Everyone,

I'm still recovering from the amazing time I had at Dreamforce and I hope that we'll have a great discussion at our next meeting about some of the things I and others found at this year's Dreamforce!  We will also have Kimberly Hunt from the Salesforce Foundation coming to speak with us about the Foundation.

Here's the info for our next meeting:

When: Wednesday, Deecmber 10 from 8:30 – 11:00 AM
Where: The Nonprofit Center, 89 South St., 1st floor, Boston, MA 02111 Bring ID please
Directions: Red Line to Downtown Crossing or South Station

Next Meeting Agenda:

1. Intro to the Salesforce.com Foundation - Kimberly Hunt 8:30 - 9:00am
2. Integrating your Drupal-based website with Salesforce - Ben DiMaggio, Digital Loom 9:00-9:45
3. Connect with the Community Presentation (short!) - Marc Baizman 9:45-10:00
4. Dreamforce Take-aways: Marc Baizman, Samantha Fernandez, others 10:00 -  10:30
5. Next Meeting date/time/location and user showcase volunteers
6. Networking  10:30 – 11:00a

First, let me apologize for the delay in getting these posted and also for the brevity of the minutes - next time, I'll need to have someone else record them, I obviously suck at this.  :)  Getting ready for Dreamforce occupied most of my time.  I'll be summarizing my experience in a separate post, and I'll also present at our next meeting about it.

We had a slightly smaller turnout for the October meeting - I'm hoping to get higher attendance for December and next year.  Please let me know if there's something you'd like to see or demo at an upcoming meeting. Email me or post in the comments here.  I also spoke with several vendors at Dreamforce who are willing to demo their products at our meetings so I'll be reaching out out to them as well.

User Showcase: YearUp - Aaron Schutzengel

Yearup is using Salesforce for:

• Measuring Student Performance
• Admissions Tracking
• Student Tracking
• Alumni Tracking
• Apprenticeship Seat Sales
• Volunteer Tracking

Some of the AppExchange apps YearUp is using are:

• Picture Uploader - storing a picture of the student on the contact record
• DemandTools - data cleaning and updating
• Contact Connector - creating and maintain relationships between contacts

A few challenges YearUp faced:

• No %'s on a gauge - had to create a workaround to do this
• User Adoption - created detailed manuals for each functional area, created a sense of competition between sites to get people on board, people measured using metrics in Salesforce

Salesforce Presentation from Steven Petalas:

Steven talked about:

• Summer 08 and Winter 09 Releases
• Workflow Rules and Cross-Object Formulas
• Google Apps integration - AppExchange Link
• Pollzter - surveys for SF and free for nonprofits!

Here are a couple of PDF files that have more detail about these:

• Download salesforce_workflow_cheatsheet.pdf
• Download salesforce_useful_workflow_rules.pdf
• Download salesforce_useful_formula_fields.pdf

Quick reminder about the meeting this week: Steven Petalas from Salesforce will be presenting, so I hope you can join us!

When: Wednesday, October 22 at 8:30 – 11:00 AM
Where: The Nonprofit Center, 89 South St., 1st floor, Boston, MA 02111 Bring ID please
Directions: Red Line to Downtown Crossing or South Station

Next Meeting Agenda:

1. User Showcases 8:30 – 9:15a

• Aaron Schutzengel, YearUp

2. Salesforce Representative Steven Petalas 9:15 – 10:00a

• Winter 09 Release
• Workflow rules

3. Specific Topics - 10:00 - 10:30

• Paypal/Google Checkout
• Protocols/style guides

4. Networking  10:30 – 11:00a

Today we have a guest post from Erin Herzeelle @ Teen Life Boston:

Dear SF Non-Profit Users:

I am currently putting together a conference entitled, "Now2Next: Get Connected to Your Future", which will take place on Sunday, November 16, 2008.  Through panelists presenting about their own occupations, background and experiences, this conference will allow teens, parents, and educators to gain insight into different industries and opportunities. Now2Next will help teens discover who they are and who they can become!

