Just a quick reminder about tomorrow's User's Group meeting here at NPower Seattle at 8am. 

After some great feedback to our survey (thank you everybody who participated!), and with summer vacations in full swing, we'll be taking some time tomorrow morning to open up the forum to your Salesforce questions. Bring your problems, issues, comments, tips or queries to the meeting and have them answered/addressed by your colleagues and peers.  We'll also provide the ability to project your database onto the big screen so you can share your work with the group, or check out some live problem solving. 

If you haven't had the chance to yet, and if you can spare 5-10 minutes (8 questions total), please take the time to fill out this survey: Survey Link  Your feedback is confidential, anonymous, and will help us better plan and schedule meeting times, locations and topics of conversation.  We've had some great comments and thoughts by folks, and we'll be using that information to improve your experience at the user's group.

For those wanting to take their Salesforce experience to the next level, Salesforce is offering more classes than ever before now that they have a dedicated training facility in Kirkland!  Tom Metcalfe has recently taken over as the main point of contact for all Salesforce training and certification requirements in the Seattle area, and they often times can offer a non-profit discount for signups. For any questions or registrations please contact him directly at (415)-536-8872 or email tmetcalfe@salesforce.com

Finally, for those organizations with connections in the Portland area, OneNorthwest, Idealist Consulting and NPower Seattle are looking for non-profit Salesforce users there to help bring the benefits of the user's group environment to Portland.  If you are interested in learning more please write info@idealistconsulting.com and lets help develop the kind of community in Portland that we enjoy here in Seattle.

Wednesday August 19, 2009 @ 8am
NPower Seattle Offices
Welch Plaza Building
403 23rd Avenue South
Seattle, WA 98144

Hello all-

First, I wanted to thank everybody for a great turn-out June 18th at Seattle's Cloudforce event for our User's Group!! For those who missed it, we had over 50 attendees (in a room with about 20 chairs, sorry about that folks!) and heard fantastic presentations from Steve Andersen and Lindsey Anderson at the Salesforce Foundation about the Foundation mission and some of the upcoming tools being made available to all Salesforce customers.  For those who missed the presentation and would like to download a copy of either, NPower has graciously hosted the PowerPoint Presentation files for your convenience:

Lindsey Anderson's Foundation Introduction
Steve Andersen's Salesforce Platform Highlights
(FYI, if you don't have PowerPoint but would still like to view the files, you can download a PowerPoint viewer from Microsoft here.)

Our July meeting is now officially on the schedule for:

Wednesday July 15, 2009 @ 8am
NPower Seattle Offices
Welch Plaza Building
403 23rd Avenue South
Seattle, WA 98144

We're going to have a presentation and demonstration by NPower Vertical Response guru Elaina Buzzell about effective mass-emailing techniques and Vertical Response best practices. I know not everybody out there uses Vertical Response, so if you'd like to talk about YOUR favorite tool (ConstantContact, myEmma, ExactTarget, etc.), please come prepared to do so, as I'm sure we would all find it very informative.

Looking forward to seeing everybody bright and early Wednesday morning in two weeks!

Best-
Kevin

Hello all-

I wanted to thank everybody for attending our last meeting in May, we had a great turn out and a GREAT presentation from the gang at ONE/NW on their 'Ladders' product, which tracks constituent involvement in your organization through Salesforce. Utilizing a points system for campaigns and other actions, you can help weigh individual contact's engagement with your organization and help identify those rising stars in your volunteer base!  Check out more at:  ONE/NW

This month's meeting will take a bit of a different tack than previous meetings. The Salesforce Foundation has graciously offered to host our user's group on Thursday June 18th @ 8am (instead of our usual Wednesday time) in conjunction with the Seattle Cloudforce event.  The Foundation will be making a presentation to the group at that time.

Cloudforce is FREE, as is the User’s Group, and you are welcome to attend one without the other.  However, if you intend to stick around for Cloudforce after our meeting, the Salesforce folks ask that you sign up here:

Cloudforce Signup

I'll be providing more information ASAP on the exact location of our meeting and the details of the Foundation presentation.  Looking forward to seeing you all there!

KB

Hello all-

Just a friendly reminder to please join us for our Nonprofit Salesforce Users Group meeting on Wednesday, April 15th at 8:00 AM.  For those who may not know, Patrick Shaw has recently left NPower for a wonderful opportunity here in Seattle, and so I'll be fetching the coffee from here on out! ;)

I'll provide the coffee and the space (here at NPower Seattle), and I'd like each of you to provide:

A Salesforce feature or function that you've used more than you expected.  A good example from the consultants here at NPower would be the use of anonymous methods in our production code.  Not sure what an anonymous method is??? Find out Wednesday morning!

We'll also have a presentation by Friends of the Orphans, who are currently using Salesforce to manage their sponsorship and placement programs, and are one of the largest and most complex implementations we've worked on here at NPower. If you have an interesting object, workflow, lead converter, complete implementation or anything of ANY kind you'd like to share, please send me a note to offer to do a brief demo!

Last meeting we looked at ways to implement Salesforce to help manage student tracking and graduation programs.  However, program tracking isn't the only thing that we're looking for. We'd all love to hear how YOU'RE currently using Salesforce! Web-2-lead, assignment rules, tracking board members, membership, donors, events, etc. Whatever it is, we'd love for you to share it with the non-profit community!

Showing the group a few things that you are doing will help ALL of us use Salesforce better!

See you on the 15th!

