MK Partners Archive for December, 2008

Which Edition of salesforce.com is Right for Me?

Your organization has taken the important step of signing up for salesforce.com, but to make sure you get the most out of your license, it’s important to determine which edition of salesforce.com is right for you.

Salesforce.com offers two basic choices for Nonprofit organizations, – standard Salesforce CRM (commonly used for the commercial sector), and the Salesforce CRM + Nonprofit Starter Pack. Both enterprise-level editions offer free 30-day trials and include Salesforce.com’s award-winning customer relationship management tools as a base from which to configure salesforce.com to fit your organization’s intrinsic needs.

The first choice, the “generic” salesforce.com template is seen as salesforce.com “out of the box”. This edition is generally oriented toward the business world but can be extended to fit any required non profit business process. In some cases the standard Salesforce CRM might be the right fit for your organization. The standard commercial Salesforce CRM doesn’t provide the same default functionality that a nonprofit may need (for example the ability to manage households), but it is still full-featured and can be a great starting point for your organization.

However, it’s been the experience of MK Partners that the addition of the Nonprofit Starter Pack takes away much of the initial trepidation of signing up for salesforce.com because it was built with the common core needs of the nonprofit sector in mind. By choosing this edition, nonprofit organizations can realize significant savings in customizing the application to meet their needs than they would if starting from a standard commercial version of Salesforce. This edition provides tools to help manage your organizations campaigns, leads, donations and contacts. Here, some of the names have been changed (An Opportunity is called a Donation, and a an Account is called an Organization, for example). This edition easily allows you to:

• Manage donors and fundraising programs
• Track affiliations
• Manage a wide range of constituents in one place including donors, volunteers, board members, and more

The Salesforce CRM + Nonprofit Starter Pack

Imagine the complete power of Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) used everyday by thousands of for-profits, but with added functionality specifically for nonprofits to better track donors, donations, and fundraising programs. The Salesforce CRM + Nonprofit Starter Pack uses all of the power of standard Salesforce CRM and adds a base set of functionality unique to the nonprofit sector.

All the Benefits of Salesforce CRM

Because the Nonprofit Starter Pack is built on the salesforce.com platform (Force.com), nonprofits can also take advantage of all the powerful Salesforce CRM features.

• Software as a service means no hardware or software to install or maintain
• Award-winning ease of use that drives end-user adoption and compliance
• Apply work-flow triggers to automatically generate tasks for volunteers or board members
• Create standardized templates for consistent, professional responses to queries that can still be personalized by the sender
• Control access to sensitive data by creating user hierarchies to protect confidential information
• Get instant insight and analysis with powerful dashboards and reports to quickly analyze and
  understand your constituent behaviors
• Point-and-click customization to meet your organization’s specific needs
• The flexible Force.com platform to meet even the most extensive customization and integration

The Nonprofit Edition was recently re-developed by the Salesforce Foundation and MK Partners to further meet the specific needs of non profits, and the roughly 400 organizations who sign up forsalesforce.com every week. While not all nonprofits operate in the same way, the template tries to address common core functionality that is traditionally found in the nonprofit rather than commercial sector.

Since its first release in 2006, the nonprofit edition has received important and exciting improvements. At the core, the application remains simple, by providing a rudimentary set of contact management and fundraising type functionality. However, it’s still defined in such a way that it can have multiple other nonprofit solutions added on to it via the AppExchange, including many solutions offered by MK Partners.

Features and Enhancements of the Nonprofit Edition

In addition to providing essential, built-in salesforce.com functionality, major features of the nonprofit edition include:

• Sophisticated APEX code for automation, enabling customers to decide how they want to relate contacts and accounts.
• New functionality such as Organization Affiliations and Contact Relationships.
• Donation automation – built native to salesforce.com!
• Single donation tracking capabilities
• A converter to migrate existing users of the original nonprofit template over to the new one

Major enhancements:

• Contact-to-Contact relationship tracking
• Affiliation tracking
• Fully automated capabilities for tracking individual people (constituents), the B-to-C model
• Reduces the amount of clicks it takes to enter a new individual and maintain that data.

