Processes evolve. Needs change. And, it’s not uncommon for nonprofits to find that their old donor database or other Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system — which once met their needs — can no longer support them.

But, once the big decision is made to move to a new system, there are still considerations: How do you safely move your valuable constituent data into the new system? How do you set up the new system to support new, more efficient processes and give staff members access to the data they need? What do staff members need to know about using the new system? By addressing these considerations, nonprofits can ensure they see the expected benefits of their new technology.

Here’s an example: Heller Consulting helped a Human Services Organization move their data and processes from their existing donor database into Luminate CRM while meeting all of the organization’s requirements.

Following are just some of the results:

• Improved processes — Development and accounting staff members spend less time struggling with their processes and technology.
• Better reporting — More development staff members create and run their own reports to measure the effectiveness of their fundraising efforts, without relying on a database administrator.
• Efficiency and consistency — Training ensures that users of the new system can be up and running efficiently and consistently.

Find out more: Download the Human Services Organizations case study.
 

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Clients often ask us what can they do to help contribute to Salesforce success and a smooth and effective deployment. After 7 years and 700 plus projects we came up with eight general requirements for project success:

Listen to your Consultant

Client should follow the consultant’s advisement in implementing technology and changing business processes within scope. If client make changes without consent from consultant, it places the consultant in a reactive mode instead of executive mode. This interferes with project planning and methodology and may even force major adjustments to the project.

Project Commitment

Client must commit internally to all technology and processes that will be implemented in the project. If client remains hesitant about an area of the project and continues to explore / ask for alternative solutions for that area, this drains time and effort from overall project execution. If the client maintains significant doubt about an area of the project, then that area should be removed from the project in its entirety.

Take Ownership

Client should have a single liaison/point of contact person to set the tone and goals of the project. If necessary, certain project areas can be delegated to other client staff members, but work and goals in those areas should be clearly defined.

Build Consensus

All client stakeholders must work together to agree on the desired improvements. Agreement towards a primary, shared goal must be worked out to claim success. Each client stakeholder must understand when a specific project area affects not just his group, but the entire organization as well.

Stay Focused

The project must remain within scope. Extra features or new technologies should not be added once the project has begun.

Be Available

No project can be done in a vacuum. If you are unavailable as a client your project will experience a slower deployment. Be engaged: resolve issues quickly, provide feedback, eliminate roadblocks.

Be Realistic

Keep requirements relevant and attainable; strive for a balance between management needs and what the day-to-day end user can actually input. Organizational change due to new technology has to be managed and indoctrinated into the project.

Be Optimistic

Continuous communication throughout the project to the end users in order to educate, inform and build excitement.

By keeping these 8 points in mind, you are on your way to a successful deployment.

Do you have any other suggestions on how to make things run smoothly? Let us know in the comments below.

The post 8 Steps to Salesforce Success appeared first on The Connected Cause.

To checkbox or not to checkbox, that is the question. Checkboxes have many advantages, especially for system administrators. They are generally the fastest and easiest fields to create, and they are preferred when creating field dependencies, formulas, and workflows. They also facilitate quick data entry and make reporting easy. But do they really give you accurate data?

Checkboxes are often used on forms and in databases to accept or refuse an offer. For example:

• Please send me the monthly newsletter.
• Yes, I would like to repeat my gift monthly.
• Add 10% to my donation to contribute to operating expenses.

They are also frequently used to capture an individual’s interests. For example, Interests:

• Animal Welfare
• Social Justice
• Gender Equality
• Education

With those advantages, why would we ever not use a checkbox? There are a few things to consider.

Checkboxes imply a default answer

In the above examples, the answer is “no” until the box is checked. It takes a special effort for the individual to change his/her response from the provided empty checkbox. In this way, checkboxes can be used to guide a respondent to an answer. Some of us have experienced this “guidance” in its most manipulative form. I bet I’m not the only one to have ordered a magazine and overlooked the automatic subscription renewal checkbox. Grrr.

If the question does not have a default answer, consider using a yes/no picklist or yes/no radio buttons.

Select your answer Yes No

Checkboxes compromise data integrity

With checkboxes, it is unclear if the individual purposely did not check the boxes or simply skipped that section of the form. Is the box intentionally or unintentionally blank? Consider when a user is confronted with a yes/no picklist field, forcing the user to make an active choice. If the user submits the form without indicating yes/no, the field remains blank or we can send an error requesting the missing data. Additionally, picklist fields can be required fields, while checkboxes cannot. If it is important enough to request the information, isn’t it important enough to get it correct?

