Meeting Notes from the Philadelphia Non Profit salesforce.com User Group: May 14, 2008

What a great learning session! Our guest presenter, Judi Sohn, was very informative!

Judi is a Mac user, so we first asked if she can use Demand Tools from CRM Fusion, with the Mac OS. Judi does this all the time and explained that after she readies her files for use in Demand Tools, she just drags the files over and drops them to the PC side on her MAC. She can then run the Demand Tools application from her MAC.

Judi is also very invested in Google docs, and showed us two Visio documents, one of her organizations data collection methods prior to using salesforce.com and then another after the salesforce.com implementation.

Judi is fortunate that her Executive team sponsored the implementation at www.fightcolorectalcancer.org and promoted the mandate internally that 'If it's not in salesforce.com, it did not happen.'

Fightcolorectalcancer.org is using salesforce.com with an integration to/from Convio. Convio is an application which supports Online Fundraising, Email Marketing, Advocacy, and Event Fundraising. Its target user audience is primarily the non-profit sector. Judi demonstrated how her organization uses both tools simultaneously. The integration captures any contacts entered into the Convio website and migrates contact data to salesforce.com. This powerful combination of tools supports an informational call center for victims of colon cancer and their loved ones. There is a HIPAA component to the data collected in these communications, Judi enables the confidentiality required using salesforce.com roles and profiles for users.

What Judi is doing for her organization is tracking all on and off line interactions using salesforce.com and Convio. The online advocacy needs are addressed by Convio, and the donations captured on Convio include an on-line store of products designed to spread the word about colon cancer. The actual inventory of these products and the order fulfillment is tracked in salesforce.com, but the order is placed through Convio. Judi uses three custom objects to track the inventory and order fulfiullment. Her inventory availability is on-demand! Any major or individual gifts to the organization are tracked in  salesforce.com's opportunity module. One of the 'secrets' that Judi shared was that this integration can 'synch' campaigns, so if you have a matching campaign on the Convio and salesforce.com 'sides', the actual campaigns with their responses can be tracked in salesforce.com.

Here is the really interesting part - if a constituent or contact enters the Convio site to take an advocacy action, perhaps notify an elected official, that action is stored to the Contact record in salesforce.com. Imagine the possibilities! If you have a collection of salesforce.com contacts who believe in contributing to a bill being passed for a medical reason, AND you have a motion on the floor of congress pertinent to your cause, you can mass email all of these advocacy contacts to again contact their congressman. Pretty Powerful!

Judi has automated the 'synch' between Convio and salesforce.com. Judi cautions that Convio is strongly dependent upon the email address of the constituent or contact. Therefore if you mark the contact in salesforce.com as an email 'opt-out', the synch for that contact may be broken. She is seeking a solution for this issue.

Judi then closed with a discussion as to her organizations use of Conga. This is a powerful third party tool for salesforce.com which generates snail mail. It is designed to replace the mail merge function of salesforce.com and produces letters, labels and envelopes without any MS Word interaction. When sending a snail mail batch, Conga also stores this communication as an activity to the salesforce.com contact. Best part?? Conga can be run from a salesforce.com report!

This was the best demonstration for this User Group we have had to date, and I must thank Judi Sohn for coming over from Northern New Jersey to present!

The next meeting is set for June 11, Wednesday, from 10 AM to Noon. Our friends from the Cultural Alliance will host. They are located at 1616 Walnut Street in Philadelphia. I will send a reminder email.

Topics for the next meeting include a demonstration of the Summer '08 salesforce.com release by Tucker MacLean, and  a new member, Chris Conroy, of World Benefactor wishes to speak to us about Google apps with salesforce.com. Check out their new website: The World Benefactor Website

We have a few requests - how to handle data exceptions, how to see how others are handling collection of data from multiple sources, and the always interesting Outlook 'synch'. If you have an issue or question for the group, please send an email to Dean Graham at dean@NPowerPA.org.

Great meeting! Thanks also to the Voice Foundation for hosting.
See you all on June 11--------------------------------------------------------------------------Maura

Please note: Due to the large amount of material gathered at this meeting, please feel free to post a comment, as this is only one person's view of this meeting.

                               Exciting News! - Special Presentation

Our next Philadelphia Non-Profit salesforce.com user group meeting will be held Wednesday
May 14 at 9:00 AM. The Voice Foundation has arranged a new location for us. Many thanks to Julia and Catherine!

Drexel University Medical School
219 N. Broad Street, 10th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Telephone: (215) 833-3351

All of the Philadelphia Non Profit User Group is invited. We will serve light refreshments. We have a special presentation for this meeting. Judi Sohn of Fightcolorectalcancer.org is going to demonstrate how her organization uses salesforce.com with Convio. Currently they collect member registrations and all financial transactions with thier implementation. Sudi is also exploring the functionality that adds advocacy alert actions as member response in Salesforce campaigns. Can't wait to see this!

If you wish to pass on this to other co-workers that are not members of the user group, please have them register at: http://dreamforce.blogs.com/join

Meeting Agenda:

• We will do a brief User Group business update
• Judi Sohn will make a presentation showing salesforce.com integrated with Convio
• Bring the issues or solutions that you are experiencing in your salesforce.com implementation. We want to hear from you!
  

  Really looking forward to seeing everyone again!