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