So this is pretty significant news for nonprofits, Vertical Response is now allowing nonprofits to get 10,000 free emails per month. Details here:

http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2008/04/non-profits-ema.html

and if you aren't already using Vertical Response, they have a nice integratin with Salesforce available here:

http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000000GI9FAAW

VERY Exciting news for the over 3,000 nonprofits we have using Salesforce.com

Chris

For the past two weeks I've been on the road and attending Salesforce Events in Miami, Boston and my home city of New York. We are really generating momentum in the nonprofit space around using Platform as a Service. My metric for measuring this is the sheer number of larger nonprofits that are starting to attend our events not judging the effectiveness of our product, but strategically planning in their head what they want to build next on our platform. I had the opportunity to host a lunch with a variety of customers and prospects in our Higher Education market, talking about some of our success in the space because Salesforce when compared to existing higher ed systems that just can't be configured for integration and expanded application development, to not say anything about how user unfriendly they are. It's very exciting to sit with a group of people, from well known schools that are easily recognizable, excited about the potential of development on our platform.

After lunch, I talked to another large nonprofit customer who said to me, "what's amazing is we actually have metrics", they'd recently taken some tracking data for sales and marketing that had been on a spreadsheet and built it out in Salesforce. Cloud computing is a concept that any organization, nonprofit or for profit, need to get their heads around to see the potential benefits. This understanding of what is possible is why we are starting to see large nonprofit organizations make the switch of legacy databases to Salesforce and see real success.

In the next two weeks we will be taking the Tour de Force event to London as part of Dreamforce Europe. If you are reading this and you know of a charity that might like to attend, please drop me a note personally catwood@salesforce.com we have some signficantly discounted rates to attend available.

Chris Atwood

Account Manager, America's East and EMEA Nonprofits and Higher Education

Why Salesforce.com and Google Apps will Change the Game for Nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations should not need to deal with the plumbing of technology.  They should be able to move ALL of their resources on to the Internet (into the cloud) and concentrate their technical and creative talents on making the world a better place.  To date, this has been nothing more than a nice idea. However, that all changed yesterday. There are a lot of resources out there about exactly what is available and exactly what it will and will not do. 

A great salesforce.com resource is here: www.salesforce.com/googleapps.

Here's a page from Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/posted-by-scott-mcmullan-google-apps.html

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

First point to be made here is that, he came.  The features that are now available represent a tremendously useful first step, a great mash-up.  The fact that Eric Schmidt and Marc Benioff presented this together means that this is an alliance between two companies with supporting visions.  A computing platform is being built and both of these companies are dedicated to the success of the nonprofit sector.  For evidence of this: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/product and http://www.google.com/nonprofits.

Joseph Mouzon - Network for Good

Next point to be made is the critical role of the social sector in this announcement and the ongoing development and adoption of this cloud computing platform.  In the video above Joseph Mouzon of Network for Good does a great job of describing the value proposition of this new integration.  And, salesforce.com has chosen this video as an effective way to get out the news to it's entire community of users. 

Blogs:

Nonprofit blogger, Judi Sohn in her blog http://www.momathome.com, has two excellent posts on this new integration.  It is worth mentioning that there is nothing uniquely "nonprofit" about her post.  She writes about what she sees as that is immediately valuable and where she sees room to grow.  A wonderful thing to notice about her posts are the comments. 

In this post

http://www.momathome.com/2008/04/google_apps_and_salesforce_-_finally_a_first_look/

A salesforce.com employee comments to fill in some information on the features of gmail to salesforce.com.

And in this post

http://www.momathome.com/2008/04/more_on_the_salesforcegoogle_calendar_sync_bug/

about an issue that she found in the Appirio calendar sync, you will notice that Appirio commented at 8:44pm that they would look in to the problem and at 3:06am reposted that it was fixed. 

The nonprofit sector is nobody's step-child!  We are driving innovation.  We are at the forefront.  Can I get a witness!?

Another great blog from NTEN is here:
http://nten.org/blog/2008/04/14/salesforce-com-google-improved-productivity

And Finally...

The new Google App Engine is LOUSING with potential.  Like I mentioned earlier, what we have seen, from a feature perspective, is a great mash-up.  After watching the video above, sit back in a comfy chair, turn on some very loud music (headphones or surround sound preferred) and think about what you could accomplish by mashing up your organization's Salesforce.com data with custom, universally available web-apps built on the Google architecture.  APEX + Google App Engine, mmmmmmmm.   Now open you eyes.  Now go build it.