I am writing to you as I think you all come from such interesting organizations and have equally captivating stories of how you got there. I welcome you to share that story with teens through participating on one of the following panels:   (Please note that we are developing more creative titles once the panelists have confirmed. )

Advertising/Marketing
Communications (Journalism & Media)
Education/Working with Children
Technology
Engineering & Energy
Law & Government
Social Change/NonProfit
Business, Finance, & Entrepreneurship
Creative Industries
Health Care
Sports & Recreation
Agriculture & Animals

At Now2 Next you’ll connect with college-bound youth from a variety of schools in the Greater Boston area, their parents, and educators, as well as a great group of equally interesting professionals in a wide range of industries – from arts and entertainment to healthcare and technology. While this program can serve as a great networking event for you all, our hope is that through sharing how your extracurricular activities, internships, and college majors played a part in shaping your career path and goals attendees will confirm interests in a certain area and generate new ideas for industries to explore.

Please let me know if you are willing and able to participate in this event or could recommend someone else who might also serve as a great model for this audience in our other industry discussion. To confirm your participation or nominate someone for the event please email erin@teenlifeboston.com. More information is below.

Conference Date: Sunday, November 16, 2008
Time: 10am to 3pm
Location: TBD in Brookline

Agenda:
10:00 – 10:30: Arrival & Check In
10:30 – 11:00: Keynote Speaker
11:15 – 12:15: First Breakout Session (choice of 8)
12:30 – 1:30: Lunch and Round Table Discussions with Panelists
1:45 – 2:45: Second Breakout Session (choice of 8)
2:45 – 3:00: Wrap Up & Departure

Due to a last-minute space conflict, we will NOT be having a meeting this week.  I am really sorry for the late notice.  Thanks to Jaime for catching the mistake.  I am postponing the meeting to Wednesday, 10/22, when the space is available again.

Here is the updated information for the October Meeting.

When: Wednesday, October 22 at 8:30 – 11:00 AM
Where: The Nonprofit Center, 89 South St., 1st floor, Boston, MA 02111 Bring ID please
Directions: Red Line to Downtown Crossing or South Station

Next Meeting Agenda:

1. User Showcases 8:30 – 9:15a

• Aaron Schutzengel, YearUp

2. Salesforce Representative Steven Petalas 9:15 – 10:00a

• Winter 09 Release
• Workflow rules

3. Specific Topics - 10:00 - 10:30

• Paypal/Google Checkout
• Protocols/style guides

4. Networking  10:30 – 11:00a

After speaking with the Salesforce Foundation, I wanted to make everyone aware of the training that's available to all nonprofits:

• http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/trainingregistration.   Take a look there to register for classes.
• If you'd like to see the full schedule of what's available, look at the Salesforce Education site: http://www.salesforce.com/services-training/training_certification/

Here is the information information for the October Meeting. Looking forward to seeing you all there!

When: Wednesday, October 8 at 8:30 – 11:00 AM
Where: The Nonprofit Center, 89 South St., 1st floor, Boston, MA 02111 Bring ID please
Directions: Red Line to Downtown Crossing or South Station

Next Meeting Agenda:

1. User Showcases 8:30 – 9:15a

• Aaron Schutzengel, YearUp

2. Salesforce Representative(s) 9:15 – 10:00a

3. Specific Topics - 10:00 - 10:30

• Paypal/Google Checkout
• Protocols/style guides
• Workflow rules

4. Networking  10:30 – 11:00a

Another great turnout and a really interesting meeting. Emily and Jeff did a terrific job showing their Salesforce instance. Jaime hooked us up with the terrific space at the Nonprofit Building once again, so big thanks to her. Here are the minutes, as recorded by Aaron at YearUp:

