I found some issues concerning salesforce.com (sforce) that are worth talking about. Strangely enough, a close friend of my wife who was not at the conference discussed the nature of sforce at the nonprofit she worked at. It turns out that there are numerous workarounds associated with the template but the workarounds are pretty odious. For instance, donors have to be associated with organizations and as a result dummy organizations have to be created in order to enter the donors. There are new releases that fix this but her org hasn’t implemented those changes.
On the other hand, I went to a session on sforce at the NTC. Steven Wright of the Salesforce.com Foundation acknowledges and is ready act on fixing the problems. They seem a heck of a lot more responsive than other vendors I have worked with but the proof will arrive when the Nonprofitforce template has its bugs ironed out and there’s real documentation about it. It turns out that there was only one developer assigned to create the template.
A day later, I ran into Steve Andersen (who is even more smart in person than he is on his blog) at the Omni Shoreham and he presented what I think is a capital idea. He suggested that a bevy of sforce consultants, business managers and users be assembled in one place for a few days and that a code sprint of sforce consultants be applied to Nonprofitforce. How interesting that open-source methodologies can be applied to sforce! This is why sforce works — they’ve got fiendishly bright developers who are committed to the platform because they believe in its potential and sforce’s platform is actually amenable to collaborative development efforts in the style of open source projects. AppExchange tries hard to be a kind of audited SourceForge but it was with little surprise that a little search on SourceForge turned up sforce source code.
What is interesting is the issue that other non-sforce vendors are raising about sforce. They’re saying that the much-vaunted sforce “ecosystem” is really just another ploy to have more consultants circling around nonprofits in the sense that instead of a one-stop shop for CRM, you end up contracting with multiple vendors in order to get say, e-mail marketing properly done. In essence, the “ecosystem” is difficult to work with and set up and will need consultants to get nonprofits to migrate to sforce. As a result, sforce can be crudely characterized as a consultant’s dream and that the user’s needs are never met.
There’s always a tension between the one-stop shop concept and the model employed in sforce. If you’re a nonprofit that likes a lot of handholding and likes to stay in one silo and don’t happen to mind paying extra for that “privilege”, then by all means try the one-stop shop. However, sforce is all about competitive advantage for a nonprofit. The idea that you can easily reflect your internal data for purposes related to fundraising is a clear advantage over other nonprofits that may be in the same issue area. Better fundraising by drawing connections between your various data sources is the potential behind sforce. Any nonprofit that doesn’t see the technical promise behind that strategy is going to be rendered irrelevant as other nonprofits figure this technology out and use it precisely the way the private sector uses it — to raise money and strengthen their ties to their clients.
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