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2009/03/17: Introduction to Salesforce CRM

Submitted by hallman on Tue, 04/14/2009 - 9:18am

NetTuesday/Triangle 501 Tech Club

Location: Wake West Regional Library, 4000 Louis Stephens Drive
Cary, NC 27519.

Speaker: Trish Perkins, a VISTA volunteer with Faith Action International House, a human rights and advocacy organization in Greensboro, NC. She also directs the international technology consultancy, Worlds Touch, which focuses mainly on work with nonprofits in the Himalayan mountains..

Introduction to Salesforce CRM: Until two months ago, Trish Perkins had heard lots of good things about Salesforce-- how it made 10 of its Enterprise (Premium) Edition licenses available for free to each qualifying nonprofit. She'd also heard that it was a bit tricky to configure, since it was designed for sales teams in the corporate world, but that the company wanted to get a toehold in the nonprofit realm. NPower New York sent their staffers to the consultant's training and now they help nonprofits that want to use it as their CRM.(Constituent Relationship Management, i.e. org database.) Salesforce has put together a Nonprofit Edition that came out in December. Trish's organization, seeking to update its resource manual of social services available to immigrants, signed up.

Trish is NOT an expert, just a passionate beginner who is willing to show the group what she's discovered about this very powerful tool. She has spent 10-15 hours taking Salesforce's online tutorials, configured her organization's Salesforce to reflect its immigrant/refugee constituency, and begun using various features with interested staffers.

Join Trish in the Salesforce sandbox to see what the buzz is about. Trish is a VISTA volunteer with Faith Action International House, a human rights and advocacy organization in Greensboro, NC. She also directs the international technology consultancy, Worlds Touch, which focuses mainly on work with nonprofits in the Himalayan mountains.

Website: http://www.meetup.com/TriangleNetTuesday/calendar/9722199/

Notes and discussion:

Wireless connectivity was not working well. Trish had made several screencasts (using jingproject.com) and was able to move through them quickly, giving us a good idea of how Salesforce works.

  • Faith Action International House deals with refugees and immigrants.
  • People in the organization each had their own system, mostly piles of business cards.
  • Trish had worked previoiusly with Organizers Database for grass roots organizing, which runs on a PC.
  • Salesforce has a business image, but there is a nonprofit edition
  • Go to salesforcefoundation.org to sign up -- not salesforce.com.
  • They'll donate up to 10 licenses.
  • You can get a 30 trial before you send in 501(c)3 paperwork.
  • Good training materials, including a workbook.
  • Tutorials/screencasts for getting started.
  • Accounts are organizations, a person can have multiple organizations.
  • Salesforce has relationships, event management, campaigns, and good reporting (which CiviCRM doesn't have).
  • E-Base, an early constituent management system, was good. CiviCRM was derived from E-Base.

Followup email from Trish, posted at http://www.meetup.com/TriangleNetTuesday/messages/5578975/

Here are the slides and video tutorials from the Salesforce Introduction
presentation I gave last Tuesday night at the Research Triangle Net
Tuesday meetup.

http://www.screencast.com/t/ZQDGnxru1

And here's the link to the Jing Project. Free download of screencast
stills and videos. This is what I used to make this presentation.

http://www.jingproject.com/

I've put them all online at Screencast.com. Let me know if you are
having any trouble viewing them.

I read an article yesterday supposedly comparing Salesforce and CiviCRM,
but the critique of Salesforce smacked, to me, less of analysis and more
of religious fervor. Maybe it comes down to a question of faith. I don't
know. I'm busy customizing Salesforce for our Immigrant Assistance
center's cage management component.

VISTA, by the way, is a low-income poverty-fighting program of the
federal government. The low-income is YOURS, at a whopping $800 a month
"subsistence allowance." But for folks emerging from poverty or college
with a set of skills that can really benefit nonprofits, it's one way to
do what you love and let the money come later, if at all. For retirees
on fixed incomes, for faculty spouses like me, it can very well be one
way to contribute to your community while bringing in enough to act
charitably and generously elsewhere in the world.

Trish Perkins
VISTA @ FaithAction International House
336-379-0037

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