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

Amongst 7,000 of my closest friends, here I sit at the opening of DreamForce 2007, the SalesForce.com extravaganza being held this week in San Francisco, (see http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce). My quest: to figure out if this marvel of SAAS (software as a service) can live up to Allan’s devotion as a key element in his stack. (http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/more-about-my-stack-of-stacks). I always thought a stack was something best served with maple syrup, but anyway…

I will be interviewing customers with the singular question: Can you say mine works?, and if yes, or even sort of yes, what is it doing for you?

Something that we should all take to the bank: when SalesForce talks to the plenary, and when they talk to the special sessions devoted to the press and analysts, one-third of their success stories come from the nonprofit sector. When CEO Marc Benioff gave his keynote, the fourth point he made was to stress their corporate commitment to the 1/1/1 idea. (see http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/). They are serious about their commitment to philanthropy.

I am off to rub elbows with people to find out if their’s works.
Doug Yeager

[ED: Yes, folks, Doug Yeager is Non-Profit Tech Blog's first guest blogger!!! If you want to guest blog for me, send me e-mail at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org.]

If there was one impression I was left with after attending two and a half days of Salesforce.com summitry, it’s that salesforce.com has perhaps the most frank and self-effacing group of employees I’ve ever met in the nonprofit vendor space. Everyone down the line in the salesforce.com staff made frank assessments about the weaknesses in the salesforce.com application. I’ve never been so grateful for such a great team of employees. The standouts for me are Steven Wright, Meghan Nesbit and Tucker Maclean. I’m usually less than sanguine about nonprofit vendors but these folks just seemed incredibly focused on making salesforce.com work for our sector. They were clearly reality-driven. I believe that’s the mark of a great company — a willingness to engage the marketplace with a clear eye on product weaknesses and strengths. I believe that this attitude will ultimately win the day for salesforce.com as they engage with the nonprofit sector for the long term.

There’s finally good news for nonprofit IT directors out there looking for salesforce.com success stories. The developer Wiki is changing to reflect user-driven suggestions about the way the Wiki is used not just by developers but by IT directors evaluating salesforce.com solutions. You know, it’s been made clear by this blog and by others that salesforce.com will eventually affect the fundraising software that nonprofits use but there are many other software verticals in the nonprofit sector that should be quaking in their boots because salesforce.com consultants are now aiming at them as well. This means that all those closed and proprietary case management applications that social services nonprofits use (and which I have been responsible for purchasing sadly enough) are now in the sights of consultants who are looking to productize their now-custom applications.

There are some gaps though — salesforce.com is still in its nascent stages and requires an awful lot of developer time to simply reconfigure the base nonprofitforce template. This will get shorter over time as developers like Steve Andersen (the one salesforce.com developer who is a good candidate for cloning once bio-engineers get all the kinks worked out) disseminate best practices to the rest of the salesforce.com developer community.

Also, the basic design patterns for nonprofit software applications have yet to be codified and presented. This should have been done a long time ago for our sector. However, the very architecture of salesforce.com and AppExchange incentivizes developers and consultants alike to make the nonprofit-specific building blocks still missing in salesforce.com. In the future, I suspect that nonprofit salesforce.com users will be able to buy solutions a la carte through salesforce.com’s AppExchange and basically build themselves a suite comprised of fundraising, volunteer management, event management, advocacy and case management applications as well as any other application that’s more specific to their vertical. No longer will nonprofits be stuck with multiple silos of data that can’t possibly interoperate with one another. Instead, the salesforce.com ecosystem will basically fill in gaps of functionality in the base salesforce.com and allow nonprofits to create their own perfect menu of applications.

Those of you interested in case management should take a look at what Rem Hoffman’s firm, Exponent Partners, built out for San Francisco social services agencies. It’s certainly not generalizable (yet) but over time I see it developing into much more. At this point, I’d recommend Exponent Partners, One/NW (should you be so lucky to be a Northwestern environmental group) and NPower Seattle (Evan Callahan is a standout developer there) as good salesforce.com solutions vendors. Unfortunately, Theikos was not around for me to take a look at their wares. The space is small right now. By this time next year, I doubt I’d be able to list in one paragraph all the great salesforce.com vendors out there.

The roadmap itself was subject to a collaborative work session. A group of consultants, developers and Steve Wright worked on the roadmap together and the Wiki was updated in real-time. It should be noted here that Blackbaud, Convio and Kintera have consistently refused to provide product roadmaps to prospective customers. Meanwhile, salesforce.com simply builds the roadmap with its customers and partners. Salesforce.com is simply light years ahead of its competitors in the way it’s working with its ecosystem. I can only hope other nonprofit vendors can study and imitate this more open method of simultaneous customer service and marketing.

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.