SEE HOW CLOUD FOR GOOD CAN HELP YOU CREATE MORE VALUE WITH SALESFORCE.
For me, 2013 was the first year I was able to attend Dreamforce and I must say I had no clue what to expect. Sure I asked veteran team members, “Where should I go? What should I see? How do I maximize my experience?” More often than not I heard the same answer: See as much as you can and enjoy the experience because it will be over before you know it.
All companies, whether for or nonprofit, need to hire and onboard new employees. In many cases, the hiring process may be run through a job board system that handles the posting of job applications, interview scheduling, ratings, etc. Here’s an example of a common back-office process that can be made more efficient with some very simple automation in Salesforce.
At many nonprofits, and in particular at smaller organizations, staff members tend to wear many hats. There may not be someone who has “administer Salesforce” written into their job description, just as there may not be someone on staff who is responsible for maintaining the website, putting antivirus software on the computers, or fixing the printer when it jams. Nonetheless, those are all important tasks, and when it comes to Salesforce, it’s crucial to have a designated administrator.
Apsona creates user-friendly, browser-based web applications for CRM and e-commerce. Its offerings include Apsona for Salesforce, a Salesforce.com add-on for improved data manipulation, cross object filtering and reporting, and multi-step reporting, a powerful multi-object reporting tool.
This blog post is part of the “Apps for Good Webinars” where awesome AppExchange providers like Click and Pledge, Conga, and Scribe will demo their applications and how nonprofit and educational organizations can use them to collect online donations, integrate with Google Apps, or create online forms. Register for future webinars here.
roundCause is the best in class constituent engagement suite available on Salesforce.com for fundraising, development, volunteers, grants and event management. roundCause is being implemented throughout the Salesforce nonprofit and higher ed ecosystem. It is designed as a native tool thus allowing you to implement the application and easily extend Salesforce into other areas of your nonprofit’s programs/services and social enterprise departments.
One of the biggest obstacles to using Work.com to effectively manage goals was that it wasn’t integrated with Salesforce.com, so there was no automated way to record progress – instead, someone had to manually go in and update progress against goals. Although not insurmountable, anything that requires manual entry should (in my opinion) be avoided like the plague! In the last year Salesforce.com has worked to address this shortcoming and added several important enhancements that make it worth taking another look at.
Even on a powerful platform like Salesforce, we’ve all had moments where we need a little bit more. Maybe your nonprofit is using the Non-Profit Starter Pack (NPSP) for a while and you’ve found that you need more robust support for managing your fundraising and your donors’ preferences. Maybe you’re new to Salesforce and you know that you need it tailored to complex nonprofit business processes. Either way, when your nonprofit reaches a certain point in your approach to CRM, it may be time to consider an application like roundCause. roundCause is a comprehensive application for nonprofits built on the Salesforce platform. It has a robust set of features for fundraising, marketing and communications, events, and overall relationship management. It offers 360 degree view of your donors and volunteers, as well as empowering you to track and increase constituent engagement.
When using Salesforce to run your organization, there comes a point where the complexity of your implemented solution process may cause your users to complain, or sometimes even stop using your system. Over the last fifteen years I have heard so many complaints about business applications that point back to an issue of complexity. You can avoid it, learn how.
4 Steps to Integrating Social Media into Successful Campaigns, is a helpful guide for understanding and using social media to meet your campaign goals.
Who doesn’t like the idea of a sandbox? You can get creative, get dirty, and get better at what you’re looking to accomplish. Salesforce has some nice options here. Depending on the type of sandbox you spin up, you have different features, capabilities, and pricing. Read more about your options.
