Looking for a way to take orders, receive donations, and have Order, Customer, and Product data flow into Salesforce’s CRM system? Nexternal’s eCommerce platform and shopping cart system automates how this data flows into the Salesforce CRM system using the eCommerce Connector.

The eCommerce connector is an application in the Salesforce.com Appexchange that you can download for free here: NexternaleCommerceConnectorAppExchangelisting . This application automatically pulls Order, Customer, and Product data from the Nexternal eCommerce platform into the standard (Donation/Organization/Contact) account objects found in the Salesforce.com CRM system.

Many non-profits need to customize how data flows into the Salesforce Non-Profit Starter pack. “Nexternal’s eCommerce Connector App and the services we received from Cloud for Good make syncing ecommerce data with the Salesforce a breeze” says KristaFiser of NaturalHigh.org. Clouds for Good helped NaturalHigh.org and other non-profit organizations customize how data flows into their custom Salesforce account objects. This provided NaturalHigh.org with further flexibility and control over how their data flows from the Nexternal eCommerce platform to the Salesforce.com CRM system.

For more information about Nexternal & the eCommerce Connector visit IntegratingeCommerce & CRM or contact Bobby Cintolo | bcintolo@nexternal.com | (800) 914-6161 x206 .

Thanks very much to our friends at Cloud for Good for inviting us to guest post about Cirrus Insight.

If you are a nonprofit that uses Salesforce and Google Apps, we built Cirrus Insight for you!

Cirrus Insight seamlessly integrates with Gmail, where constituent communication happens, and brings in contextual information from Salesforce, where vital constituent information is stored.

Step 1: Install Cirrus Insight for Google Chrome or Firefox browser.  It takes just 30 seconds!  There is no setup or admin configuration.

Step 2: Open an email from your Gmail inbox. You’ll see Cirrus Insight in the right margin or sidebar of Gmail.  It will replace the Google Ads that typically occupy that part of the browser window.  Click to Sign In just like you do in Salesforce.  We use industry standard oAuth to provide secure authentication via Salesforce.

Step 3: Every time you open an email from your Gmail inbox, Cirrus Insight will now show you relevant contextual information about the person from Salesforce including contact information, activities, cases, and opportunities.  No more toggling back and forth between Gmail and Salesforce to do lookups and search for information!

I decided to write this blog post to address the main advantages of using one centralized database and I chose to use one of our current projects as an example, a mid-west chapter of Habitat for Humanity (HFH).

The HFH’s vision is to create a world where everyone has a decent place to live. To do that, they build simple, decent, and affordable houses for low-income families around the world. Houses are built by the homeowners and volunteers under the supervision of trained individuals. Our client has been using multiple databases (Keystone, Access, Constant Contact, Excel spreadsheets Outlook and more) to manage complicated relationships with families, donors, volunteers, contractors, partners, and vendors.

Flexibility is the key. The HFH implementation includes tracking donors and foundations (including single gifts, pledges, major gifts, grants, and in-kind donations), managing volunteers (allowing volunteers to self register online for multiple jobs and shifts, track volunteer hours, and create a volunteer profile), tracking attendance at educational workshops, managing every touch with the families they serve, measuring program outcomes, logging home repair cases, and even managing the bidding process on lots. Does it sound complicated? It is. Does it mean that HFH needs to purchase multiple databases to manage donors, volunteers, service requests? Absolutely not!

Salesforce is an extremely powerful, scalable, and secure cloud platform. The Salesforce’s drag-and-drop tools, pre-built components, and pre-designed user interfaces allows us to launch new solutions in minutes—with no servers or software to manage. Additionally, the Salesforce AppExchange includes thousands of pre-built applications such as Volunteers for Salesforce, Conga Composer, and Vertical Response (read about more applications we like here) that enhance the platform’s functionality.

Why did they choose to move from a multiple database approach to one single location?