If it is important to confirm that the user appropriately responded to the question, consider using a yes/no picklist or yes/no radio buttons.

Select your answer Yes No

Creating a form or a database is an art and a science. When designing fields, be sure to understand the implications of detail-level decisions, and balance the priorities of easy data entry, easy system administration, easy reporting, and high data quality.

What input tools work better for you to get accurate data? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

The post Does a Checkbox Give You Accurate Data? [Tech Tips] appeared first on The Connected Cause.

In my most recent post in this series, I covered considerations when setting up Multi-Select Picklists in Salesforce.com to ensure your organization can scale Salesforce.com in the future. What’s next?

Picklist Value Collisions: the “Both/And” Problem

Consider the following Contact Type picklist that might appear on a record:

• Staff Member
• Former Staff
• Board Member
• Former Board Member
• Volunteer
• Organization Liaison
• Major Donor

This seems straightforward, and represents the gamut of how nonprofits understand people. But what happens if I’m both a Board Member AND a Major Donor? A Former Staff member AND a Volunteer?

Scaling Salesforce.com to last for the long term should consider both the short- and long-term applicability of these values. Consider how Salesforce.com features can be used for understanding your data from the perspective of what’s mutually exclusive and produces the easiest reporting benefits on your data.

Based on knowing all these things about your people, here’s what I’d suggest as your new Contact Type picklist values:

• Staff Member
• Board Member
• Former Board Member
• Organization Liaison

These are all mutually exclusive values, because generally nonprofit staff members are not both Staff and Board Members, and Board Member relationships are closer and more important to your organization than simply knowing that person as an Organization Liaison (usually Board members are courted for their existing relationships to other organizations or the sector in which a nonprofit operates).

Where did everything else go? Here’s a breakdown:

• Former Staff Member: This can now be a checkbox, and a Validation Rule can exist to prevent it from being checked when the Contact Type picklist is “Staff Member.” People are or are not Former Staff, and a former staff member can concurrently be a Volunteer or Board Member.
• Volunteer: This can now be a checkbox so that it can also exist concurrently with other categorizations such as Former Staff or Board Member.  If you need further definition, consider a separate “Volunteer Type” single-select picklist in its place, or pair the high-level checkbox with a dependent multi-select picklist of volunteer types for lower-level granularity.
• Major Donor: It’s gone. Why? Because Major Donor is a moment in time for the person that may or may not be repeated.  Use reporting to determine who these folks are, versus a picklist value that someone may forget to change or update as time goes by, causing the value to become diluted and lose meaning.

How your contacts change their relationships with you over time can give you clues as to how to correctly use Salesforce.com features to categorize them.  And, the long term benefit is fewer data entry and maintenance errors, and easier reporting for your organization because the highest level categorizations are mutually exclusive.

Lastly, if you’ve ever considered titling a checkbox “Sally Jones’s List” or directly adding staff/board names as picklist values, let’s talk. Share your thoughts in the comment section below. I promise there’s a way to represent this as a function rather than a person in your instance!

Watch The Connected Cause for the next post in this series, in which I’ll cover Activities.

Looking for more? Check out the first 2 posts of this series:

• Part 1: The “Owner Field”
• Part 2: Multi-Select Picklists

The post Scaling Salesforce as You Grow, Part 3 [Tech Tips] appeared first on The Connected Cause.

In her work with nonprofits Amy Quinn often refers to the “New Normal”. She believes, and has personally witnessed, how leveraging technology and the solutions and innovation it offers, can help organizations achieve higher levels of success.

In her Avectra blog post “The Wealth Within”, Amy urges organizations to focus less on what they don’t have, or can’t afford, and instead look within to uncover untapped resources and talent to bring innovation to their programs.

If you’re ready to look for these (perhaps) hidden resources at your organization, but don’t know where to start Amy recommends reading the 2012 survey report, Unleashing Innovation: Using Everyday Technology to Improve Nonprofit Services from Idealware.org. This report identifies four “core elements common to organizations that use technology to successfully innovate program delivery”:

• Needs identification
• Knowledge of technology
• Connection of needs and technology
• An environment supportive of change

In her blog post, Amy examines two case studies, one from a large nonprofit and one from a small one. These studies reveal how both organizations recognizing they needed to do things differently, carried out a needs identification, utilized the knowledge of their staff, created “gatekeepers” and fully evaluated their technology and training needs.

