Thanks to everyone for attending out last meeting at Salesforce.com in San Francisco.  We had a record attendance of 34 members and we now have over 200 members registered!

Steve Anderson, Solutions Architect for the Salesforce.com Foundation presented remotely from Seattle a primer on the Nonprofit Starter Pack.  Steve related some important considerations to make before installing: 1) The give and take between control of the CRM over pre-installed packages and 2) making the choice between the One-to-One and Individual models for Contacts.

David Taber of Sales Logistix presented very well documented and researched information on Email Blasting.

Download Email Lessons Learned from Corporate

Our next Nonprofits Bay Area user group meeting will be on Wednesday, May 13. Please RSVP to let us know if you'll be attending.

WHEN: Wednesday, May 13th from 12:00-1:30 p.m.

MEETING TOPIC: This week we're fortunate to have Ralph Eddy, Salesforce field sales engineer presenting. His presentation will focus on Visual Force, Sites, and Payment integration. In particular, Ralph will be discussing how to build and use Visualforce and Apex code as well as how it's used in Sites. In addition, he'll be covering payment integration for those of you who are considering services like PayPal. Afterward, we'll be breaking out into three smaller groups who will focus on specific topics (i.e., security [profiles/roles] / data maintenance and migration; and a continued discussion on Salesforce sites).

As always, please come prepared for an interactive session. If there's a particular topic you're interested in, please email them to us now. We'll do our best to include them in this week's session. We'll be needing volunteers to help head up the break-out sessions. Please let me know if you're interested in heading up one of the groups.

LUNCH: A free lunch will be provided.

LOCATION: Salesforce's San Francisco offices at One Market Street in the Kalakaua conference room on the 6th floor. We'll all need to meet at  the Starbucks in the courtyard of the building and be escorted up to the conference room. 

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday, March 13th at 12:00 p.m.!

Best,
Your user group leaders

Charles Garzón (Center for Genetics and Society)
Spencer Bolles (Bay Area Community Resources)

The Salesforce.com team focusing on nonprofit success is excited to be participating in the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco, April 26 - 28th. 

While the conference has sold out, the free Science Fair provides a great opportunity to see some of the latest and greatest solutions available to nonprofits. Salesforce.com Foundation staff be there in full force showcasing some of the most powerful features and uses of the force.com platform. It would be great to connect! 

Nonprofit Technology Conference Science Fair
San Francisco Hilton, 333 O'Farrell Street 
Sunday April 26th from 3 - 8 pm

Hope to see you there!

Meghan Nesbit
Senior Manager of Alliances and Product Donations
mnesbit@salesforce.com
www.salesforcefoundation.org

Content Management – For those of you considering adding Content Management to your Salesforce, take a look and/or download Jackie Pohl, Education Pioneers, great presentation she made to our users group last December. In her presentation Jackie showcased how her organization utilized this Salesforce tool.

We would like to thank all of you who attended our March 11^th Users Group meeting in San Francisco. It was the largest gathering thus far with 26 participants. Don’t forget the more input we get from you the better we’ll be able to make our meetings. If you have any suggestions on meeting format or topics I strongly encourage you to contact either of the group leaders (Charles – mailto:cgarzon@geneticsandsociety.org; or Spencer – sbolles@bacr.org).

Don’t forget to take a look at the new features found in the Spring ’09 release. There are some exciting new items that are available now with this release. Some are ready to use others need to be “enabled.”

Some include easier ways of building “dream apps” for those of you hardcore techies in our group. Also, for the first time we’ll be able to share information and collaborate with like minded organizations and/or colleagues through Salesforce. For a complete listing of the new features found in the Spring ’09 release please go to https://na1.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_spring09_release_notes.pdf

Thanks,

Charles Garzón

Dreamforce '08 was amazing.  One of the most memorable moments: watching Obama give his acceptance speech on TV with the Salesforce Foundation and Nonprofit community at the top of the Drake Hotel's Starlight Ballroom. 

Dreamforce had a way of putting your head in the cloud, imagining success, and inspiring the next iterations of applications, so after the conference at the agency where I work, we met with our Executive Team.  We reviewed and planned how we're using Salesforce for Administrative offices and we've started building a call center application with a Salesforce partner for one of our programs.  Wherever you are with your Salesforce org, from first round investigation to successfully rolling out a new application, the User Group can be a place to share, learn and build community. 

Our next meeting is this Wednesday, December 10th Noon at Earthjustice Conference Room in Oakland.  This will be our last meeting at Earthjustice and we are scouting around the East Bay for a new meeting place.  Please contact us with any resources.

On Wednesday we'll look at Salesforce Content Management.  Jackie Pohl of Education Pioneers will showcase how her organization utilizes this Salesforce tool. Then Spencer will be presenting on Agile software development models.

We hope to see you at this and future meetings!

The Bay Area Non Profits user group is dedicated to helping nonprofit users of Salesforce.com share ideas and best practices, networking, and hopefully having some fun in the process. The group is led by Seth Schneider of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition, Clayton Yee of San Francisco Nature Education, and Spencer Bolles of Bay Area Community Resources.

We meet monthly, alternating between Oakland and San Francisco. There is no cost to participate. Meetings are geared to current nonprofit users of Salesforce.com, but are open to anyone who is interested.