• Managing the overlap. HFH, like many other organization, understood that their relationships with their constituents are constantly evolving. A family member can become a volunteer and a volunteer can become a donor. Maintaining their information and interactions in multiple locations made it very difficult for them to cultivate relationships. Instead of spending hours comparing files, importing and exporting data, and attempting to de-duplicate these various data sources they can focus on building relationships.
• Unifying and simplifying processes across departments. A centralized database allows the organization to focus on the culture of tracking data. It is a great time to unify and standardize business process and to make sure that the entire organization works together to create an institutional memory.
• Collaborating and sharing. The organization wanted to create a place where all the organization’s employees can share information and collaborate on opportunities.
• Accessibility. HFH was in need of solutions that could be access from anywhere on any computer (or mobile device) at any time.
• Vulnerable data integrity. With decentralized data sources, the organization had a difficult time capturing reliable backups and securing its data against accidental or malicious loss.

What about the cost? Salesforce implementations, just like any other implementations, have costs associated with it, but you know what? Not using technology also has a cost (read about the cost of implementing Salesforce here). The costs of purchasing (or custom building) multiple databases, maintaining them, and hosting them was much higher than customizing Salesforce to manage the HFH needs, they checked.

Staff time is often overlooked; asking them to use and be trained on multiple systems is confusing and creates inefficiency. The reality of many nonprofit organizations is that one person can wear multiple hats, your fundraiser might be involved in the contractor bidding process or volunteer recruitment, and having one system allows all users the access to the entire organization’s data (based on permissions of course!).

Best of all, the Salesforce foundation donates 10 Salesforce licenses and many AppExchange solutions are either free or heavily discounted for nonprofits.

Is CRM just for large organizations? If you find that Excel cannot support your mission anymore (click here to read what I think about using Excel to manage relationships), Salesforce can probably meet your organization’s needs. It can easily scale up or down depending on your needs and business processes. We work with variety type so of nonprofit organizations from very small (all volunteer based) to multi-million dollar international organization (such as Connell University and United Way).

Still not convinced? Contact us to talk about your organization’s specific needs, join the conversation on Facebook or send me a message via twitter.

Direct Mail generates over $373 Billion dollars in sales and donations per year. That’s a lot of money and prospects often go overlooked for lack of budget and manpower to generate and manage.

With Salesforce, now you can add this channel easily to your mix thanks to Cloud2You.

Salesforce is a great Cloud CRM solution, when used efficiently, it’s  purpose is to drive revenue or increase donations.  That’s where Cloud2You hedges your investment and enhances your reach.

Cloud2You by Advanced Image Direct, a large volume highly secure mail manufacturer known for mailing millions of pieces of mail per week for large companies across the United States, allows application users to send individual or campaign postal mail easily from Salesforce that is completely trackable. By “trackable”, we mean that when each individual piece, whether a single piece of correspondence mail or a campaign, when delivered by the U.S. Postal Service, activity history is updated with individual delivery confirmation. This confirmation can be used by organizations to close the loop with a historical record of what was sent or create additional event triggers to correspond with postal delivery information, using Salesforce.

Cloud2You makes it easy for users to upload via Salesforce, their own creative print materials and supports many standard business physical print formats such as Letters, Greeting Cards, Postcards and Brochures.

As an example;  users can send a single “Thank You” branded greeting card inserted in to an envelope for just $.99 and that includes the 1^st class postage stamp! Plus, you will know when it was delivered.

It’s an economical solution as there are no minimum orders of mail, users simply pay for what they mail, as they mail. The very economical prices are published on the website; www.cloud2you.com. Salesforce, users can manage their catalog of materials and easily generate a campaign in a matter of minutes. The application is an Aloha app and utilizes Salesforce’s robust reporting features for mail usage. Assigning budgets for individual users is a snap.

Cloud2You comes “out of the box” with a free catalog of items that users can have their logo appended to at no cost to get them started.  Users can send their own letterhead in an envelope and create text message templates almost immediately upon download. All materials whether catalog items or your own print materials are printed on-demand when ordered, so there is virtually no waste and all items are printed on FSC certified papers, so it’s good for the environment as well.

Some examples of how users are leveraging Cloud2You for salesforce:

•  Seeking Donations, on-boarding new members

• Customer Service, Call centers, Win-back

• Literature fulfillment, Thank You notes

• Customer Acquisition, Retention and Loyalty

While studies and reports may vary slightly, one consistent fact is that direct mail still has the most consistent and highest ROI.  In 2011, Direct Mail accounted for $373 Billion + in sales & Donations followed by Search Engine with $14.4B and Email at $ 13.7B.

