Does SalesForce work for nonprofits? According to my highly sophisticated survey… yes.

The data:

• Now you might suggest that nonprofits who had tried SalesForce and hated it might not come to a SF conference in the first place. And further, that the 80 or so of the 350 at the conference that came the breakout session on the AppExchange (which is the marketplace for SF plug-ins) might be the geekier subset and therefore susceptable to acts of impulsive optimism, but:
  • 80% of the people in the room indicated that “YES, mine works!”.
  • 90% of people that had used an AppExchange module said “YES, it works!”
• Those are high numbers. People like this stuff: it is stable and scalable, and developing solutions something often measured in weeks (not years, sometimes months).
  • 
    Take Bob Bennett, for instance. The Family Service Agency of San Francisco describes itself as the safety net of the safety net, working with the homeless and mentally ill – a tough job.  But they built a case management system for its clients and have deployed it to 125 of their staff, and are looking to expand it to another 125. If you have ever worked in human services and attempted case management, you will recognize this as an achievement.
  • SalesForce acknowledged Bob and his team with an Appy award for innovation.
• Some other numbers: Of nonprofits visiting the AppExchange web site, something like 10,000 have given a “test drive” to a custom module. Of those, 6,000 have installed special features to their “sandbox” (a copy of your account SF gives you to play around in). Of those, 1,600 lead to deployments within the nonprofit’s live database. That is a lot.

I have been watching and waiting on SF for six years. In my book, it has finally crossed the tipping point between skepticism about its relevance to our space, and confidence that it can deliver.

Doug

We all know that Project Agape (uh-GAH-pay) has left the nptech world breathless with its amazing viral growth on Facebook. As a result of that growth and the constant hits on my earlier Project Agape post, I decided to do a quick interview with Project Agape. Micah Sifry has already done an excellent interview on the political and social implications of Project Agape but I had yet to see any technical information on how the Causes app on Facebook was built and maintained so I decided to call in for an interview. In short order, Project Agape turned around my request and hence today I have the chance to present to you quite a bit of information on how Project Agape was built and how it somehow manages to service all the users in the Causes app.

At the beginning of the interview, Joe Green, co-founder of Project Agape, ran down some vital statistics. As we were speaking, he estimated that the Causes app might acquire it’s one millionth user. It was at 998,000 and counting at the beginning of the interview and the interview took an hour. You do the math. Their largest Cause was the breast cancer Cause at 345,508. He also remarked that Causes were spreading faster than the groups themselves despite the fact that the groups had more extensive tools for faster viral growth such as mass invitations.

I started asking more technical questions and Chris Chan, one of their engineers, was brought in to answer them. Here are the harder numbers and specs for you web developers out there:

• mySQL 5.0
• Ruby on Rails
• 14 application servers, 2 database servers and 5 boxes in reserve
• 3 Image Servers (2 Squid, 1 image source)
• Apache 2 on Image Source
• WebApp servers have 2GB of ram
• 1 server for serving static content
• 26 Mongrel services per box
• 4 GB of RAM per box
• 50 – 60 MB of RAM per Mongrel service for a total use of around 1.5 GB of memory set aside for Mongrel

Additional:

• A pair of F5 Loadbalancers
• All systems running FreeBSD 6.2
• memcached
• nginx (not pound)

Specific Rails technologies used: nginx (not pound), Evented Mongrel, squid

Facebook and Rails gotchas

The Project Agape team was remarkably open when it came to discussing issues they ran into while building and maintaining their app. What follows is a list of things that Chris Chan ran into.

When Facebook ran requests via the API back to Project Agape’s servers, they came from only one or two IP addresses which caused the load to only be distributed to only one or two servers in the Facebook configuration. Oops. They had to adjust their load balancing techniques accordingly.

The Active Record bugaboo rears its head again. Rails uses an ORM (object-relational mapping) to closely tie database tables with objects in code. For instance, your Employees table in your mySQL database is referred to in code by using the word Employee. Unfortunately, having this layer of abstraction sometimes means that you can end up with suboptimal SQL code. That means relying less on Active Record’s beautiful way of denoting joined tables via a dot notation (“Employee.phone_number”) and just writing the SQL code yourself.

The “has_many” association in Ruby works quite well when in test but doesn’t work well when the “has_many” association you’re using now refers to an object containing a massive number of records. If a Cause “has_many” users, imagine the size of the object you’ll be building on the server just to service that request. Chris Chan mentioned an object several hundreds of megabytes in size. Ouch.

