Due to Kyla and I both attending salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference next week, we will not be holding our normal User Group meeting in November.  We will schedule our next regular meeting for early December and bring back all the exciting new things we learned from the conference to share with everyone.

What I'd like to propose for November instead is that anyone interested in connecting more with the nonprofit tech community here in Austin to attend the Nonprofit Bar Camp event this Saturday, sponsored by NTEN.  Kyla and I will both be there, and there will be a member of our group (Ehren Foss) presenting on some concepts around salesforce.com for nonprofits.  It's also a great way to continue to build a community of nonprofit tech folks in this area!

Here are the details of the event:

RSVP NOW = http://npocamp.eventbrite.com/

What It Is:

Austin Non Profit Camp is a free, facilitated and participant driven
conference that will be the place in Austin for non profits to learn and
troubleshoot their technology problems in a supportive, collaborative
setting.

Non Profit Bar Camp is being spearheaded by David J. Neff, Jon Lebkowsky, Maggie Duval and Matt Glazer. Their goal is to take the successful Bar Camp model and apply it to expand understanding and awareness of  technology within the non-profit community in Central Texas.

How It Works:

Non profits and technology folks come together to have conversations about the issues that they face in a no sales, no cost environment. We bring tech experts together with nonprofits in a context that will facilitate mutual understanding. In addition to scheduled speakers, attendees will have the option to sign up to speak about issues and solutions they know best.

Nonprofit attendees collaboratively problem solve issues they face with running and promoting their organizations, workshopping with local technologists about the latest and most effective technologies and methodologies. These conversations will help nonprofits filter what’s useful from what’s not and keep their organizations humming and on track.

A Free lunch is provided by Pictoric and the fine folks at carinos italian

Topics:

Google Apps, Data Exchange/Salesforce, Google Grants, Social Media, Marketing/PR, Cloud Computing, Email Marketing, Fundraising in Social Media, ZERO COST Infrastructure, ROI of The Cloud and much more!

Event Details:

Date: November 14th Time: 10:00 a.m. -- 4:00 p.m.

Location: ACC Eastview Campus 3401 Webberville Road

Keynote Delivered by: Holly Ross from NTEN

Non Profit Camp is sponsored by: NTEN, 501 Tech Club, Plutopia Productions, 501derful.org, Austin Social Media Club, and GNI Strategies

A Free lunch is provided by http://twitter.com/Pictoric and the fine folks
at http://twitter.com/carinositalian

Clare Fleming, Executive Director of Ventana del Soul

• Introduced mission and services of Ventana del Soul
  

Meghan Morrison, Co-Lead of the User group & Founder of Swift River Consulting

• Introduced the September Meeting:
  
  • The speaker
    
  • Dreamforce, upcoming learning and networking opportunity, with a discount
    
  • Emphasizes the importance of reporting to a nonprofit's stakeholders & decision making

Rita Jhivari, Salesforce CSM for Austin area to present Intro to Reports & Analytics

• Key Steps fo Report Planning
• Best Practices
  
  • Creating Reports - Webcast available from Help & Training within Salesforce
  • Summary Roll up Fields
  • Creating Custom Report Types
    • In the event you are missing report types in the Report Wizard
    • Done in Setup
  • Deploying Reports
  • Using Reports
    • to monitor your data
    • CRM Fusion App available
  • Maintaining Reports
  • Dashboard Planning
    • Creating Dashboards
    • Chart Types
• New Features
  • Dashboard Hierarchy
  • Summary Snapshots
  • Advanced Formula Functions
• Consulting Packages available for Salesforce
• Dreamforce will have a host of information about Reports and Analytics
• Additional Resources will be posted to the LinkedIn group

We hope everyone has survived the summer and even had some fun doing it!  It's time to get back into your salesforce projects and join us for the next user group meeting!

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, September 16th, from 12:00 - 2:00 at:

Ventana del Soul
1834 E. Oltorf Street
Austin

The agenda for this meeting is all about everyone's favorite subject:  ANALYTICS!  (C'mon, you know you love them.)  We are fortunate to have a trainer from salesforce.com joining us for this meeting to teach us about the Reports and Dashboards functionality in the software.  As everyone knows, your data is the key to everything, including funding, reporting to your Board, making all your hard work visible to your boss, etc.  So, if you have some great nonprofit reports and dashboards you'd like to share with other nonprofits, or just want to learn how to use this very important and powerful part of the software, please join us for this session!

Don't forget lunch will be provided!

Kyla and I are looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks! 

August 5, 2009
12:00 to 1:30 pm

816 Congress (IBC Bank's building, on the corner of 9th & Congress)
3rd floor

We're still on for the August User Group meeting.  Meghan is out of town, so it's a looser format this time with more informal discussion.  If you can make it, please come with an open mind as we discuss what we are working on.  There will be a projector and laptop if you'd like to share something you've worked on!  And we will be hearing a couple Admins who have some tips to share.

As always, lunch is provided.  It's a box lunch from Do Good Deli & there will be many selections available.

Please email kyla@onestarfoundation.org to RSVP for this event!

Parking is metered on all downtown streets, so please plan accordingly.  Click here for a map.

When: Friday, July 17, 2009 12:00 PM-1:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada).

 

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

 

Nonprofit User Groups,

 

We've heard feedback from our community of users and partners and decided opening up the code and processes around the Nonprofit Starter Pack was the way to maximize the benefit to the nonprofits we serve.  Steve Andersen, Salesforce.com Foundation's Solutions Architect, will be leading this call to explain why we're open sourcing, what we hope to accomplish, and how we're going about it.   Please post this call information on your group blogs so your members can join in to learn more about this exciting project and how they can join our effort to help nonprofits using Salesforce.com be as effective as possible.

