Salesforce.com is not just a database, it's a powerful communication tool. Many companies do not have a detailed, long-term customer communication plan because they don’t know what to say and some say the same thing over and over.

Here's a list of 50 different topics that you can use to craft e-mails, direct mail, paid advertisements, telephone calls, press releases, and online promotions. These messages serve to build trust between your constituents and your organization by providing them up-to-date information about your company’s activities. Follow these three communication tips:

• Consistency.  Create a bi-monthly communication plan. Start with a 6 communications and schedule them to go out to every 2 weeks over a 13 week period. That's a quarterly communication plan.
• Multi-Channel.  Deliver messages using multiple media (email, direct mail, and phone). If you need an excuse to call a constituent, call to reinforce the most recent message. For example, "Hi Donna, I'm calling to talk to you about
• Call-to-Action.  Make sure you present a clear call-to-action in every message. Tell the constituent what the next step is. For example, "visit our website today to volunteer" or "call today to set-up a recurring monthly donation."

1. Thank You 
   
2. Financial Success 
   
3. Market Success 
   
4. Team Member Success 
   
5. Customer Success 
6. Event Success 
7. New Product Introduction 
   
8. New Feature in Development 
9. New Feature in Beta 
10. New Price or Promotion 
11. New Feature Released 
12. New Team Member Introduction 
    
13. New Process Description 
14. New Customer Announcement 
15. New Partner Announcement 
    
16. New Vendor Announcement 
17. New Know-how Announcement 
18. Account Review 
19. Account Status Report 
20. Case Study 
21. White Paper 
22. Reading Recommendation 
23. How-to Tips & Tricks
24. Feature Overview 
25. Event Announcement 
26. Event Invitation
27. Training/Support Offer 
28. Feedback
    
29. Survey
30. Certification Announcement 
31. Membership Announcement 
32. Appointment Reminder
    
33. Award Recognition
34. Holiday Greeting
35. Birthday Card
36. Anniversary Greeting
37. Customer Recognition
38. Account Review
39. Up-sell Offer
40. Cross-sell Offer
41. Order Status Update
42. Legal Update
43. Industry Update
44. Market Update
45. Competitive Analysis
46. Partnership Invitation
47. Co-development Invitation
48. Co-marketing Invitation
49. Case Study Invitation
50. Gift

In order to experience the full benefit of CRM, realize that Salesforce.com is more than just a database, it's a powerful tool for  tracking and understanding behavior and steering subsequent customer actions. Customers for nonprofit organizations are constituents including (but not limited to) donors, sponsors, volunteers, vendors, and participants.

1. Database Basics. At this the second meeting of SNUG, we discussed some basic database concepts that will help users to find data quickly, add fields properly, communicate effectively, and assign roles prudently.

First, understand that Salesforce.com has many predefined "objects" including Organizations (aka Accounts), Contacts, Leads, Campaigns, History, etc... When you set up a new database, there is usually a great deal of discussion about the relationship between these objects. Salesforce.com makes this discussion very brief: Contacts and Leads are subordinate to Organization (aka Accounts) and everything else is subordinate to Contacts. Very little is tracked at the Account or Organization level. This means, if you want to know the contact history or status of negotiations with a prospective sponsor corporation, you have to refer to the activity and campaign history for that corporation's contacts. This structure my seem strange or counter-intuitive but it has some advantages, namely, it is customer-centric. Organizations or Accounts are abstract entities without personas, whereas Contacts are people with whom you can communicate and build relationships.

Second, all outbound communication tools in Salesforce.com are linked to the two types of people Salesforce.com enables you to track - Leads and Contacts.  Again, in Salesforce.com you don't communicate with Organizations, you communicate with people (Leads or Contacts) who are linked to those Organizations (aka Accounts), so avoid the common mistake of creating new Contact related fields within the Organization object because you can't use them to communicate. This means, if you want to send a newsletter to all organizations who are somewhere in your development process, you need to track the organization's process at the Contact level. Don't add the status field to the Organization object.

Third, if all Organizational information is recorded at the  Contact level, you have to be careful about who has permission to edit and delete Contacts. Imagine working two years with a Contact and an intern accidentally deletes your entire activity and campaign history. Be careful when you set up Profiles and Roles to limit access and privileges to your important information. 

2. CRM Blueprint.  Read any of the white papers on my website (www.goodmancapone.com) and you'll learn quickly that as many as 60% of all CRM implementations fail because there is no strategy. Instead of using the CRM platform as a tool for tracking, analyzing, and steering constituent behavior, it's used as a dumping bin for data. Remember, Garbage In, Garbage Out. Creating a CRM strategy is straightforward and easy in Salesforce.com owing to its customer-centric structure. All you have to do is answer 4 questions:

1. What is this Contact?
2. Where is this Contact in my development process?
3. What do I want this Contact to do next?
4. How will I help this Contact to perform the task I want him/her to do next?