Kevin Bromer

NPower Seattle
403 23rd Ave S
Seattle, WA 98144

Driving, Busing and Parking Directions

Don't be shy - this should be about surfacing YOUR questions!

Here are couple of items that someone has already asked about:

·         Security --  what have others done with security in their implementation?

·         Leads – maybe someone can demonstrate the lead functions?

Hi all,

Please join us for our Nonprofit Salesforce Users Group meeting on Wednesday, March 18th at 8:00 AM.

I'll provide the coffee and the space (here at NPower Seattle), and I'd like each of you to provide:

A Salesforce tip or a question (could be about process, something you've discovered, or a need that you have) to share with the group - we'll use that to kick off the meeting.

And we'll have a couple of customer demo's of Salesforce in Action! I have one lined up already, but would LOVE to have one more. (You can comment here on the blog, or send me a note to offer to do a brief demo!

Last meeting, we showed you a quick demo of a tool to track vacation approvals. But fancy or clever isn't the only thing that we're looking for. I want to know how YOU are using Salesforce. Maybe you've figured out a neat way to send thank you notes, or how to assign tasks automatically. Or maybe you've figured out a way to keep track of board membership, or event registrations.

Showing the group a few things that you are doing that are helping will help ALL of us use Salesforce better!

See you on the 18th!

NPower Seattle
403 23rd Ave S
Seattle, WA 98144

Driving, Busing and Parking Directions

Thanks to everyone who attended the meeting this week - here are some quick notes - and keep your eyes out for the next meeting notice and agenda!

Tips and Tricks:

• Just do it - make sure that you add contacts and accounts and opportunities to Salesforce at every turn! It will take less than 2 minutes to ensure that you (and your agency) have captured that important information
• Check out Simon Fell's website for tips about using your Mac and Maildrop to move mail into Salesforce.
• If you have a check box that limits the items you are searching on (such as "limit to items I own") UNCHECK it so that you don't inadvertently add duplicates.
• Check for duplicates before adding a record!
• Investigate the Outlook Connector (details at the bottom of the page)
• Use tasks more - just like you might in Outlook. Remind yourself, or remind someone else!

What We Covered:
A quick review of the different template options offered, which include:

• Enterprise edition (the edition you would start with if you were a for profit sales company)
• The NP Template (no longer available). Created by the Salesforce Foundation
• The Non Profit Starter Pack (a new suite of tools created by the Salesforce Foundation

Each of these have likely been further modified by you or  by a vendor - so moving from one to the other could mean migrating all of your data and more

The Turn  Up Rants are due on February 27, 2009!

Evan provided a demonstration of an approval tracking process for vacations. Key takeaway: you can use approvals and work flow to automate some of your work!

Next Meeting:
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 at 8:00 AM

Greetings, all -

You might not know it - but we had a meeting in early January! That's right - I wasn't careful with my calendar, and arrived at work to find some of our user group friends waiting!

We did some quick introductions and information sharing and scheduled our next meeting -which I hope you call can attend:

Wednesday, February 18th, 2008 - 8:00 AM
NPower Seattle
403 23rd Ave S
Seattle, WA 98144

Hope to see you - we'll have introductions, have a customer demo, and more!

Special thanks to Steve Andersen for his great notes about our meeting!

User Group details

o NPower and ONE/Northwest are not here to get customers

o 8 am works, one person had a problem with Wednesday

o once a month works for folks

DreamForce report

 Annual user meeting

 nonprofit tracks

 Patrick

 Afternoon keynote focused on philanthropy - they have a real commitment to it

 Evan

 Sites - public access to Salesforce pages

    publishing data to the web

    gathering info via the web

  Add-on vendors

    EchoSign for digital signatures

    VerticalResponse for mass email

 Integrations

    Amazon web services integration

    Facebook - showed an app that showed jobs from a sf.com instance to facebook

 Free app on appexchange just published (Brown Paper Tickets)

    integration with Brown Paper Tickets app

    you can bring in leads from BPT events to salesforce.com campaigns

 Dave Lindell

 customer service portals

 Salesforce.com Ideas for Dell and Starbucks

 So Many Apps, So Little Time

    great session, not enough time--want more of that

 Aya

 learned of a lot of resources

 Thornton

 talking to vendors was great, even though we have no money

 nice to meet Foundation folks, hard to contact them afterward

 Meghan Nesbitt from Salesforce.com Foundation, Lucky Jesus (CD)

 Vinod

 use Clicktools for surveys and feedback

 Steve

tips and tricks

Best Practices

Problem Solving

Demonstrations and show

NPower Salesforce Brownbag - 12/12?

 intro for people not using Salesforce.com

Ideas for next meeting

 What resources are out there?

 How to increase user adoption?

 Mapping data out of salesforce

 applications on the web getting into salesforce.com

 Reports--how are people getting reports done?

 Last year but not this year report. Can it be done?

 Case study--how are you using Salesforce.com?

 lots of interest in this

 10 minute demo

 Is there a list-serve for this group? Nope, but there is a forum.

Online group: http://groups.google.com/group/npsf

    http://etherpad.com/9dtxHJXglu

Download salesforce_users_guide.doc
 

Wow - our first ever users group meeting for Seattle area nonprofits was great. We kicked off at 8:00 AM and had 24 people attending!

I'll post minutes in the next day or two, but wanted to say thanks to all of the attendees, and that I'm looking forward to our next meeting - which is schedule for Wednesday, December 17th here at NPower Seattle (NPower contact information and NPower driving/bus/parking directions).

Come on back later for an update to the Agenda, as well as to review minutes. Thanks again for your great energy yesterday.