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.