A couple of my colleagues and myself have spent the last two days at the awesome Dreamforce Europe conference, for users of Salesforce.com. If you've not heard of Salesforce before, it's a CRM (customer relationship management) tool that we (and 40,000 + companies in the world) use to manage relationships with our clients.
Now this was not your normal bland, boring conference. Not when the flamboyant CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, is there speaking alongside the likes of Stelios, Peter Gabriel and Jimmy Wales (founder of a little known encyclopaedia website called Wikipedia...) about "The Future of Software" and "The Internet As A Platform For Changing The World".
It was all hugely inspiring stuff and I've come away with lots of ideas of how we can use Salesforce internally to really help the charities who use Justgiving, but also how charities themselves can use Salesforce. And for this, there is the Salesforce Foundation:
The Salesforce Foundation harnesses the power of product and people to improve the lives of those in need. Using a unique 1/1/1 model—1% Time, 1% Equity, and 1% Product—the Foundation reaches out to the community and increases the effectiveness of non profit organizations so they can better achieve their goals. We call this the Power of Us.
And it's 1% product part that I'd like to focus on - for if you go here you can apply for up to 10 free (or apply for additional) licences, watch a demo, or take a free trial of the service.
Let me repeat that:
If you are a charity, you can get this amazing tool for free.
So if you are a small charity looking to implement a fundraiser/donor relationship tool, it's really a *no-brainer*. We pay for the service, do hugely customised and complicated things and think it is amazing, and you can get all of that for no cost!
Plus, you can work with Salesforce's partners to help you implement it - because a large number of the companies who build custom applications for Salesforce for paying subscribers like us, also donate their time through the "Power of Us" of the Foundation.
So why are we plugging Salesforce?
Well, it would make it easier for us to integrate fundraising and donation data from Justgiving with charities who use Salesforce, since we already use it ourselves. That would enable you to have a 360 degree view of all your (online and offline) fundraising, donor contacts, campaigns, mailing lists, and all the other stuff you do (e.g. finance) online. In one place. In one web browser.
Update **to clarify the above, there is no solid integration yet, it is in discussion**
And, er, it's just brilliant.
But seriously, we see the whole point of Justgiving as a similar service - where Salesforce is "software as a service", we try to be "fundraising as a service". And our future aim is to be even more like the platforms Marc Benioff referenced in his keynote below:
So for more info on the Foundation, go to their site, or visit the non-profit message boards at the Salesforce community pages.
As a non-profit Salesforce user (read: evangelist), and having recently signed our organisation up for Justgiving, can I second everything that Jonathan's said!
Salesforce has totally changed the way we approach our data management - it's made things so much easier for not only tracking our donations and supporters, but also for tracking our core activites.
It's customiseable, flexible, and easier to use than any other database platform you've ever seen. It's also incredibly complex for those who need it to be.
And something that Jonathan didn't mention - the Salesforce Foundation can also arrange training for non-profit database administrators if there's space available on their regular courses, and the training was invaluable to get us up to speed with the whole thing.
Like Jonathan says (and I say constantly) it's a no brainer! Get on board. Get set up. And also? Join the community:
http://community.salesforce.com/sforce/board?board.id=Non-Profits
Posted by: Charlotte | May 12, 2008 at 05:03 PM