Cloud2You is a free to download application that will get you on track for “fully” integrated marketing automation and within your individual budget.

Guest post by Tina Tarvin from Advanced Image Direct for Cloud2You. You can contact Tina at TinaT@advancedimagedirect.com

First off, we’re so excited to be guest posting at Cloud for Good!  We have worked with Cloud for Good consistently over the last three years, helping nonprofit organizations get their data from Salesforce into the documents they need.  It’s fun to share some of that experience here on their blog.

AppExtremes is the company behind the Conga suite of solutions: Conga Composer, Conga Mail Merge, Conga Courier, Conga Conductor, and Conga Workflow.  Our flagship product, Conga Composer, is the most popular document generation app on the Salesforce AppExchange and has consistently been in the AppExchange Top Ten since Conga Composer launched in 2007.  Conga Composer makes it easy to retrieve your data from salesforce.com and merge that data into sophisticated documents, whether Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF.  You can then print it, store it locally or in Salesforce, or send it via email.  Conga Composer will also log activities, create follow up tasks and even update fields.

With standard Salesforce technology, creating a donation acknowledgment letter can be a time-consuming and tedious process.  It requires copying and pasting the necessary data from Salesforce to a Word document and that Salesforce data may be stored on multiple objects or reports, which have to be run and viewed separately.  Plus, the copy-paste process is error-prone which can have major negative outcomes (imagine if a donor inadvertently received confidential information about another donor!).  Finally, once the Word document is populated with the Salesforce data, it has to be manually stored back in Salesforce for record keeping purposes and then manually attached to an email and sent to the donor.  Running this process multiple times per day or creating a large batch of these letters can quickly become a full-time job when time and resources would certainly be better spent elsewhere.

Conga Composer takes such tedious, manual processes and makes them quick, easy, and done within a couple of mouse clicks.  It will gather data from your Salesforce objects (standard or custom) or reports and automatically merge the desired data into your donation acknowledgment Word document.  No more manual copying and pasting because Conga Composer does the work for you.  No more errors because you have configured Conga Composer to pull only the data you’ve specified.  No more time lost because Conga Composer is fast and fully integrated within Salesforce.

All you have to do is click a button to initiate the Conga Composer process and either download the document to your browser or send it via Salesforce email.  The same donation acknowledgment Word document can be used every time (so it’s sure to meet your legal and marketing guidelines) or you might have different versions of the acknowledgment depending on the donor, amount donated, or time of year (e.g. your annual donation drive in November).

If you need to run batches of documents, labels, or envelopes , Conga Mail Merge (included with Conga Composer) is the tool for you.  This saves even more time when you have a large group of acknowledgments to generate as the result of a recent fundraising campaign.

Let’s say you want to run a batch of donation acknowledgments with accompanying envelopes so they can be mailed to the donors.  You simply choose which records you want to generate the letters and envelopes for (from a report, Campaign, or set of Contacts or Accounts), specify which donation acknowledgment letter you want to merge the Saleforce data to, select the appropriate envelope size, and then download.  You now have a batch of donation acknowledgment letters, each with an accompanying envelope, each with information tailored to that donor because it came from their unique record in Salesforce.

Of course donation acknowledgments aren’t all we do.  The sky is truly the limit with Conga Composer, as you can configure it to pull data from any object or combination of objects.  You might have the donation acknowledgment on a Donation object, a welcome letter on a Contact, a batch of thank you letters on a Campaign so that you can personally thank each person who attended your recent fundraising event, and a spreadsheet on your Project Management custom object that provides an overview of the milestones achieved and those still remaining for your current project.

Conga Composer (including Conga Mail Merge) is available for download from the Salesforce AppExchange.  We offer a free, no obligation 30 day trial so you can try it and ensure that it will work for your organization before you purchase anything.  Technical support is included with the free trial (and with your subscription if you become a customer) so our team will help you each step of the way to set up your solutions and ensure they’re running to your satisfaction.  We offer a one-third (⅓) discount to our nonprofit customers – $96.00 per user license per year with a five user license minimum; remember, technical support is included and we never charge setup or maintenance fees.

