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.

 Our next user group meeting will be on Wednesday, May 14 from 12:00-1:30. Please RSVP to seth at transcoalition dot org so we'll know how much food to order.

 This is a particularly exciting meeting because we've got a special guest this month: Lindsey Anderson of the Salesforce Foundation! Our main topic this month will be reports. Are you having trouble reporting the data you want? finding it hard to update campaign data after you've done a mailing? or do you have other questions about reports in Salesforce? Lindsey can help! We're also hoping to have a preview of an exciting new feature coming in the Summer '08 release: public tagging of records; this will allow Salesforce users to search for whatever tags other users have applied -- a quick, easy, and informal way to categorize your records. Finally, Lindsey will be available to answer any Foundation-specific questions you might have, such as donations of Salesforce licenses. Please come prepared for an interactive session -- bring your tips and questions and we'll learn from each other.

 As usual, 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.

If you arrive late and the group is no longer there, meet us upstairs in the Oahu Conference Room on the 4th Floor of the Landmark Building (there are two different towers). You will need to be escorted into the conference room.

Please RSVP to seth at transcoalition dot org so we'll know how much food to order.

Room to Read, an international non-profit with headquarters in San Francisco, is hiring a database manager to manage the development, implementation, and ongoing administration of its applications on the Salesforce.com platform. Download the job description. 

Here's a belated posting of some takeaways from our April user group meeting:

Mail Merges

• Single Document Mail Merge: To create a single mail merge document for one contact or lead, use the Mail Merge button in the Activity History section of a contact, lead, or opportunity.
• Extended Mail Merge: This is new functionality that was made available in limited release in Summer '07. You have to request that Salesforce activate it. You can use this bulk mail merge process to create form letters, bulk email, mailing labels, and other merged documents from your Salesforce data. This process assumes that Microsoft Outlook is the default email application used when performing bulk email merges. For more information, go to the Help section of your Salesforce org and search for Mail Merge Overview.
• Conga Merge: This is third-party software from AppExtremes. It is more powerful than built-in Salesforce functionality, allowing for merging data from multiple objects, such as contacts, accounts, and opportunities. AppExtremes will donate a couple of licenses to nonprofit organizations. See the AppExtremes website for more information about Conga Merge.
• Generate Mailing Labels: From an Account or Campaign, generate mailing labels, in various Avery formatted styles, for the related Contacts or Leads. The resulting Word document is saved either as an attachment or in the Document repository. Works with Standard or Non-Profit template. This is an S-Control button that is available as a private install from the AppExchange. Learn more and download it.

Some tips on user training
Attendees at the user group had a number of suggestions for effective user training:

• Do trainings in one-hour chunks. Any longer and you'll overwhelm and burn people out.
• Try separating your trainees into groups according to their tech savvy-ness.
• Ask questions of your users to see if they're understanding the material.
• Try giving them exercises to do prior to a subsequent training.
• The Salesforce online trainings can be useful -- the most relevant track for nonprofit users would be trainings for Sales Representatives.
• Bribe them with rewards: cookies!

 MEETING TOPIC: We will focus on two topics at our next user group meeting. First, we'll have a look at mail merges -- how do you generate letters, labels, and other merges, and what other options are out there? Then we'll take a look at web-to-lead forms -- how are you using them to collect sign ups on your website and what are some best practices? We'll also aim to leave more time than usual for open discussion. 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: 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 so we'll know how much food to order.

Record Types and Page Layouts
The main part of today's meeting focused on record types and page layouts. It's hard to summarize what we covered in a blog post, but I'll give it a quick try.