Also, Facebook’s profiles use a push model meaning that the code showing, for example, the number of people in a Cause can’t be easily updated because the push would have to occur for every profile of every member in Causes. Instead, Causes profiles link to an external URL hosted on Project Agape’s servers that serve a cached number.

All of the above should impress upon those of you looking to use Facebook in the nonprofit sector what Marc Andreesen’s said about the Facebook platform:

The implication is, in my view, quite clear — the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways.

Project Agape has spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars handling the viral growth of its membership (37,000 users per day since Facebook Platform launch). They’ve got five developers. Clearly, a Facebook app is not trivial and not recommended for most nonprofits to try to approach.

UPDATE (6/21/2007): More details about the fundraising efforts about Facebook. They’re now up to $100,000 raised over a population of one million users. Project Agape itself is launching its new website on July 1st, 2007. They’re changing their name as well. I have a hunch that their new name will be Philotic as that name appears in their off-Facebook website pages but who knows?

Here’s are three office technologies that I guarantee will have more impact on your nonprofit than say, Second Life (which I believe is a boondoggle and a half) or Myspace (marginally interesting but Myspace doesn’t support an open API).

Copiers. They’ve advanced so far they’re not even copiers anymore. They’re MFPs (multifunction printers). Basically, all MFPs can print, scan, fax, e-mail, FTP or use SMB to send digital documents into your organization’s document store. These MFPs are not your father’s MFP.

As always, every MFP manufacturer out there has a different take on how to do things. Kyocera sells a fascinating turnkey solution called iTag which combines a workflow process designer, Sharepoint, and a Dell Server with the ability to dynamically modify the control panel of a printer in order to create custom workflows for your documents. Sharp is selling their printers with something called OSA which is tada! an open API for their printers. Canon has been selling the MEAP which gives developers the ability to write Java code that actually sits on their printers and can modify the printer’s control panel. All of these changes in MFP technology can only mean one thing — an easier interface for document retrieval and storage. You can literally pull case management documents straight off the printer without requiring a PC. This means that volunteers can be easily trained to implement document-based workflows and that employees won’t need to wrestle with a document management system just to do work.

Windows as a service. mygenii.org is now selling Windows dialtone for nonprofit organizations. What does it mean? It means you can use Remote Desktop on a Windows XP machine or thin client to connect to a session hosted on mygenii’s machines from anywhere in the world. In other words, we push the hassles and expense of maintaining dozens of workstations over to mygenii and as our desktops slowly go out of service we will be replacing them with thin clients. Essentially, this is a back to the 1970s model of resource allocation. Everyone at your organization will give up their local desktops in order to have a virtual desktop hosted elsewhere. This works extremely well for case workers should they want to connect to their work files at home. This stuff is so new that not many for-profits are doing it. Once you work the numbers though, you’ll see that this solution is a no-brainer.

Interactive voice response systems (IVR). One of the few things that do scale well in a nonprofit environment is telephony. I see seasonal variances with telephone usage due to the cold weather we experience every winter in New York that in turn causes our clients to seek shelter (and call my organization). This means we have to resort to automated means of answering the telephones. Using an IVRis the only way to scale a solution that can answer up to hundreds of calls an hour with the kind of information that our clients need.

Yes, I know, copiers aren’t sexy. Nobody has web pages devoted to Copiers 2.0 and nonprofit technology like social networking does. There will be no Second Life version of a bunch of people picking up the telephone and answering phone calls from distraught and anxious clients. There’s just going to be nonprofit workers trying to be resourceful with what they’ve got. It’s in our interest to get out of their way and provide them with the tools THEY need, not what some marketing consultant wants.

Access to the API is FREE and current subscribers to Raiser’s Edge will receive the Infinity platform in the mail. Now I’m getting most of my information via the presentation and via my Blackbaud sales rep so pardon me if I get the fine points wrong, but Blackbaud’s new platform is built on:

• SQL Server 2005
• SQL Server Report Services 2005
• .NET Framework 2.0
• ASP.NET 2.0
• SOAP Web Services
• Visual Studio 2005
• Windows Server 2003
• ClickOnce SmartClient

Apparently, the ClickOnce SmartClient is Blackbaud’s term for delivering their interface over a Web browser, either IE or Firefox (yes!). This complete turnaround by Blackbaud is due to the ascendance of their new CEO, Marc Chardon. The buzz about him is that he GETS IT. IT being the notion that Blackbaud must respond in a direct yet agile fashion to the salesforce.com, Convios and GetActives of the world and to the growing restlessness among Raiser’s Edge users due to the lack of programmable data interchange in RE itself. But wait! There’s even more.

