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.