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.]
Loading ...
I am STILL waiting to hear of at least one org that has migrated from Raiser’s Edge to SalesForce.
Welcome, Doug!
Allan: -1 for not putting full posts in the RSS feed. Please let us, your readers, choose how to consume your content.
There were 350 nonprofits at the conference, and I didn’t hear anyone talking about a RE connection. Granted, the vast majority of SF users are smaller organizations.
From the Expo floor: there is a HUGE number of vendors doing data integration in the SF space. High quality, state of the art stuff.
doug
Doug – I am not looking for a connection to RE. I am looking to talk to an org who has converted completely from Raiser’s Edge to SalesForce
roger that!
Yeah, I think everyone is still looking for that Holy Grail of conversion from RE to salesforce.com. My guess is that it WILL happen but we haven’t seen conversions yet simply because the churn rate for RE is small due to the large investments made for Raiser’s Edge. To Blackbaud’s credit, IT directors are looking at the current outlay and still deciding that the cost of switching even to a free product would hurt this year’s budget. And of course, nonprofits are not well known for doing mult-year forecasts to properly assess ROI for new initiatives…
And Jon, I just wanted to test putting only short summaries in the RSS feed for a week just to see what effect it would have. Y’all are so lazy and refuse to bring your eyeballs to the site.
By my estimation, there are roughly 150 readers a day who only read the RSS feed, if they all came to the site, it would almost double my traffic — GRRR… How can I make you click on my Google ads??? Muwahahaha. BTW, I donate all my Google AdSense money to nonprofits.