We encourage you to read some of our 200+ five star reviews on the AppExchange and hope that you’ll download our Conga Composer free trial (including Conga Mail Merge).  Feel free to check out our online knowledge base or YouTube channel and we’re ready when you have questions or are ready to set up a solution.

Thank you for the wonderful work you do and we hope to work with you soon.

Guest post by Shelley Anderson from AppExtremes. You can contact Shelley at sanderson (at) appextremes (dot) com.

 (This blog post is part of the “Apps for Good” series where awesome AppExchange providers guest post about their applications.)

Two key reasons why Salesforce is so widely used in the non-profit community are its availability and its eco-system. Salesforce makes its enterprise edition available at no cost for up to 10 users for non-profit organizations. Its eco-system encompasses so many different facilities, with AppExchange apps, documentation, user groups and excellent developers and admins, that no matter what your non-profit’s specific needs, it is not very hard to find ways to meet those needs.

As an application, Salesforce has a lot of breadth and depth to it. There are some areas, though, where enhancements make Salesforce even more easy to use, and Apsona for Salesforce endeavors to fill those gaps. Apsona is a browser-based application that creates a layer on top of Salesforce, and adds many features that make Salesforce more usable. Here are some examples of situations which are handled more easily with Apsona for Salesforce.

Batch-mode additions and updates. Say your organization’s volunteers need to add large numbers of new donation records, or perhaps their work hours, so that you need a batch-like interface for adding and updating records. Apsona’s record adding and editing features simplify this process. The “add record” popup window remembers previous values, so when you are adding a batch of records, you can make just incremental changes and click “Save.” Editing existing data is all done in-place, and saving data is instantaneous.

Routine data management. Suppose you need to search your donation or donor records based on specific criteria, and organize them in an Excel-like table so that you can update them all inline, without having to click through each record. Apsona’s tabular view gives you such a layout, with in-place editing and quick saving of changes.

Data import (upload). For example, say you have a CSV file containing a large number of donor names, addresses and donation information, and you wish to import them into Salesforce. For such situations, Apsona’s import feature provides automatic cross-object lookup, thus avoiding the need for the dreaded VLOOKUP to find the keys of related objects. Apsona also gives you an echo-back of your imported data, along with the record ids for the imported records. Using the echo-back, you can easily import data records from one CSV file into multiple related objects, such as from one CSV file containing donations into the Contact, the Donation and the Contact Relationship objects.

Cross-object and exception filtering. You would like to find the contacts who have donated but have not been included in any of the last three annual campaigns. When searching in an object, Apsona’s filtered search lets you choose search fields from all related objects, with exception filters (e.g., contacts excluded from specific campaigns, or organizations with no donations) and quantified searches (e.g., organizations, all of whose donations exceed $500).

Campaign management. You wish to create a new campaign targeted at specific donors you choose, e.g., based on their giving patterns in previous campaigns. You can search for such donors using Apsona’s cross-object search, and then add all of them to a new campaign in one click of the “Add to Campaign” menu item. This adds all the searched-for records, not just the ones shown in the first page, thus easing the task.

Mass updates. One of your associates just left your organization, so you would like to change the ownership of all 7,700 of her Contact records to another associate while also updating the status (or other field) in the records. Apsona offers an “Update all” feature that you can use to accomplish this in short order.

Reporting across multiple objects. You wish to create a report containing donations from the contacts who meet multiple criteria based on their household income, their organizational affiliations and their donation history in specific campaigns. Apsona’s reporting feature includes all the search capabilities outlined above, and lets you create reports with fields from all related objects without the need for creating custom report types within Salesforce.

Apsona for Salesforce is browser-based, so it needs no client-side software. It works as a layer within your Salesforce application, so any changes you make via Apsona are reflected within Salesforce immediately. Apsona can handle all native and custom fields in your Salesforce instance, and works with all apps on the force.com platform, including the Non-Profit Starter Pack and Convio Common Ground. It respects the field-level and object-level access rights assigned to user profiles. Any triggers and workflow set up in your application also take effect via Apsona, just as they do within Salesforce.

Apsona for Salesforce is available from AppExchange, and installs in minutes. Bug fixes are propagated automatically, so you never have to worry about having the latest version in your Salesforce instance. Apsona was among the top rated apps in a poll of non profit clients held recently.

