Nonprofit Success - April 2008

• Vertical Response Program for Nonprofits

  Chris Atwood Apr 24, 2008

  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

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• Thoughts on Tour De Force

  Chris Atwood Apr 24, 2008

  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

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• Salesforce.com and Google Apps

  Conches Apr 16, 2008

  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

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