Volunteer Events as Campaigns in Salesforce.com

Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 December 2005 03:13 Written by Steve Wednesday, 28 December 2005 03:11

Volunteer events are outreach activities. The goal is to further the mission by getting donations of time from constituents. Another goal is to engage constituents in the work the organization is doing. You get the donation of work from the volunteer, and you also get to interact with them, and deepen the value of the relationship for both parties.

In trying to model volunteer events in Salesforce.com, the best match for this type of activity is the Campaign object. It allows you to track interactions with people, some of which will attend the event. It also rolls up all the donations that result from the event. Those donations can be volunteer hours, and cash donations.

There are a couple drawbacks to modeling volunteer events this way. You can store a lot of information about the event, but you can’t store custom information about the act of attending. You basically get a Status field, and that’s it. If you have complex volunteer roles, or other data you must capture, this probably will be lacking for you.

The other big drawback is that it’s not easy to turn volunteer event attendance into donations of time. After you have the event, you don’t want to have to hand create Opportunities for each attendee. This, it turns out, is a really easy problem to solve using a custom S-Control (of course).

With this S-Control as a custom link off of a Campaign, you can one-click create volunteer hour Opportunities for all members of a volunteer Campaign. The volunteer hours reside in Salesforce.com as Opportunities, which is what they are–donations to your organization. You can easily report on volunteer hours together separate from all the other donations that come to your organization. Here’s a look at a sample report:

You can also look at volunteer hours in combination with all other donations to your organization, and get a single picture of a constituent’s contribution to your org:

Think about the end-of-year thank you letter you could crank out with this data in a Word mail merge…

Matching Processes to Technology

Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 December 2005 01:52 Written by Steve Wednesday, 28 December 2005 01:52

I’m up to my neck in process right now. I’ve spent 6 hours talking with a customer about how they work. Donor management, membership, volunteer trips, a film festival, and retail sales. They work with govenment agencies, other nonprofits, grant makers, and corporate sponsors. Needless to say I’m a bit overwhelmed.

What I’m trying to do is take in all they can tell me about what they do, ask as many questions as possible to elicit more information, and capture all the detail. After I’ve sucked the life out of them, I take all that info home for analysis.

Analysis consists of taking those processes and figuring out the best way to support them with technology, in this case Salesforce.com. What data tables do I have to work with? How can I string them together into a workflow that matches how the customer works? Where can a little bit of custom code get around holes in the technology support of the process?

It’s mind-numbing, and also really fun. It’s all about understanding two sets of constraints, the customer’s needs and the technology’s limitations, and bringing those together in a good design. Like doing a 3 dimensional puzzle…

In the next couple days I’ll share some work I did today to get Salesforce.com to support volunteer events, in this case land cleanup. I’m pretty psyched because it’s coming together pretty tightly.

My steps to CRM

Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 December 2005 08:54 Written by Steve Tuesday, 20 December 2005 08:53

In September I took my organization through a process to migrate from ebase (a filemaker pro database) to Salesforce.com for CRM. Much like Dr. Jeckyll, we thought it a good idea to experiment on ourselves. Unlike with Dr. Jeckyll, it did not end badly.
We have been using Salesforce.com for over two months now. I’ll talk about using Salesforce.com and how it’s changing the way we work in a later post. In this post, I’ll run through the general steps of the process I took us through in our move to Salesforce.com.

1. Process Reivew Meetings
   1. We talked a lot about what currently stunk about the way we did CRM, what the ideal would be, and what unintended consequences might come out of it.
   2. I spent 6 hours with key staff here to understand how they work. Once their process for working was laid out, I could then identify the data and workflow necessary to support that.
   3. We identified necessary reports, and sources of data that we should bring into CRM.
2. Customization
   1. I went off with this information and decided how to modify the application to support the identified processes.
   2. I created custom fields, built some custom objects (data tables), set up permissions, and created some custom code to make data entry easier.
   3. I set up the reports we needed. We didn’t have many reports because we had really been limited in our reporting ability by ebase. I’ll be creating more reports as we get used to being able to create them!
3. Data Migration
   1. I got to spend lots and lots of time with ebase and filemaker. Real fun. I recommend it.
   2. I got our data out of ebase and into Salesforce.com in the right format
4. Integration
   1. We didn’t integrate into any outside systems in this first project.
5. Training
   1. I worked with key staff and showed them how to use Salesforce.com to do their work.
   2. We skimped a little on this because I sit in the office and can answer training questions on short notice…
6. Launch
7. Follow Up
   1. Since our launch I’ve been adding new fields, changing page layouts, changing permissions, creating reports, and giving training.
   2. I also have had to do some data cleaning because of mistakes I made during the data migration process

Overall the process worked pretty well. I have to get better at being exhaustive in the requirements gathering because I won’t have the luxury of walking across the hall to ask for more info. And my clients won’t be as forgiving as we are, because as we like to say, we have a very high pain tollerance when it comes to technology.

I learned a lot during this work, and have made a lot of changes. I’m now testing the process on two real-world projects. I’ve fully disclosed that I’m not really sure what the heck I’m doing here, and they’re game. I’ll let you know how it goes.