Blackbaud is releasing a new product still unnamed that will encompass much of the functionality of a Convio or Kintera. This product willl wrap up constituent management, volunteer, events, fundraising, prospect research, major giving and direct mail marketing functions all into one. And then ANOTHER new product will also deal with more advanced direct mail marketing functionality. It’s called Bullseye.

The new SOAP API on the Infinity platform will allow for direct read/write access to the database as well. Of course, this leads to the notion that Infinity will allow for not only the extensibility of its current feature set, but the creation of entirely new functionality. There’s this wonderful slide that lists possible new uses of the Infinity platform:

• Constituent management
• Volunteer
• Events
• Fundraising
• Prospect Research
• Major Giving
• Legacy Integration
• Case Management
• Program Management
• Fulfillment

Frankly, I’m very excited over the idea of Blackbaud putting it all together in this way. I can imagine the kind of pressure they’re going to be putting on a lot of people with this new platform especially if they do the following:

1. Learn to nurture their small development community. HINT: Give out free developer editions of the Infinity platform, make some great code samples, document that API well and start setting up partner relationships with the small development shops out there. I’d love to see a Blackbaud Development Network (BBDN) patterned on MSDN.
2. Create a hosted ASP version of the platform similar to salesforce.com.
3. Give away seats of the hosted version to small nonprofits. It’s a me-too approach but it will certainly cut off any inroads salesforce.com, Kintera and Convio are making into Blackbaud’s market share.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to this Infinity platform… Will keep you all posted on any further developments…

At least, it’s not too slow (3 GB every 10 minutes). At this rate it should be done around 1 AM! You know, all the time, effort and hardware to maintain an Exchange e-mail server has a pretty high cost. Microsoft is now offering what it calls “Exchange Hosted Services”. It’s Microsoft’s attempt to sell Exchange as a service so that your typical SMB customer doesn’t have to hire an Exchange administrator. Microsoft is charging $17.25 per user per month up to 3.6 GB per user.

I would suggest that all nonprofits start to factor archiving costs into their e-mail especially when senior staff start to insist on large e-mail archives. I’m thinking of using Microsoft’s pricing sheet as a baseline cost that I’ll use to discuss how expensive data archiving is. Let me tell you one thing, it’s quite a bit more than $17.25 per user at my shop when you factor in tape-based and online backups.

$6240 for the labor
$4000 per year for the auto tape loader and tapes (amortized over 4 years)
$2400 per year for the online backups

equals $12640 per year or roughly $126.40 per user
vs Microsoft’s cost of $2070 per year.

Hmm… now I’m thinking this isn’t such a bad idea after all… If any of you know of anything cheaper, go right ahead and suggest!

The Treo 650 requires quite a bit more maintenance if you require that all handheld users be able to download attachments created within Microsoft Office. Documents to Go has to be installed for Microsoft Office compatibility yet Documents to Go has to be reinstalled again should you decide to upgrade the firmware (as provided by Verizon Wireless). The Treo 700W comes with the Windows Mobile 2005 edition of Office and requires no maintenance in that respect.

Both Treo models suffer from unusual glitches related to what seem to be memory leaks and require soft resets once or twice a month on average. The Treo 700Ws come with backup software for the dreaded day that one will have to do a hard reset which eliminates all data on the phone and resets it to its original state. While BOTH models do this, it doesn’t happen often but the likelihood is fairly high that it will happen to ALL Treo users during the ownership of the phone. Because of this, I again recommend the Treo 700W because it has built-in backup software that will allow you to backup all your important data to an SD card. The Treo 650 does not include backup software and indeed you have to teach users how to change save locations so that data is stored on the card and not the built-in memory on the phone.

Users have some complaints about the Treo 700W — the screen is a little “small” due to less resolution on the screen. The phone keypad is not the default option on the Treo 700W. However, all the users of our Treo 700Ws very much appreciate the consistency and reliability of using Activesync for Exchange synchronization. They also love the fact that the Treo 700Ws take advantage of Verizon’s EVDO support and that you can do a Google search straight from the Today screen.

I am planning on migrating the Treo 650 users to the Treo 700W as soon as possible and quite possibly staying on the Windows Mobile 2005 platform as well.