At apsona.com, we believe that the proof of our success is the degree to which we and our software have been useful to others. To that end, and learning from Salesforce, we offer 10 free seats of Apsona for Salesforce to all non-profit organizations, with additional seats discounted. Non-profits are a large proportion of our customer base, and we routinely work with them via e-mail, phone calls and screen sharing sessions.

We would like to thank  the folks at Cloud for Good for enabling this guest post.

This is a guest post by M. A. Sridhar, Architect and CEO of apsona.com. You can connect with him on Twitter at @apsona4sfdc.

CLOUD COMPUTING IS A HOT TOPIC FOR NON-PROFITS… HERE’S WHY.   Plus, THE LATEST TIPS ON SELECTING A VENDOR.

 (This blog post is part of the “Apps for Good” series where awesome AppExchange providers guest post about their applications.)

Cloud computing is a hot topic these days, and the smart nonprofits are taking advantage of it.

Never has more powerful and inexpensive technology been available to nonprofits.  Think FREE.  The advent of Cloud computing and the Salesforce Foundation have made it possible.

Nonprofits are transitioning in droves from expensive, closed, legacy-based donor management software to the free, open, feature-rich cloud platform available from Salesforce. They have discovered its easy integration, its far-reaching applications and its performance features that benefit the entire organization.  No more silos of data; everyone works from the same database.

Plus, you will join a network of common cloud-based users in the nonprofit space working together in an open, thriving global community of ideas and products; not limited to the closed niche of a single company’s products.

At Click & Pledge we design custom software integrated with Salesforce to manage donor information and to increase the financial performance of nonprofits.  Our products are tuned to enhance giving and engage donors, all managed in a cloud environment.

We have a close collaborative arrangement with Cloud for Good to tailor custom Salesforce integrations.  In our experience, Cloud for Good has proven to be exceptional and has taken a leading role in cloud-based applications for nonprofits.

The power of the Salesforce cloud is hard to ignore.  It’s a better way to manage your information technology, improve online giving, coordinate volunteers and leverage donor information. It’s all about more efficiency, increased capability, lower costs and improved overall business practices.

Our recent integration of Salesforce.com and its Cloud-based donor management capability is the result of the Salesforce Foundation gifting a custom version of its CRM platform to registered nonprofits.  Today, Click & Pledge is fully integrated with Salesforce to deliver donor and event management coupled with a payment system, a mobile “smart phone” solution and a comprehensive suite of more than 30 online fundraising tools.

What’s more, Click & Pledge and Cloud for Good have enhanced the Salesforce application.  We have made it easier to use and have deployed robust applications like event management, payments and mobile integration. The software is free to nonprofits, it’s managed in the cloud, it delivers big data capability and it’s smart computing

As a fundraiser, you know that it’s a never-ending search for new and better ways to increase dollars to your cause, while at the same time, trying to manage spending.

This brings to mind the lesson Professor Emeritus Theodore Levitt notably told his students at Harvard Business School, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”  If we equate this to the non-profit world, “We want increased giving!” Yet, we still need the tools to achieve this goal.

But first, we must select the proper vendor to deliver the proper tools.

So as Dr. Levitt suggests, instead of focusing on the attributes of the products, focus on the outcome and what these tools will do for you.

At Click & Pledge we build FREE online fundraising tools loaded with features and benefits. Even so, we want you to focus on how our products will deliver what you ultimately want: Increased giving.

What I painfully experience with a number of prospects is that they focus on cost…and worse yet, they focus only on the cost of credit card processing!  It’s not about credit card processing!

It’s about the software and the support that will help you achieve increased giving without a never-ending drain on resources.