United States

1.  Please join my meeting.

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/224741521

 

2.  Join the conference call:

 

 

Meeting ID: 224-741-521

 

USA & Canada Toll Free 1 866 528 9422

USA Toll 1 954 334 1626

Please join both Salesforce Austin User Groups (standard & nonprofit) in their first mixer. Sponsored by CastIron Systems and held at UNCORKED Tasting Room & Wine Bar.

When: Thursday July 16^th starting @ 5:30pm.

Where: I-35 & E. 7^th Street, Downtown

This effort is focused to bring resources together for both groups.  In fact, the nonprofit users need some insight from and access to local seasoned administrators, developers and users here in Austin.  

Did you know there are 315 registered Salesforce User group members in Austin? If you haven’t joined, then join us at Uncorked to learn more.  Stay connected.  Stay with the Austin tradition.  You can help “KEEP Salesforce USER GROUPS WEIRD”.

Click here to RSVP now!

Meghan Morrison, Co-Lead of the User group & Founder of Swift River Consulting

• Introduced the July Meeting with its new format:
  • Salesforce 101
  • Real Instance Demo
  • User Clinic

Rodney White, The Acceleration Agency presented the 101 portion

            Salesforce 101 presentation

• What is a CRM, what is it for?  How do nonprofits use it?
• Foundational Salesforce Terminology and translations for nonprofits
• A few scenarios
  • Vertical Response “piggy back” donation mentioned of 10,000 emails per month for NSP donation recipients
• Some different ways to do Households
• Importance of Clean Data
  • Dirty Data = things in the wrong column or important data in a Notes field

Marc Gomillion, BookSpring volunteer, presented the Real Instance Demo

BookSpring Nonprofit Starter Pack

• Objectives of use of Salesforce
• Feature Usage
• Customizations
• Demo of his instance

Meghan led the user clinic, presenting solutions like Steve Anderson’s blog, the Nonprofit starter pack Developer Wiki in addition to the resources below:

In AppExchange

• Forms Assembly: http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016ac6EAA
• Click Tools: http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016aHQEAY

 Also, mention of the utility of Training Modules within Salesforce:

• Fundamentals for Salesforce: https://admin.acrobat.com/_a13852757/sffundamentals
• Connect for Outlook: https://admin.acrobat.com/_a13852757/outlookintro

For those of you who've been following along on the development of salesforce for nonprofits, this news will hopefully come as a welcome change.

A couple of weeks ago the salesforce Foundation made the excellent move of hiring Steve Andersen of gokubi.com and ONE/NW fame.  Steve has quickly jumped in and started refining the tools and processes that were out there for the new Nonprofit Starter Pack that thousands of nonprofits have signed up to use.

At our Foundation Partner meeting last week, Steve announced that the decision had been made to make all the code behind the Starter Pack available as an open source project for everyone to see, add to, help advance, etc.  This is indeed a most useful and exciting improvement in the nonprofit sector's ability to move forward in its adoption of salesforce.

Here are the details from Steve:

http://blogs.salesforce.com/nonprofit/2009/06/open-s.html

If you are so inclined, please join in the effort to continue to develop this product and improve upon it for all nonprofits!

Also, look for an announcement shortly about a webinar from Steve to talk about the open source project and Nonprofit Starter Pack.

Our next Austin Nonprofit User Group meeting is on Wednesday, July 1st.

We're set to meet from 12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. at:

Ventana del Soul
1834 E Oltorf St.
Austin, TX 78741
(512) 707-7447

http://www.ventanadelsoul.org/

This month we will be focusing on salesforce basics with a Salesforce for Nonprofits 101 meeting. Rodney White of The Acceleration Agency will be spending some time talking about how nonprofits can use salesforce and some process ideas on setting things up. Then Marc Gomillion will show us a demo of the implementation he did for BookSpring to give us a great example of one approach to using salesforce in the nonprofit sector.

I would also like to save some time for groups to bring in their questions/problems they might be having with using salesforce. This is an especially great opportunity for new users just getting going to ask about how to get started.

If you are new to salesforce and confused about what the heck to do with this amazing donated software, this is the meeting for you!

As always, lunch will be provided, but PLEASE RSVP so I know how many lunches to order! This month Ventana del Soul is providing lunch for us as well as the meeting space.

Meghan

• Introduced of group & structure and asked folks to identify if they were:
  • A Common Ground user (1 person & another owner/nonuser)
  • A brand new Salesforce user (none)
• Introduced Common Ground trainer, Chad Miller from Convio

Chad

• General overview of Convio & Common Ground and how it interacts with Salesforce
• Grand Tour of Common Ground
  • Creating households and connecting their relationships
  • Slow motion gift transaction
  • Not yet released tools: Duplicate Merge Manager (though not dynamic, but great when used periodically),Volunteer Management, Event Management
• Feel free to email at cmiller@convio.com

Meghan

• Won’t always do demos, depending on what the users want.
• Next meeting planning to have Steve from Nonprofit Edition of Salesforce
• Some future sessions based on people's experience level with Salesforce, like a Salesforce 101 type meeting to learn what Salesforce can do if you’re just getting started.
• Asked for other orgs who are already up and running to demo their own instance of Salesforce so we can learn from what each of us has done.
• Need to still figure out how this group wants to run itself
• Next time at Ventana del Soul possibly