When asked what drove the innovation, the Executive Director of the smaller nonprofit said that the employees believed in their capabilities as well as accepting the responsibility of finding “better ways to do things”.

Click here to read the full blog post and learn what you can do to unleash innovation at your nonprofit.

About Amy Quinn

Amy Quinn is an independent consultant, speaker, and, most recently, author of the book, Fundraising Innovators: Leaders in Social Enterprise Share New Approaches to Raising Money. After successful positions in the business and nonprofit sectors, including American Airlines and Dreyers-Nestle, she followed her heart and established a business to help organizations raise more money. Innovative fundraising means having the funds for programs and achieving mission.  

The post Access the Wealth Within – Uncovering Talent and Utilizing Technology appeared first on The Connected Cause.

Nonprofits often ask us at Idealist Consulting: Can I integrate my Salesforce database with [insert social media platform here]? The first question we ask after hearing this question is: Do you have a social media strategy? Without a strategy, it’s difficult to direct organizations to the right tools, and even more difficult to make Salesforce and social media work together properly.

With that in mind, let’s establish what social media is, exactly, and then I’ll address applications that connect social media with Salesforce. Social media refers to mobile and web-based technologies that create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content.

Social Media Types

There are 6 types of social media:

1. Collaborative projects — Ex: Wikipedia
2. Blogs and microblogs — Ex: Twitter
3. Content communities — Ex: YouTube and SlideShare
4. Social networking sites — Ex: Facebook
5. Virtual game worlds — Ex: World of Warcraft
6. Virtual social worlds — Ex: Second Life

Integrated solutions on the Salesforce platform are most robust in two of the types above: 2 and 4. Some examples:

• Blogs and microblogs: Twitter, WordPress, and other blog platforms
• Social networking sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+

It’s important to ask yourself what you want to do with social media because Salesforce caters to each of these social media types in a different fashion. The apps that integrate with Salesforce can be divided into two categories, “Observing” and “Engaging”:

• Observing is a passive approach to your social media effort. It basically means you are watching the media environment to evaluate an impact you may have had with a press release, a campaign of some sort, a soft ask.
• Engaging is a direct approach that allows constituents to actively participate in your campaign effort. Examples include: making a donation, event sign up, membership sign up, newsletter sign on, etc.

Following are some applications that integrate with Salesforce and that fall into these categories. Some are well reviewed, some are not so well reviewed, but this will give you a sense of what’s out there now:

Observing

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud (previously Radian6) — Listens to conversations on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums, blogs, mainstream news, LinkedIn, and image sites. New sources are being added all of the time. You won’t find this on the AppExchange because it’s one of the Salesforce.com modules, not an app.
• Fliptop – Listed on the Salesforce AppExchange, this application allows you to view Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles alongside your leads and contacts.
• LinkedIn for Salesforce — Listed on the Salesforce AppExchange, view LinkedIn profiles alongside opportunity and account information directly within Salesforce.

Engaging

• Action Sprout — Designed to help organizations run Social Action Campaigns on Facebook in order to unlock their Facebook Fans with actions that move beyond Like, Share and Comment.
• Salesforce for Twitter and Facebook — Gives you a simple way to join real-time customer conversations happening on Twitter and Facebook.
• HootSuite – Just launched a Salesforce integration app, it provides HootSuite users the ability to streamline social lead generation and expand communication channels to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Remember, without a strategy of some sort, it’s going to be tough to identify which of these applications will actually help your organization. However, looking through these applications should give you a sense of what’s possible, which will help the strategy process. Happy researching!

The post Are Salesforce and Social Media, Well, Social? appeared first on The Connected Cause.

In the first post of this series, I covered considerations for approaches to the Owner field in Salesforce.com to ensure your organization can scale its use of Salesforce.com in the future. Today, let’s talk about another topic.

Multi-Select Picklists

Multi-Select Picklists are intended to allow Salesforce.com users to quickly grab multiple values of record categorization and apply them simultaneously to the same person or thing. They look pretty, and can quickly replace massive checkbox grids or a series of single-select picklists.  My issues with them run deep and strong, especially with their limited ability to be easily referenced in Salesforce.com automation processes such as workflows and formulas (though this has improved over time), as well as how they are handled in Salesforce.com reporting, which is literally as a series of text-only values in some cases.