Selection of a vendor has evolved…please consider a few of these tips:

• Select vendors offering simple yet effective solutions.   Remember, making things simple is hard.
• Know what you need and what you want and what your budget is.
• Explore Free. We do online banking, purchase tickets, register for a class, manage a database and accept donations. We communicate worldwide with friends and we network for business — all for FREE…do you want to explain why you did not select free?
• Seek vendors offering the latest technology … in with more HTML 5 and out with Flash…in with Cloud-based platforms and near field communication where the smart phone replaces the wallet.
• Seek a vendor that can deliver the best total solution under one roof: payments, donor management, forms, events, mobile and so on.
• Look for vendor applications outside the traditional “keyboard/mouse input” to deliver rich, simple experiences across the board.  Make it easy for your patrons to communicate, volunteer, participate and give.  See this: (link to QR PayCard)
• Vendors must provide “mobile” capability as “First Screen” experiences…they are replacing the age-old desktop fast!  Look for those who think mobile first.  In the past, television was “first screen”, computer was second and mobile third.  Now, mobile is fast becoming first.  Plan and design accordingly.
• Social networking & Facebook experience extensions are now “must haves” but with limited sharing of information.  Login to participate is a bad social experience.  Vendors must make social more integrated, considerate and thoughtful about how information is shared.
• Require an online demonstration of the software and how it works.  It’s time well spent and you get peace of mind.

Mobile brings new opportunities and new products like the QR PayCard.

The takeaway: In five years, expect the computer, as we know it, to no longer be around. Your tools will be tablets, mobile phones or a computer-on-a-stick. All you will need is a browser-powered monitor and your office will be omnipresent. As a matter of fact, you can do most of this today on the cloud.  Ask Cloud for Good.

Guest post by Jim Barney from Click and Pledge. You can contact Jim at Jim.Barney (at) clickandpledge (dot) com.

 (This blog post is part of the “Apps for Good” series where awesome AppExchange providers guest post about their applications.)

IDEX is a San Francisco based non-profit organization that promotes sustainable solutions to poverty by providing long-term grants and access to resources to locally run organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Like many NPO’s, IDEX leverages technology to help their small staff promote their message and engage their supporters. And, of course, they must do all this while also keeping costs down and maximizing their return. Using the combined power of Salesforce CRM and VerticalResponse for AppExchange, IDEX is able to maintain a successful email marketing program that contributes to a large increase in their online fundraising efforts and supporter engagement. Even better, IDEX is able to take advantage of VerticalResponse’s non-profit program, enabling them to send up to 10,000 emails per month absolutely free (a monthly savings of $120).

IDEX has discovered many benefits to using VerticalResponse in conjunction with their Salesforce account. According to Deborah Goldberg, IDEX’s Communications & Public Outreach Manager, using VR for AppExchange allows her to create beautiful emails even with no graphic design expertise. The interface makes it easy for her to focus on what matters most, messaging and content. Using VR’s segmentation tools enables IDEX to target their campaigns based on specific supporter information as well as being able to tie back all of their email activity to specific Salesforce campaigns. Deborah has also found extreme value utilizing email opt-in forms across the IDEX website, a great tool for growing their email list. IDEX has seen a particularly large lift in email opt-ins by asking supporters for their email addresses in exchange for reports and other valuable content.

When it comes to content for the emails themselves, IDEX takes advantage of VerticalResponse’s robust reporting features to help identify what resonates most with their audience and is able to optimize their messaging accordingly. Because of this, IDEX has developed an email marketing program that consistently drives high engagement and leads to increased donations. Let’s take a look at IDEX’s most recent email newsletter to see what best practices they use to achieve this success.

1) From Label: The most effective from label is a name your recipients recognize, trust, and expect to hear from. IDEX addresses all of these things by including not only the organization’s name in the from label (name recognition), but by also including Deborah’s name, which adds an additional layer of familiarity and personality.

2) Subject Line: The subject line is your chance to grab your readers’ attention and compel them to take the all important step of opening your email. Besides having a compelling hook, though, you also have to keep in mind that many email clients (especially those on mobile phones) will cut off all but the beginning of your subject line. IDEX takes this into account and puts the most crucial information, March News, front and center and then follows with the specific content that their readers will find interesting.

3) Image to Text Ratio: While there is no hard and fast rule for this, it is a good idea to maintain balance between image and text in your emails. Remember, any one of your recipients that doesn’t have images turned on in their email client will be unable to see anything but the text. Don’t risk losing them by making your entire email one large image. IDEX’s newsletter illustrates this concept brilliantly.

4) Events: Just because email is an online medium doesn’t mean you shouldn’t utilize it to take your engagement offline as well. In a great example of how IDEX uses the VR segmentation tools for targeting, they are able to promote events to their local audiences.