User Showcase: Root Cause/Inner City Entrepreneurs/Social Innovation Forum - Emily Silberstein and Jeff Kessner.
Download the presentation.
- Using SFDC for ~4 years--Enterprise Edition
- NPower did initial customization
- Using SFDC calendaring but wouldn't necessarily recommend it
- Have a bucket "Individuals" account for single donors
- Big dupe problem--would guess up to 10% of records
- Sharing model is very open--everyone sees everything
- Not using householding much--manually de-dupe mailing lists in Excel.
- Have a custom "Participation" object to connect contacts to sites/initiatives. But are trying to move away from this and do more using the standard Opportunity and Activity objects instead.
- Using Opportunities for donations. Stages: Cultivation, Research, Submitted, Received, Rejected.
* Donations also have to be entered in accounting package, but would like to streamline this process.
* Donors generally start as Leads and are converted
- Also have "Resource Tracking" custom object for when donors are connected directly to recipients.
- Using Campaigns for events and mailings. Vertical Reponse for mass email.
* Would advise against storing mass emails like newsletters in the Activity History. Gets too cluttered.
* Populate campaigns by running a report that includes SalesforceID column, exporting to Excel, manipulating the list, and then re-importing as campaign membership.
- Form Assembly for online application forms. App updates leads, contacts, and opportunities. $34/month. Generals HTML you can put on your public website. Supports conditionals and validation.
* For upserts, can have an intermediate step/queue where admin verifies the matches.
* Recommend only allowing web forms to create Leads--that way someone can sort through them.
* More sophisticated logic than Web-to-Lead.
* For later rounds of the application process, users can pick up where they left off by entering an ID # which is emailed to them. The continued application process updates Contacts and Opportunities.
* Can also upload files.
* Downsides: limited/poor tech support from Form Assembly, spam problems (need Captcha), big initial learning curve.
Vertical Response discussion.
- 10k free emails/month for nonprofits
- Great customer support.
- Syncs well with SF.
- Good preview and test email features. (Make sure to test in multiple clients--Outlook, Gmail, Blackberry).
- Links with Google Analytics.
- Has limited survey function, but that doesn't sync with SF.
- Downsides: difficult to share lists/templates between multiple VR users, can't customize Reply To address, navigation can be difficult, unsubscribe isn't granular enough.
Outlook Edition discussion.
- Used by 2 orgs in the audience today
- Add email is nice, but syncing is problematic--especially contact sync.
- Recommendation: Can prevent users from having the sync option by editing an XML file on their machines.
- For Mac users, Maildrop from www.pocketsoap.com is an alternative to Outlook Edition.

One of our members, Sarah Mountcastle, is leaving her position at the Greenlight Fund and she asked me to post the Job Description for folks in the User Group to apply. If you have questions, feel free to contact Sarah directly at smountcastle@greenlightfund.org

Here is the Job Posting.

This is a post to alert you about Dreamforce 08, Salesforce.com's global gathering of all their customers using the platform.  This year there is a specific nonprofit track, and I'll be attending and speaking as well.

Why should you go?

• Networking - there is nothing better than meeting other nonprofits using Salesforce around the world and seeing what they're doing!
• Learning - there will be lots of classes and seminars on all aspects of Salesforce, so you can go from zero to super-admin in 3 days!
• Vendors - you could find the magic AppExchange app here and negotiate a nonprofit discount! 
• San Francisco instead of Boston in November.  :)

If you are interested, as a nonprofit you can attend by using the registration code PENP99 when you register at http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF08/register.jsp. 

Here are a couple of less expensive (note I didn't say cheap) hotel options for you:
The Mosser: http://www.themosser.com
The Monticello Inn: http://www.monticelloinn.com
Hotel Des Arts: http://www.sfhoteldesarts.com

And try www.kayak.com to find the least-expensive flight. 

Hope this helps, and if you have any questions, post a comment!

Here is the information information for the September Meeting. Looking forward to seeing you all there!

When: Wednesday, September 17 at 8:30 – 11:00 AM
Where: The Nonprofit Center, 89 South St., 1st floor, Boston, MA 02111 BRING ID PLEASE
Directions: Red Line to Downtown Crossing or South Station

Next Meeting Agenda:

1. User Showcases 8:30 – 9:30a

• Emily Silberstein/Jeff Kessner, Root Cause/Social Innovation Forum/Inner City Entrepreneurs (30 mins)
• Shamir Jones, UMass Boston (30 mins)

2. Specific Topics 9:30 – 10:30a

• Workflow Rules
• Outlook Edition
• IDEAS WELCOME - Post comments please!

3. Networking  10:30 – 11:00a