Make Salesforce.com successful for you by participating in our monthly meetings. Membership in SNUG is free and it's a fun (and confidential) way to share strategy, tricks, best practices, product reviews, tips, rants and raves with your peers at other nonprofit organizations.  Please accept our invitation to attend the July meeting of SNUG, the Salesforce.com San Diego Nonprofit Users Group. Details below.

When                
Wednesday, July 9, 8:30 am - 11:00 am

Where          
2404 F Street, San Diego 92102 (map below)

Venue Host   
Christianne White, Business Manager, Shakti Rising
www.shaktirising.org  

Food and Beverage
I'll pick up schmears at Einsteins. Send me your special order by Tuesday, July 8th.

Agenda
Our goal for the first 3 months is to get everyone comfortable with CRM practice and Salesforce.com functionality. We'll review some basics to help you enhance your current set-up or help you to set-up your new license right.

• Welcome New Members
• CRM Basics, by M. Capone
  • Object Hierarchies.  Does a donation belong to an organization or to a contact? Modern CRM platforms make set-up easy for non-technical people, but there is one abstract database concept that we all need to understand in order to set-up Salesforce properly - hierarchies.  Learning objective: Understand relationships and Salesforce limitations.   
    
  • The Development Process.  The only way to send constituents relevant and timely communications is to know where each individual constituent is in your development process. You'll need to track constituent by type and stage. Learning objective: Create your own CRM Blueprint.   
    
  • Salesforce.com Basics.  The goal of CRM is to track, analyze, and steer constituent behavior. I'll show you the basic tools and plg-ins for managing and analyzing your data and communicating with constituents. Learning objective: Add, edit, and delete a user, account, contact, file,d view, template, communication, and role.
    
• Presentation by our venue host (15 minutes).
  
• Open Discussion
• Tentative meeting schedule and venue hosts
  
  • August, Volunteer Center San Diego
  • September, CONNECT

Next Step
Send an e-mail to mcapone@goodmancapone.com to join SNUG, reserve your seat to the July meeting, and place your special schmear order.

What an exciting meeting! Of the 41 SNUGgies (San Diego Nonprofit Users), 14 attended the kick-off meeting on Wednesday, June 4th, at the Entrepreneurial Management Center at SDSU. Discussion was candid and lively and I know we're going to be able to help each other a great deal. Here's a summary of the discussion and next steps:

Member Profile. All members in attendance are marketers (versus technical staff or developers) and most are new SF users. On a scale of 1-5 (5 for expert), the comfort level of members today is a 2. A complete list of attendees and their contact information is below.

Goals: The business challenges that members want to use SF to solve are numerous. Below is a list of the "Top 10 Wants." 

1. Enhance business continuity - document processes and set-up
2. Automate follow-up (internal and external) to all constituents
3. Track constituents  (volunteers, donors, partners, leads) status
4. Train more staffers
5. Set-up mass e-mail campaigns
6. Improve data quality - consolidate, scrub, and manage constituent information
7. Integrate payment gateway w/ SF and 3rd party accounting package
8. Monitor and analyze performance
9. Manage staff and volunteers
10. Consolidate financial reporting

Our immediate goal is to increase the comfort level of all members to a 4. We agreed to dedicate the next 3-4 monthly meetings to bringing everyone up to speed on processes, applications, set-up, features, and functionality. We'll address the challenges listed above in order. Once all members are comfortable with SF, we'll discuss again the idea of expanding our discussions to include general nonprofit issues. Eventually, we may invite vendors to present to the group and only in the context of educating members versus power selling to us.

Next Steps.

• The next meeting will be held at CONNECT offices in La Jolla, tentatively the 2nd week in July, probably 8:30 - 10:30 am. Michael will email invitations as soon as date and time are confirmed with CONNECT.
• Michael will email links for the SNUG blog and discussion boards. All members are encouraged to use these to eliminate the need to answer questions more than once and also share ideas and best practices with everyone.
• Michael will create a tentative calendar of discussion topics and distribute to all for review.
• All members are reminded to refer Salesforce.com to an NPO friend. After all, it's powerful, scalable, customizable, secure, and FREE to designated 501c3s.

Thank You. Bernie Schroeder, Program Manager at the EMC and our venue host, extended a generous offer to support SNUG members:

• Interns.  If you need business expertise and don't want to pay high fees to consultants, contact Bernie to arrange for a graduate student to assist you with projects ranging from secondary research to complex data issues. All projects are monitored by a subject matter expert and faculty member.
• SEI.  Learn best practices in NPO management and fund raising from your peers and industry leaders by joining one of the SEI forums. The EMC is eager to grow participating and the published rate is negotiable.

Attendees (no particular order)
Michael, SNUG Leader, SDSU/UCSD
Joe, CONNECT 
Jesse, CONNECT
Erin, Outdoor Outreach
Terry, Outdoor Outreach
Sarah, San Diego Coast Keepers
Caitlin, Las Palmas Housing / CARE
Madeleine, Las Palmas Housing / CARE
Christianne, Shakti Rising
Elise, Volunteer San Diego
Connie, Rolling Readers
Steve, Culture of Life
John, San Diego Oceans
Ron, Logix Biz
Bernie, SDSU EMC

Meeting Name    Kick Off

Date/Time    Wednesdauy, June 4th, 8:30 – 11:00 am

Venue        SDSU Entrepreneurial Management Center (EMC)
5250 Campanile Drive, Suite 1502
San Diego, CA 92182-1915

Venue Host    Bernhard Schroeder, EMC

Sponsor        Salesforce.com

Coordinator    Michael Capone, SDSU/UCSD, Salesforce Consulting Partner, AppExchange Partner

Members    Sarah Locher, Africa Aid
        Marjy Tatlor, Mainly Mozart
        John Valencia, SD Oceans
        Ron Wild, Logix Biz
        Caitlin Pincus, Las Palmas Housing
        Christianne White, Shakti Rising
        Connie LaFuente, Rolling Readers
        Elise Rollinson, Volunteer San Diego

Chapters    San Francisco
New York
Philadelphia
Washington DC
San Diego (41)

Goals         Customer Success. Share with peers best practices, tips, reviews, and ideas.
Foster a community of enthusiastic Salesforce.com users, developers, and partners.
Moderate blogs and discussion boards.
Organize meetings online and face-to-face.

Agenda        Introductions
1.    Name and organization description
2.    Salesforce user since, profile, competency, favorites, dislikes
3.    What are your organizational challenges

Venue Host Presentation     Bernhard Schroeder, EMC

Open Discussion
•    Confidentiality and Candor
•    Marketing or Technical
•    Peer or Partner
•    General Training or Case Study
•    Salesforce–centric or CRM eco-system

Next Steps
•    Does this time work?
•    Tell a NPO friend to use Salesforce or become a member – it’s FREE
•    Next meeting venue host
•    I will send link to blogs and discussion boards
•    I will send a list of presentation topics for you to select