supporter360.net