1. What is this Contact?   Nonprofits manage many different constituents like donors, sponsors, volunteers, participants, customers, etc...  Each constituent type wants different information from you and the message, channel and frequency of your communications to these types will vary greatly. In order to send donors information that is relevant to donors, volunteers information that is relevant to them, and customers offers that are relevant to customers, you have to be able to segment your Contacts, accordingly. Create a list of all your organization's constituents and define each constituent type. Your constituent type names are for internal use only and don't have to make sense, but they do have to be unique so you can differentiate between them. One nonprofit marketer uses Lord of the Ring characters to track her 7 constituents: Frodos, Sams, Gandolf's... Next, train everyone in your organization to refer to use these types consistently, add a picklist field to your Contact object, and make sure every Contact in Salesforce.com has a constituent type.

2. Where is this Contact in my development process?  Donors don't just see an advertisement and write a big check. Volunteers don't usually call out of the blue and ask "can I volunteer every Monday?"  No matter which constituent you're talking to, in order to get a commitment of money, time, or resources, you have to win trust. Winning trust is a process and knowing where a donor or a volunteer is in this process determines what kind of messages to send to him or her. Clearly, you'd communicate differently with a first-time donor versus a long-term, dependable donor.  The only way to  send these differentiated and relevant communications is to know that (a) this Contact is a donor (and not a volunteer), and (b) this Contact is a potential donor (versus a first-time or recurring donor). For each constituent type listed above, create a series of incremental goals. Realize that before you can get someone to commit to volunteering every Saturday, you need to motivate that person to volunteer at least once. Your incremental development objectives for volunteers might look like this list:

• apply to be a volunteer
• volunteer on a single project
• apply to be a project volunteer coordinator
• serve as volunteer on an on-going basis
• apply to be a volunteer project coordinator

In order to tack a constituent's status, you need to create a simple stage name for each status.

• Newbies - those who have applied to be a volunteer
• Singles - those who have volunteered once time
• Applicants  - those who have applies to be a project volunteer coordinator
• Recurring - those who volunteer on an on-going basis
• Projectors - those who coordinate on-going volunteer programs

Again, your names are for internal use only and don't have to make sense, they just have to be unique. Add a picklist field to your Contact object, train your staff to use these status names consistently, and make sure every Contact has a both the constituent type and status field occupied.

3. What do I want this constituent to do next?  Answering this question is easy when you know where the constituent is now. Using the stages listed above, you want Singles to become Applicants, Applicants to become Recurring, and so forth.

4. How will I help this Contact to perform the task I want him/her to do next?  The answer is communication. For each constituent type and stage, list 4 weekly or bi-monthly communications that you will send to help the constituent to get to the next step. Salesforce.com has built-in outbound e-mail capabilities and you can use third-party applications from Appexchange to manage direct mail and telemarketing campaigns. Experiment with different channels (email, print, and phone) and different formats (newsletter, calendar, article, case study, announcement). For a list of 51 things you can talk about, download the PDF file called "51 Touches."

3. Salesforce.com Basics.  We concluded the 2nd meeting with a brief tour of Salesforce.com. Most pertinent are the abilities to add and edit users, applications (a group of tabs), tab names, fields, page layouts, and communications. All these can be managed by clicking the Setup tab. Probably most relevant to all users today is the ability to setup an e-mail. Here are the steps:

1. Prepare a header and footer file. Both should be H 1.25" x L 7.5"  72 dpi and saved as JPG images.
2. Open the Document tab and create a new folder titled something like "Communication Images."
3. Upload your images to this new folder and make sure you select "Make Public" for each image.
4. Click Setup/Communications/Letterhead/Create New
5. Follow the step-by-step wizard to create your organization's letterhead.
6. Click Setup/Communications/Email Templates/Create New
7. Follow the step-by-step wizard to create an e-mail

Once you create an e-mail, there are two ways to send it:

• Manually to an individual Contact. Open the Contact, scroll down to the Activity block and click Send email, click select a template, edit the e-mail and click send.
• Manually to a group of Contacts. Click the Contacts tab, scroll down to the bottom right and click Send Mass Email, create a view (aka list) of the recipients using, for example, constituent type and status fields, and click send. You can also schedule an e-mail to be sent in the future.

Now that we've covered some conceptual basics (database structure and CRM blueprinting), we'll spend more time next month on setting up Salesforce to support a development strategy.

Thank you Christianne White from Shakti Rising for hosting us in her beautiful home and thank you everyone for coming. Please send to me your questions, topics, and learning objectives for the next meeting.

Attendees:  A. Bechill, E. Rollinson, S. Blakeslee, J. Dobbins, J. Valencia, T. Ayotte, E. Erne, C. Bromu, B. Densmore, C. White,  M. Capone