Benefits:

• Bring higher levels of professionalism and shared communication to your organization.
• Improve interactions with donors, volunteers, and supporters and encourage repeat donations.
• Analyze your organizations initiatives from fundraising campaigns to program impact.

You can’t go wrong

With either template that you choose as starting point, there may be be a number of things to undo and change. For everything you like, there may be some things you don’t. One of the many benefits of salesforce.com is that it is configurable and extend-able to specifically fit any business process for any given organization; this is one of the hallmarks of salesforce.com technology. Whichever edition you choose, you have the powerful force.com AppExchange at your fingertips and customizable database with complete functionality.

Have further questions? The experts at MK Partners offer complimentary salesforce.com support for non profit organizations. Visit us online at mkpartners.com, or email us at support@mkpartners.com

Sign up for a free trial for either edition here:

Read the Product Donation FAQ

Watch MK Partners CEO and Nonprofit Starter Pack lead, Matt Kaufman’s webinar here for an exciting demonstration

reference: salesforce.com Foundation

It’s been a great year of growth for MK Partners. We’re excited to keep implementing new products and programs throughout 2009, but thought we’d take a minute to reflect back on some accomplishments of 2008. We hope you will continue to reap the benefits.

• We went live with our new website in October thanks to our partners at Spark3

• Dreamforce 2008 was a huge success. We thoroughly enjoyed participating as a sponsor, networking with fellow professionals who were eager to share their salesforce.com success and introducing a slew of new products including our Shopping Cart, an exciting integration with Google Checkout.

• CEO Matt Kaufman was credited as an editor on the latest edition of the popular “Salesforce.com For Dummies“

• We introduced complimentary salesforce.com support for nonprofit organizations including a support portal where nonprofits can get their questions answered by the experts at MK Partners with an easy-to-use format.

• In an effort to provide better service by increasing our accountability and transparency, we began utilizing google docs to share our configuration process with clients

We’ve got lots more planned for 2009 and beyond! Stay tuned to our blog for the latest updates.

‘Tis the season of giving, but in these tough economic times, MK Partners understands the fundraising challenges your organization may be facing. Here are 10 important fundraising do’s and dont’s to keep in mind:

1. Do strengthen your case for giving. Your donors are more interested in how the economic troubles are directly impacting your beneficiaries, rather than your organization. Chances are, their needs are greater than ever, so your campaigns should emphasize this urgent need

2. Don’t apologize for asking. Even if times are tough, a request for donations to your cause is an opportunity for your donors to validate their values and beliefs. Instead, make sure you have a strong case for support, and that donors know where their money is going.

3. Do segment your donor file using the most sophisticated tools within your reach. Take advantage of salesforce.com’s tools to mail your donors more selectively, and focus more on those donors at the top of your giving pyramid.

4. Don’t cancel donor acquisition activities. Instead, budget-friendly ideas include list exchanges or networking events.

5. Do invest in personalized appeals – embed multiple data points from your database in each individual letter, refer to the number of years a donor has been contributing to your organization, whether they have been a volunteer, an event-attendee, a monthly donor, etc…

6. Don’t cut the cord. It’s crucial to stay in touch, especially with your most generous and responsive donors. Step up your online fundraising and communication efforts. Increase the frequency of your communication, and if you’re not using the telephone to stay in touch, now is the time to begin. The interactivity of telephone contact is important to maintaining personal contact. If possible, meet your donors in person. Face-time is more valuable than any number of emails you could send.

7. Do optimize online giving opportunities on your web site by making the process as easy as possible for donors, including a prominent “Donate” button on every page, and building a specific landing page for each electronic appeal to reinforce the case for giving. Make sure you are utilizing the capability of your online fundraising tools to track donor interests and behaviors, and be sure to use that information to personalize email offers.

8. Do emphasize your annual donor - those who give you a set amount each year are the people potentially wondering if they should give you the full $250 rather than just $150 this year. Large annual donations have the most flexibility and involve important, loyal donors who have been with you for several years. Focus on keeping such donors informed and motivated to maintain their support.

9. Do understand that corporate donations are the first to decline in a recession. Resist the temptation to go after “big gifts” from companies because they will make the largest difference, rather than lots of smaller gifts from individuals. The reality is that corporate giving is less reliable, and the time spent away from individual donors-who provide more than 83% of charitable donations, can be costly.