"Part of the issue here is that we never build the app that you want. We build an app that you may want...  Why not build them on a common inexpensive infrastructure that has all the information on it anyway."  - Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

What we are seeing are two companies betting the bank on the success of their customers.  If, and only if, we are successful, then they are successful.  Intuitively, this makes perfect sense, yet it is strangely rare.  We have the keys to the castle and we were invited in through the front door.

Steve Wright
Director of Innovation
Salesforce.com Foundation

The Salesforce Foundation has a global mission, ensuring nonprofit success around the world and making nonprofits aware of our product donation program is one of our top focuses. Salesforce is available in fifteen languages including Spanish. I used to live in Argentina and find myself back in the country a couple of times a year and have spent quite a bit of time working with Idealist in their Buenos Aires office. Idealist is a great organization for nonprofits and also a very successful user of Salesforce.com. Their website is integrated with Salesforce.com and fully integrated into every aspect of their operation.

With my last visit to Argentina we decided to host an event for nonprofits in Buenos Aires and "hacer un poco de ruido" or make a little bit of noise.  We hosted the event at the Circulo Italiano and had about 50 people there from 30 different organizations.  We had three speakers, I first talked about the license donation program and gave a company overview, the next speaker was Jans Larssen from HelpArgentina.  HelpArgentina uses our product for contact/account/donation tracking, and also received a grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation and continues to work to improve the integration of their website with Salesforce.com. The third and final speaker was Matias Laurenz from Idealist.  Matias did a great job discussing how to use Salesforce successfully and some of the ways that Idealist is using it in their day to day operations. The speakers were followed by a Q and A session. We were lucky to also be joined by ETIS and Endeavor, both Salesforce.com customers. It was a very exciting event and we received a lot of positive feedback afterward on the program. Additional pictures are located here : http://picasaweb.google.com/mlaurenz/SFEvent

Chris Atwood

The Salesforce.com Foundation just put on an event in NY that I am very proud of.  (...of which I am very proud.) 

Happy Holidays from all of us here at Salesforce.com and the Salesforce.com Foundation,

My post today isn't holiday oriented though. I just want to remind everyone that Salesforce.com offers a FREE weekly backup service (included for all Enteprise and Unlimited Edition accounts, nonprofits have Enterprise) for your data. One of my Customers first did a data upload and accidently wiped out all the first names of all their contacts. That prompted this blog entry, because had they backed up their data recently it would have been a much less painless process for them to restore the data. It's also a good idea to do this regularly as part of your own CRM Change Control procedures.

To request a data export, follow the steps listed below.

1. Click on:

Setup | Administration Setup | Data Management | Data Export.

2. Select the "Include attachments" check box (if desired).

3. Select any data that you would like to include by checking the box next to the name of the object. Selecting the "Include all data" box will include data from all tables.

4. Click the "Data Export" button.

A confirmation email will be sent when the export has completed, with a link to the export files, as mentioned above.

If your holiday plans include any major data updates, give yourself the gift of backing up first.

Chris Atwood

Nonprofit Account Manager

Salesforce.com

Blat-Lapidot hosted a non-profit conference in their offices in Israel for foundation customers in Israel. In the conference included explanations about why and how non-profit organizations should use the system, a lecture our about Salesforce.com`s basic functions and day-to-day use, with an emphasis on the substantial difference between non-profits and business oriented companies. In conclusion, Blat-Lapidot hosted a session in which their implementation team spent time with the attendees and helped them with any specific questions and issues.

Candy Shinaar, Director of Resource Development at ERAN: "I have to say how very happy we were to attend the seminar. We were very impressed with your company. The tuition was extremely helpful, and the personal attention we received was exceptional!"

If you are a nonprofit organisation in Israel and wish to get in touch with Blat Lapidot please visit http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/Blat-Lapidot for more information.

*Written and posted on behalf of Omer Cygler, Blat Lapidot, omer@blat-lapidot.co.il.

Getting to work in the Salesforce.com Foundation on the Product Donation program is a pretty exciting job, we get to bridge two communities, the IT sector, plus the nonprofit sector, two sectors I love to be involved with. On Wednesday 07 November we had the pleasure of presenting and exhibiting at the Plaza Publishing IT Charity Conference in the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre London and meet with a broad spectrum representative of both industries. Being based in Dublin, Ireland, a little trip to the UK is always nice too.