Record types are a way to categorize the records in a given object -- e.g. for your Organizations (aka Accounts for those of you not on the Nonprofit Template) you might have record types of Business, Foundation, Government Agency, and Nonprofit. Having these record types then lets you do a couple of powerful things. First, you can use the record type in any kind of reporting that you do to see results according to the kinds of entities that matter to you. Second, you can assign a different page layout to a given record type. So, for example, if you have one record type of School and another of Business, you could have corresponding page layouts. Then, on the School layout you might display a related list of teachers and classrooms, and display and hide certain fields. For example, you could display the field for school mascot on the School layout and hide it on the Business layout.

We also covered page layouts and looked at how you can easily drag and drop fields onto and off of the layout. You can also add/remove sections and related lists, set some field-level properties (read-only and required), and choose whether to have one-column or two-column displays.

Minh said that she's found that if you're going to assign a record type to a page layout that doesn't yet exist that it's better to create the page layout first and then create the new record type.

Charles said that he uses a related list to further expand the types of nonprofit organizations. This means that when the record type is set to "nonprofit" that a dependent field is made active, allowing the user to specify what kind of nonprofit it is with an additional picklist.

Charles said that he finds the Console to be a great way to have relevant information about the contact, organization, and donation all displayed on one screen.

Reporting
We also talked about reporting in Salesforce. There isn't quite as much that I can say in this blog post. It's pretty easy to go to the Reports tab and to work your way through the wizard. One tip that Michael  (?) shared is that you should avoid setting date-based criteria in the standard filters, it's much better to tell your users to delete the date criteria in the standard filters and to use the advanced filters (below on the same screen) for any kind of date-based reporting.

Charles said that he wishes there was a way to report on leads and contacts in a single report. The only way he's found around this is to query on the subject field of mass e-mails that were sent, which will pull up both leads and contacts. If anyone knows a better workaround please post a comment on this blog entry.

Spring 08 Release
The Spring 08 release will be available very shortly. One highlight is "Outer Joins." What does this mean? It's a way to view certain records whether or not other records are present. It's easier to illustrate this with an example. You could do an outer join to find all organizations (aka Accounts), regardless of whether there are any contacts at that organization. This would then allow you to do things like seeing what percentage of your organizations you do have contacts for. This concept can be extended to other objects in Salesforce, including donations (aka Opportunities), Cases, etc.

There is a succinct overview of Outer Joins on the Salesforce blog. And a more in-depth discussion of how you can use Outer Joins by Thomas Tobin. Please note that Outer Joins are not the same thing as exception reporting. (Exception reporting is where something is not expected or not normal. For example, finding all Contacts that do not have donations.) However, there are some workarounds for creating exception reports, even though it's not built in to Salesforce.

Here's the full list of Spring 08 features.

Avoiding Spam Leads
Charles mentioned that he has been getting spam leads submitted on his website (with Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms). One way to get around this is a solution that Scott Hemmeter came up with. It uses some PHP scripts to intercept the data that is submitted before it goes into Salesforce as a new lead. The scripts send the data off to Akismet to score it for its spaminess. The data then gets submitted as a new lead with a custom checkbox field for indicating whether Akismet considers it spam. (Akismet is a technology for blocking comment spam on blogs.) This is not trivially easy to implement, but Scott does give fairly detailed instructions. To implement this you should know what PHP is and have a website using PHP -- such as Drupal or Joomla. I've also seen a company that offers this as a paid service, but it cost about $100/month. Check out more details about this anti-spam-lead solution on Scott's corporate website.

Moving Beyond Web-to-Leads to "Web-to-Anything"
Minh asked whether data submitted by website users could post to objects other than the Lead object. (In other words, if a teacher filled out an application on your website, could their personal information post to a Lead or Contact record, but could the information about the school post to a related Account record?) The answer is that Salesforce can't do this itself. However, Clicktools makes this possible. This used to be completely free for nonprofits, but with the recent change in AppExchange pricing, Clicktools had to begin charging for this software. Clicktools also lets you send out e-mails to leads and contacts that solicits them to update or fill in information on their record and the data is posted back to Salesforce. I've never used it, I don't get a kickback (!), but I've heard great things about this product.