WestCoast2008:Migrating to Salesforce.com: One Organization's Story

Description

Bergen has led Global Exchange's migration to and integration with the Salesforce.com platform, and will share the story and the learnings in an interactive session where questions are strongly encouraged.

Session Notes

Notetaker: Jude

Salesforce Session. Bergen. Overview: Global Exchange. Managing the project with developers hired. Then taking it on as developer and project manager. Why choose Salesforce even tho a donations - foundations NGO model. Transforming to that model. Built in travel agency. Advocacy campaigns in different countries. Why and how it works.

Intent (go-around of why people are at this session): Implementing Salesforce; in data entry. Have the framework. Implementation phase.

Wants to dig deeply into a platform for complicated needs of client organization.

Did taproot from access. Salesforce was one solution. Familiar with platform. Dbase person. Like to work in it more in the future.

Dbase consulting. Small clients interested in Salesforce primarily because it’s free. Not sure if they have the resources to implement it.

Union ware implementation. Looked at Salesforce. Compare and contrast. Goals, what gone through.

Not worked with Salesforce. Clients interested in integration. Addresses from a form and blast out newsletters.

Use outlook to store contact information. For email output. Not the best way to do it.

Interested in platform to serve complex organization with multiple inter-related needs.

Presentation will cover: Why Salesforce chosen. How it was manipulated for NGO. Custom but used over 1/3 of the built in: donations, people, organizations. Plus 2/3 custom. Some build-ins. Added benefit of having a layer over the dbase – interface for the user. Makes it easier to build and manage. Other developers built the interface. Changing the name to Force because not just about sales.

Filemaker dbase in the past. Very old and complex.

First piece of the puzzle. Existing dbase. Didn’t like no external access, didn’t communicate rest of the world. Dedicated machines to do queries took way long time. Ready to switch 5 years ago.

Figured out:

1. Organizational priorities re dbase uses. Overall and specifically.

2. Less data entry.

3. Proposal: dbase needs to do all these things. Access from out of the office, not hosting the hardware themselves. Wouldn’t have to worry about downtime. Salesforce has many clients (merril lynch).

4. Import and export large amounts of data. Export into Democracy in Action to do online actions, manage people trough website.

5. Import from excel spreadsheet. Import into dbase.

6. Need to track relationships between people (Board to Foundation trustee, eg).

7. Manage regular donations, monthly recurring donations.

8. Reality tours group manages package tour. Website interaction from person who wants to go on tour. Get them ot be a member of organization or take action from what they learned. Share contacts within organization. Flag fro certain campaigner to talk to. Automated task system. Write code on top of the platform. If person just returned from Reality Tour on this Tipic 0- send a message of tasks to the staff person. To do list creation. Automated tasks or workflow had to be built in or buildable.

9. Major donors – Don't want a campaigner writing the wrong letter – Customize the relationships. Stable foundation and doing modifications after you build it could be done by someone the organization could afford.

10. Community of consultants using Salesforce. Community of NGOs using Salesforce. Sustainable.

11. Enterprise level.

?customization or configuration? If you have something that can be translated … If you need to build new things, like reality tour. Small things to build. Customization and building new things. Easy to build new things.

Salesforce provides setup and dbas. Manage the dbase – manage what you see and. Everything is abstracted fromdbase layer.

Document of NGO list developers. Salesforce Foundation 10 free licenses. Way cheaper for NGOs. Took recommendation from SF. Normally working with corporations. Business analysts did the development. Not dbase or software developers.

?user management issues? Identify how painful the current situation is. It’s going to do this in this way, and let me show you why and how it’s going to solve your problem. Trained first user – confused about how dbase puts things together bc working in spreadsheets now. Hand hold.

To get ready:

• Big map of all of the data. Orgs, people, speaking tours, donations. Many objects.
• List of all the reports needed.
• Requirements.

Travel tour, speaking tours, campaigners, legislative camp, dev dept, foundations, media dept, management that needs to reports, IT.

Keep good documents that certain decisions and resolution of things. All the todo list was posted and checked off as the project went along. Buy-in for these things. Huge project. Every dept had to feel like part of the process.

Business analyst working on it. Sales model. Leads come in, person and payment or just a person and prospect of getting a payment. People. Payments = donations = “Opportunity”. %chance of closing the deal. Foundations: prospecting, LOI, reviewing, full proposal. Normal donations – payment comes in, posted, done. Translation takes easy interface. For contact, may not need what company. Admin section, click customize, and “opportunity” and 3- step to add a field. You can delete fields not built in. go to page layout, separate layers. Can rename things. Rename the tabs, and the fields. Easy to move around and manipulate the page. Complicate and easy == look at donation coming in…. we want it to look like this. But has to look different for each function. Payments object has all the things, and use function to see different layout.

Can track time spent on different things. Can have pull ups.

Ap-Exchange – build something useful and people sell or give away. Non-profit. Changes things in your world. Plop in and see something closer. Accounts are free. Get a Salesforce set of licenses. See how it looks to you.

Post a finished application. Eg. Reality tours application. Concept of the tour. Expense item. Outgoing payments. Incoming payments and people. Tour package. To get that on ap exchange, has to write code that tests it so it’s safe people to use. Private application sharing exchange.

The reports are relational, so you can choose what you want to match up. Demographic, donation amount.

Little bit of mailm erge. Browser based. Activity history. Log a call, mail merge. Connect to local word processing. Have word templates and put variables.

On ap exchange – Jasper Soft for Salesforce = complex reporting program. All about reporting and mail merging. Plug in to salesforce free for NGO. – Crystal exchange for Salesforce.

Because custom, and had problems with maintenance before bc had to go to same developer. Wanted to do whatever they wanted to do. Never have any money. So could not go to Razor’s Edge. Blackbaud. Imus, Sage. Development Director wanted to use (again) Razor’s Edge, but it cost $10k.

20 unique users. How many can be logged in at same time = all 5 times at once.

Ap exchange. Somebody sees something they want to build.

Special events. Recurring donations. Name change of tabs. Plug ins – more information and more complex Hook Salesforce into outlook or MS …

Go to account set up point. NGO version is an add-on. Have to start with a particular version. If you download the wrong version. Close one account and then open another. Free trial version. Application to get free NGO is simple. Get license key, email user id and password. Then go in and set up the NGO version.

Hire someone who knows what they are doing. Tutorials talk in sales talk. If you have to do it yourself. Go to conferences and trainings. Find someone to get you started.

Call salesforce foundation. Mr. Breckenridge email.

Web to lead. Form elements. Post to url in Salesforce. You can generate from Salesforce ugly form. Make it look nicer. Supposedly.

Show some of the data to the word.

Ap exchange has quickbooks for Salesforce.

Admin people entering data. Don’t recommend starting Salesforce without technically inclined person. Commit someone to it. Even if hiring someone to build it for you, you also need whole organization or one person who will be really into it. Learn lots of switches. Powerful reports.

Salesforce reserves the right to revoke free licenses. Salesforce contractor. Developer junior guy was not adequate. Go with someone who focuses on NGOs.

Lots of people use it, contributors. Integrating all the pieces takes the technical expertise. Salesforce developer will get a job. Spend $300 to go to training camp.

All the fields and what kind they are. All the things they wanted to do.

AH-HA's:

• In deployment phase. Common things. Ap Exchange to extend functionality.
• Impt to get into the nitty gritty and relate/know someone/org who’s actually done the project.
• General report back – lots of interest in Salesforce versus other things. Talking thru the things that they needed to do. Layer for admin. Takes totally into it and technically inclined. Buy in within org. hire contractors, look really closely.