For these reasons, I always ask two questions when considering multi-select picklists:

• Are they a primary or secondary differentiator of the values contained within them?
• Do you simply need to see the information in these picklists on a record, or actually build reports and Salesforce.com automation based on it?

I prefer to use multi-select picklists to further define a single-select picklist (or checkbox) value, which preserves some of the best of both worlds: high-level definition for reporting and ease of automation, with additional granularity applied at a lower level.

How do you use the Multi-Select Picklists in Salesforce? Let us know in the comments below.

Stay tuned to The Connected Cause for the next post in this series covering Picklist Value Collisions.

Don’t miss Part 1 of this series that discusses the Salesforce Owner Field.

The post Scaling Salesforce as You Grow, Part 2 [Tech Tips] appeared first on The Connected Cause.

Tired of juggling data in multiple systems? Many nonprofits are. Since the popularization of online marketing applications, it’s been common for nonprofits to have at least one database to manage “offline” traditional fundraising and donor management, and another database to manage online marketing efforts.

Integrated Suites with Combined Functions

There are now multiple solutions that combine traditional donor management functionality with online marketing capabilities, and sometimes even extend into complete Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

Our most recent report, Integrated Suites Product Review, provides an overview of some of the top integrated suites for nonprofits. In this paper, we review six integrated suites aimed at mid- to large-size nonprofits.

For each suite, you’ll find out:

• How online and offline functionality and databases integrate
• Pricing models
• Functionality highlights
• Product roadmap highlights

Integrated suites we reviewed:

• Affinaquest™/2Dialog™ by Affinaquest and 2Dialog
• Luminate™ suite by Blackbaud (formerly a product of Convio)
• netForum Enterprise™ by Avectra
• The Raiser’s Edge™/NetCommunity™ by Blackbaud
• roundCause™ by roundCorner
• Springboard™ by Jackson River

Be sure to download the Integrated Suites Product Review to find out more about the new world of integrated suites available today. You’ll be glad you did!

Download the Whitepaper Now
 

The post New Integrated Suites Product Review for Nonprofits appeared first on The Connected Cause.

With the 2013 National Walk for Epilepsy fast approaching, the organization was looking for a fresh new design for their peer-to-peer event. This national walk is one of Epilepsy Foundation of America’s (EFA) biggest supporter campaigns of the year. They’d used a variant of the design in 2012 and had gotten feedback from their event participants that needed to be addressed in a refresh. Our combined teams (EFA and Firefly Partners) did not have a lot of time – the public kick-off date had been selected and event registration needed to launch on time.

The team at EFA was most concerned with highlighting the four main actions around event participation and support.  Firefly created a new event greeting page with effective pathways for visitors, supporters and participants.

Early results include:

• Fewer Duplicates — Firefly’s team created a user flow that made it super intuitive for a returning participant to log in and register without creating a duplicate record in the CRM system.
• Engagement Recognition — Participants who meet or exceed team and fundraising goals receive special badges. We set these up to automatically populate without using precious staff time to manage.
• Fully Branded Communication — Firefly added custom CSS so fonts, colors and other styles remain consistent throughout every action, page and email message.

Find out more: Download the Epilepsy Foundation case study here:

The post A Fresh Approach to a Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Site appeared first on The Connected Cause.

It’s a situation that many nonprofits face: data and processes in multiple databases and spreadsheets. This may be the result of adding specific systems over time to meet specific needs. Or, it might have something to do with having multiple locations or chapters that each use a different system.

No matter how a nonprofit gets there, disparate data and processes can cause several challenges. Data is difficult to keep synchronized. Staff members may not trust the data in their systems because it’s inaccurate or incomplete. It can be nearly impossible to get a full view of each constituent’s interactions with the organization. But, creating a strong CRM strategy and implementing a single CRM system to support it can help any nonprofit overcome these challenges.

Here’s an example: Heller Consulting helped JDRF implement the Salesforce.com platform to manage everything from fundraising to program and volunteer management — all from a single, consolidated system.

Following are just some of the results:

• Simplified technology — JDRF has a unified system that’s easier to use and support for managing data and processes across the organization’s national office and chapters.
• Consistent constituent experience — Staff members can now view, manage and access constituent data in a coordinated way through a single system, allowing them to engage with constituents more consistently.
• A system for growth — With Salesforce.com as their single platform, JDRF can modify processes and integrate new technologies as the organization grows.

Find out more: Download the JDRF case study here:
 

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