Alongside the Salesforce.comFoundation were some of our key partners - implementation partners Frank Seo, CEO of Sofia Works, Ben Belassie, CEO of Generate Enterprise, David Woodhead, Director at Astadia Consulting UK, and Tony Russell, CEO of Intelligent Payment Solutions, (who offer a direct debit payment service to nonprofits - perfect for working on direct debit payments within the salesforce application). We were armed also with Dr Steve Garnett, Chairman for salesforce.com EMEA, who opened a salesforce.com track titled “ Salesforce.com– The On-Demand Nonprofit”. James Penfold, Sales Engineer with salesforce.com was also attending to provide expert advice.

The aim of our attendance as exhibitors was to share a broad spectrum of our product donation, which goes a lot further than just license donation. While we donate 10 Enterprise-class edition licenses to eligible nonprofits and can sell additional licenses at a massively reduced cost, our donation is greatly enhanced by the participation of Partners in our Donation Program.

Our Foundation Partners offer implementations and consultancy to nonprofits at heavily discounted rates, while still offering a professional and competitive service. This gives our nonprofit user community the power to drive their application to a powerful level and get the maximum return from their hard-earned contacts. To put it simply, using the application allows nonprofits to manage their data effectively and allows the nonprofit organisation to focus on what it does best – achieving their social mission without the headache of IT servers, complex data administration and inflexible legacy systems. 

The event was attended by medium to large sized UK charities as well as the very small nonprofit organisations, who typically have just as complex business processes as larger organisations. We were delighted to find many nonprofits interested in availing of our donation program – many of whom were driven to our stand following the enthusiastic speech delivered by John May, MD from UK Career Academy who opened his presentation declaring, “I’m not from salesforce.com and I can tell you – I love this product!”

Key enquires into the use of salesforce.com for nonprofits revolved around integrating with payment solutions, plus web interfacing, beyond the standard web-to-lead functionality - a common theme amongst people who dropped by our stand. And yes, our application can and does do all those things! If you are interested in more comprehensive details of our Product Donation Program and/or wish to apply, please visit the Salesforce.com Foundation site - www.salesforcefoundation.org. If you are a nonprofit organisation based in Europe, Middle East or Africa feel free to contact me, Sara Brophy, at: sbrophy@salesforce.com.

So I admit it, i'm addicted to Facebook, i'm sure i'm not the only one. I have way too many profiles across a lot of sites, friendster, linkedin, even ratemyface.com . All of those sites have a social network component, but all of them are different. Google announced on November 1st a new common API called "Open Social". This would allow a common API to run across social network sites to interface information between them and business applications. Google outlined a few key pieces of information in their announcement video that people want to know:

People

Friends

Activities

All of these are key pieces of information that you would want to know about your Salesforce contacts in the nonprofit world. By exposing this type of interface through social networking sites it allows yet another level of data richness.  I liked the linkedin demo that they showed in the video about knowing what people you know or are related too.

So now onto the most exciting part! At minute 43 of the youtube video Jason Masciarelli, CEO of Theikos and Adam Gross of Salesforce.com. Theikos is a Salesforce.com partner and has a long history of implementing Salesforce for Nonprofits (as a disclosure I used to work there prior to joining Salesforce.com). I really like how they are demoing showing the relationship between people that other contacts know. You can show how a volunteer, for example, might have a relationship to one of your major donors via an application like the one demonstrated.  I talked with Jason today about it, and Theikos is pretty excited about being involved. He said in the next few weeks once Winter 07 is released that they will be announcing an appexchange widget around Open Social which should be exciting for our nonprofit community. I look forward to seeing more!

Chris Atwood, Nonprofits and Education, Salesforce.com

ps. Check out Adam's blog entry here.

Let me first introduce myself since this is my first blog post. My name is Chris Atwood and I manage Nonprofits and Education for Salesforce.com on the East Coast and for EMEA (including our UK customers). I've been working with nonprofits for three years and my mission in life is to work with our larger nonprofits and helping them to use Salesforce.com. Many of our nonprofits have extensive needs around fundraising and we are always looking for partners that want to work with Salesforce.com to solve a need of a nonprofit. The larger ones tend to want to track their programs and their fundraising all in the same place.

About a week and a half ago I attended the Convio Summit event in Austin, TX. Convio has a well known and well used e-crm product for online fundraising, web-advocacy, and emailing. I had an opportunity to also speak on a Datasync panel and walk a packed room of large nonprofits through our donation program and product. Convio announced and demoed throughout the conference their new integration with Salesforce.com that they created.