Please sign up for this user group so that you can stay informed of our meetings and events. Just use the simple form on the left under Join Now! and select "Nonprofits Bay Area" from the pull-down menu. 

Our next Nonprofits Bay Area user group meeting will be Wednesday, July 9. Please RSVP so we'll know how much food to order. RSVP to seth [at] transcoalition [dot] org.

WHEN: Wednesday, July 9th from 12:00-1:30 p.m.

MEETING TOPIC: You request it, we deliver! We'll be trying a new topic suggested by Jackie P. at our last session: which AppExchange apps are you using? Bring your list of favorite (or least favorite!) apps and compare notes on what works well. And even if you aren't using anything from the AppExchange this is an opportunity to find out which apps others are using. In the second half of our meeting, Charles Garzon will demonstrate how his organization is using Salesforce to manage communications with media outlets and contacts. Please come prepared for an interactive session -- bring your tips and questions and we'll learn from each other.

LUNCH: A free lunch will be provided.

LOCATION: Salesforce.com headquarters at 1 Market Street in San Francisco, near the Embarcadero BART/Muni station. Meet downstairs in the lobby in front of the Starbucks and we'll go upstairs together. Please meet promptly at 12:00 p.m., as it's easier to get in if we go together as a group.

When someone new subscribes to receive your organization’s emails do you have a way to welcome them -- introducing them to your programs, easing them in, and perhaps finishing with a fundraising ask -- or do they get stuck into the mass email pool with everyone else? Here’s an easy way to use formulas and workflows to set up an automated stream of welcome emails, in order to send a series of introductory emails before your subscriber starts receiving everything else. The assumption is you’ll want to send your emails on Tuesdays and Thursdays (during peak days for email receptivity) during the first month after sign up, which is the “sweet spot” for the person’s interest in your organization. Download the instructions for this solution.

Credit for the automated welcome stream concept goes to Jeff Patrick of Common Knowledge who explained how they used this solution for their client, IFAW, at the recent NTEN conference. Seth demonstrated this proof of concept of implementing this solution on Salesforce.com at today's Bay Area Nonprofit user group meeting. The main advantage is that it's significantly cheaper to do this on Salesforce than on some other CRM solutions.

NOTE: Charles Garzon will soon be posting his instructions for using Salesforce Mobile.

Our next user group meeting will be on Wednesday, June 11 from 12:00-1:30. Please RSVP to let us know if you'll be attending. Please RSVP to seth at transcoalition dot org.

MEETING TOPIC: Hooray for user-generated topics! This month's topics are a follow up to questions raised at last month's meeting and a topic request from Jackie Pohl. (See, we weren't kidding when we asked for your feedback in last week's email.)

First, we'll look at formulas, and how they relate to donor fundraising. For example, what kind of formulas would you need to use to generate a LYBUNT report (donors who gave Last Year But Unfortunately Not This year)? We'll do a formula demo -- details to be announced soon.

Second, we'll look at workflows -- a way to help automate routine processes. For example, if every time you receive a new membership you send out an acknowledgment email, why not automate that process? We'll do a workflow demo -- more details coming soon.

As always, please come prepared for an interactive session. And if you have any questions right now about formulas or workflows, please email them to us now. We can't promise to know the answer, but it will increase the odds if we know the questions in advance.

LUNCH: A free lunch will be provided.

LOCATION: Earthjustice 8th floor conference room, 426 17th Street, in downtown Oakland. The location is two blocks from the 12th Street/City Center BART station and multiple AC Transit bus lines or one block from the 19th Street BART station.

Please RSVP to seth at transcoalition dot org.

New features in the Summer 08 release
We got a preview from Lindsey Anderson of some of the upcoming features in the Summer 08 release. These include public tagging, inline list editing, drag and drop columns in list views, multi day events, Visual Force, Salesforce.com for Google Apps (which has already been widely announced), and enhancements for mobile users. Salesforce lists these features, plus others, that are coming in Summer 08. Get more information on the Salesforce blog. Finally, Steve Andersen has a write up of the features from a nonprofit perspective.

Follow the NPSF group
The Nonprofit Salesforce group on Google is a good learning resource. If you're not an experienced Salesforce user you may want to lurk and just read the postings as many of the participants are consultants and higher-level users. Regardless, it's still a good source for following questions and answers.

Mass closing tasks
As mentioned at the meeting, here is a handy way to close a bunch of tasks at once using a list button. This code comes from Anand Sethupathy, based on previous work from Steve Andersen and Evan Callahan, courtesy of the NPSF group mentioned below. To use this button, create a view on Activity to show all relevant open tasks. Then create a Close Task list button to execute the Javascript below:

{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/10.0/connection.js")}

var selected = {!GETRECORDIDS($ObjectType.Task)};

if (selected[0] == null) {
    alert("You must select at least one Task to run this function.")

} else {

   // Close all selected tasks
    for(i=0;i < selected.length;i++) {
        var t = new sforce.SObject("Task");
        t.id = selected[i];
        // Update task status to "Completed"
        t.Status = "Completed";
       // Run the Update on Tasks
       var result = sforce.connection.update([t]);

}

   // refresh the view
    window.location.reload();

Coming soon
Bryan Coddington offered to give us a reporting tip sheet. Look for it here in the near future.