Non-Profit Tech Blog

I just attended Day 1 of the salesforce.com nonprofit roadmap summit. It’s been very good so far and I think we’re going to see a great roadmap for the entire sector come out of this meeting. We’ve got about 40 attendees coming predominantly from the West Coast and from the developer/consultant community. Check out the wiki for the summit to get a list of attendees. It’s very impressive.

I’m really hoping that this summit becomes the standard mode of interaction between nonprofit technologists and their vendors. If it does, the sector will benefit enormously from the cooperation and collaboration between vendor and nonprofit. Already, with the wiki and the group work that’s being done, these are great practices that we simply don’t see coming from other CRM vendors. I just LOVE the fact that the roadmap is actually in the control of the community that is betting their future livelihood on it. Clearly, this is a better vendor relations model than any other in our industry. My only caveat is that it COULD use more pizzas though — only 1 pizza slice for lunch = flagging energy level during the late afternoon.

So far, the roadmap will definitely coalesce around getting the nonprofit Salesforce.com community into better shape, concentrating on more common sub templates (I call them “design patterns for the nonprofit sector”), and getting more training for both current and future salesforce.com users.

Ever since I read The Design Of Sites, I grew more and more enamored of design patterns. They just seem to be a remarkably compact way of describing very large topics. Nonprofit design patterns are those combinations of use cases and UI widgets that when combined are easily abstractable across multiple verticals in the nonprofit sector.

An easy design pattern to discuss would be fundraising. It’s inherent to almost all nonprofits. Patterns are horizontal in their scope and nature but nonprofits tend to coalesce into verticals. This means that nonprofits would have to pick and choose future design patterns from patterns provided by salesforce.com practitioners. I can imagine many of these horizontal use cases and widgets. For instance, a fundraising pattern would probably implement some sort of fundraising thermometer or progress bar widget, a form for constituents and rules for soft and hard credits. There might be certain reports that would always be part of the pattern such as LYBUNT and SYBUNT reports and perhaps even mail merge. Taken all together, this would represent the core feature set of the pattern we would call “fundraising”. Consultants and developers would be asked to flesh out the rest of the pattern but it would certainly be far easier than what is happening now where each consultant has their own particular take on what fundraising means and codes accordingly. That makes for difficult transitions between one consultant and another.

If you have any questions to ask the salesforce.com people, I’ll be more than happy to ask the question for you and try to repeat verbatim what they’re answering.