5) Content: You’ve heard the expression “Content is King.” Well, in the case of email marketing, this couldn’t be truer. More than anything else, the way to keep your subscribers opening and reading your emails is to fill them with valuable content. IDEX’s March newsletter includes a blog post featuring one of their partners, a photo set of a recent alumni celebration, and a value packed impact report. Notice that all of this content is devoid of a pitch for donations (don’t worry, that comes next). Instead, IDEX recognizes the fact that their supporters have choices when it comes to making contributions, and the organization that engages their audience with great content puts them in a better position to be on the receiving end of those donations.

6) Strong Call to Action Button: You might have been reading the last point about content and saying, “what, are they crazy…where’s the part when we appeal for donations?!” Here it is, and IDEX provides a textbook example of how to do it. Call to action buttons consistently test better than links when trying to get your readers to click through. Want to learn more? Check out these tips for call to action buttons as well as a free tool for building your own.

7) Social Links: In this day and age, it’s pretty rare to find a non-profit who doesn’t have a social networking presence, and for good reason. But what’s the point of putting all that effort into social media if your supporters don’t know you’re there? There is no reason for social media to sit in a separate silo from email marketing. In fact, the two go hand in hand! Take a cue from IDEX and make sure to include links to all the social networks that your organization is active on.

Compliance: Certainly not the sexiest aspect of email marketing, compliance is one of the most important. CAN-SPAM requires email marketers to do things like include a physical address and an easy way for recipients to unsubscribe. Don’t worry, though, VerticalResponse takes the stress out of compliance by remembering the details for you. Here, IDEX’s compliance is automatically generated in the email’s footer.

If you’re a non-profit looking for a powerful (and cost effective!) email marketing solution for Salesforce, look no further than VerticalResponse for AppExchange. And if you’re already taking advantage of our product, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and share your experiences!

Guest post by Ellery Long. Ellery is the Social Media Manager at VerticalResponse. You can connect with him on Twitter at @EL.

For more information or to connect with IDEX:

www.idex.org

https://www.facebook.com/idex.org

https://twitter.com/#!/idex

For more information or to connect with VerticalResponse:

www.verticalresponse.com

https://www.facebook.com/VerticalResponse

https://twitter.com/#!/vr4smallbiz

Why are we launching  this series?

“Which applications should I install?” is probably one of the most common questions we hear from our clients. In order to address this question, a few months ago we posted an article about a few of our favorite apps (Don’t have an App Attack!), however, since then, we have received even more questions about applications. So instead of writing a short review for each application, we figured, “why not go straight to the source itself” and asked the developers to write a guest blog post. Who knows better these applications other than their actual developers?

We hope that you will enjoy the series and that it will make it a little easier to choose from the hundreds of applications on the AppExchange.

Here is the list of post:

• Apps for Good: Vertical Response (email service provider)
• Apps for Good: Click and Pledge (online payment integration)
• Apps for Good: Apsona (data manipulation in Salesforce)
• Apps for Good: AppExtremes  (Salesforce mail merges)
• Apps for Good: Cloud2You (direct mail from Salesforce)
• Apps for Good: Cirrus Insight (bring Salesforce into Gmail)

What is so exciting about the Analytics Edition?

• Bucketing, a feature which lets you group data and place them in categories (or buckets). For example: you can say that all gifts under $1,000 are small and over that are large.

• Cross-filtering, this will allow you to filter on related objects. For instance, you will be able to create a report on households and contacts, to show all contacts in households that didn’t attend the last volunteer event.

• Joined reports, this new report type will allow you to join reports together, to report on multiple children of the same parent object. For instance, if you are using the Nonprofit Starter Pack you will be able to build a report showing the payments, related contacts for each donation you received last year.
  This means that your organization no longer needs to spend hours in Excel or third-party business intelligence app’s to gain insight. You can see view a short training video here.

What does it mean for your organization?

Whether you are using Salesforce to fundraise, manage cases, or recruit, understanding the effectiveness of your efforts is essential.  The new and improved insight will help you capture “what works” and which services require improvements.

Ready to learn more? Would you like to schedule one-on-one training? Inquire about our support package today.