10. Do publicize your organization. Write a letter to your local newspaper or media outlet highlighting the value of your organization to the community. Now is not the time to cut back on marketing, instead redouble the effort. Make sure your mission statement is compelling and unique.

For an additional resource, here’s a link to an informative, recent NY Times article,

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/giving/11ARTS.html?scp=13&sq=nonprofit&st=cse

references:

http://www.afpnet.org

So now you all know, I have been a fan of The Greatest American Hero since I was a child. That’s not what I’m writing about today though. Each year MK Partners strives to find new tools to make us more efficient, enabling us to continue to offer expert services at reasonable prices. So as we near the end of this year, we wanted to express thanks to all of the Cloud based services that power MK Partners.

Productivity
BaseCamp – Project Management and Collaboration
EchoSign – Electronic Signature Service
Open DNS – URL Shortcuts, Web Content Filtering
Remember the Milk – Task Management
salesforce.com – Salesforce Automation, Support Automation, Marketing Automation, Contact Management, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Time Tracking, Project Management

Communication
Google Apps – Messaging, Collaboration, etc
GotoMeeting – Online Meetings
GrandCentral.com – VOIP Phone System
NuevaSync – Mobile Synchronization
Packetel – Fax to Email ServiceVonage – VOIP Phone System
YouMail – Voicemail Notification and Transcription

Website
Akismet – Website Spam Protection
Media Temple – Web Hosting

We hope we didn’t leave anyone out. Thank you all for your ongoing support!

I’d like to introduce you all to my new best friend. He saves me so much time when needing to get past page layout issues, he’s extremely fast at making little data fixes and he’s amazing at debugging code. I like to call him Sy, but his full name System Log and he’s available to you at the top of your salesforce.com screens.

Here’s an example of how the System Log just saved me some time:
A client asked us to load some test data into their sandbox, but when we loaded the data, we didn’t set the owner, so all the data was owned by our user. Normally to fix this, we would open excel, login with the Excel Connector, query the table, update the rows in Excel and the use the connector’s update function. (We could also use the data loader, but for simple stuff like this, the Excel Connector is often faster.) It’s really not complex or that time-consuming, but opening up Excel always seems like a chore, and dealing with security tokens is a pain. I was already logged into their org in Firefox, why should I have to login again! So, instead, I opened up the System Log, typed in the below apex code and executed it. Instant fix!

List cons = [Select Id from contact where OwnerId != 'INSERT CORRECT ID' limit 999];
for (contact c : cons)
{
c.OwnerId = 'INSERT CORRECT ID';
}
update cons;

Please note that we don’t recommend doing this in your production org as you could ruin a lot of data very quickly. But, there are so many times where we need to just make a minor update like this, or create a new record without filling out fields required by the page layout when this functionality is a huge time saver.

The System Log is even better when trying to figure out why Apex code is not doing what you want it to. Just open it up and take an action which will trigger the code and the System Log will show you everything that is going on behind the scenes. You may want to adjust the Log Level to a level closer to Finest to see more information.

For those of you that work in Eclipse a lot, you can use the System Log there too. It’s available from the Execute Anonymous view. It saved me so much time today that I was able to write this post!

With 2008 coming to a close, most companies are focused on wrapping up for the year. But in fact, MK Partners is still hard at work on new products and offerings for you and your organization.

Today we did our first live demo of the new Salesforce CRM Plus Nonprofit Pack. We are honored to have been chosen by salesforce.com to lead this project, which is a redesign of the nonprofit template. We enjoyed talking with many organizations at Dreamforce about the new features and enhancements that we implemented. You can sign up for a free trial here.

With that in mind, while we eagerly look towards the new year we realize there are plenty of opportunities to help you succeed in your salesforce.com optimization and implementation, allowing you get a jump start NOW on your goals for 2009.

That’s why we’re introducing complimentary salesforce.com support for nonprofit organizations. We’ve put together a support portal where you can submit questions, chat with our employees and search our extensive knowledge-base.

If you’ve just signed up for the new nonprofit pack and have questions, who better to ask than the company in charge of its redesign?

We look forward to hearing from you!