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Salesforce.com just published a visual map of the steps to getting CRM up and running in your organization. While it uses Salesforce.com-specific language, it’s a great framework for thinking about what you need to make your project successful. I’ve co-opted some of their materials before and found them to be helpful.

For technology to support your specific work processes, it has to be flexible. You may need different fields for tracking donors than other people do. I’m talking about “key fields”–fields that help you to make decisions. Fields like “Donor Rating”, or “Issue Interests”, or “Newsletter Subscriber”. The data in these key fields are what help you get your work done. You can send a quarterly briefing to all donors with your highest “Donor Rating”, you can send a legislative action alert to people who have idenfied Legislation as an “Issue Interest”, or you can blast out your Newsletter to everyone marked as a “Newsletter Subscriber.”

If you can’t add these key fields, the technology isn’t going to support your work, or you will have to change the way you work to match the technology. That usually isn’t a very successful path to take.

But even bigger than fields, your technology should be able to support whole new processes. What if you want to start selling t-shirts to the same base of constituents that are your Donors? Can your donor management system support that? How about volunteering? How about tracking who is coming to your next conference? It’s pretty hard for a technology platform to be flexible enough to handle not only new fields, but new tables and relationships between tables. Who knows what you may throw at it in 6 months–will it be able to suppor that? Or will you have to add technology to track the same people and organizations you’re already tracking?

I’m finding that Salesforce.com can do this–it can grow to support things you never thought about. A current client is doing Donor Managment, Grant Mangement, Membership, Volunteering, Retail Sales, and Events all in Salesforce.com. The same donors may fit into all those different areas, so why not do it all in one system? I’m very pleased with how things are turning out.

The main drawback to this flexibility is that the UI isn’t tuned to get a certain process done. If you look at a donor management system, it makes it very easy to manage donors. It streamlines things like pledges, stock gifts, householding, and soft credits. It may be completely impossible for it to do ticket sales for an annual event, but it has donor management down pat.

Salesforce.com can do all the nuances of donor management, it just doesn’t have a UI tuned to that. I think the ability to capture myriad work process in the same system outweighs the UI inefficiency, but luckily that’s not a trade off we have to make. Salesforce.com allows you to modify the UI to enforce business processes. You can drop your own interface in where you need it, effectively filling the gap between flexibility and tight user experience. I’ve been experimenting with this heavily over the past month. For my current client, I’ve built 10 custom code modules, 2 custom tables, and countless fields. And, according to the client, it’s all coming together in a pretty tight package.

Salesforce.com lets you put custom links in the application. These can be hyperlinks to other objects in Salesforce.com, custom code, external sites, etc. You can dynamically create these links based on the context of the current object. So you can parameterize the URLs with Salesforce.com data, like address info. Here’s a custom link that pulls up a Yahoo! Map for the Contact’s address:

http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?cn={!Contact_MailingCountry}&csz={!Contact_MailingCity}+
{!Contact_MailingState}+{!Contact_MailingPostalCode}+&addr={!Contact_MailingAddress}

Until recently, you were very limited in where you could put your custom links on the page layout. You had to put them in a bucket called “Useful Links”, and only custom fields could go in there. But there is a better way. You can now create Formula fields that are Hyperlinks. Here’s a Hyperlink for a link to an S-Control I wrote for creating a new gift for a contact:

HYPERLINK(”/servlet/servlet.Integration?lid=00b30000000nIAI&eid=” & {!Id} , “Create a New Gift”)

The lid is the Id of the S-Control I wrote to create a new gift. The {!Id} is the Id of the Contact I’m coming from. So I’m calling custom code in the context of my current object.

Now I can put that link anywhere I want on my layout, and I can put descriptive text near it to make sure its function is understood. The descriptive text is put in as text Formula fields that has static descriptive content. That field is then put directly below the link.

I’m up to my neck in migrating an org’s data from the venerable Filemaker application ebase 1.0 to Salesforce.com.

Turns out that taking complex relational data from one schema and migrating it to another complex relational schema takes some time.

I plan to write up a detailed article about this process and what I’ve learned, but I don’t have time. Right now I’ll just list out the tools that make this migration possible:

• Filemaker is needed to open up ebase. I have a dusty old 5.5 copy that just barely works for me.
• MS Excel is needed as an intermediary. Export all the filemaker tables to CSV. I do a lot of Excel formulas to transform data (like combining area code and phone number, but only if the phone number isn’t longer than 8 characters, and only if the area code exists, etc.)
• MS Access becomes the main workspace for me. I bring all the data in there, then use queries to transform it further for export to CSV on the way to Salesforce.com
• I would jump out a window if I didn’t have the SForce Data Loader. Seriously. Don’t try this without this tool. It’s amazing and can save you lots of steps if you use it right (I sense another blog post…)

That’s pretty much it. You can do it all in Excel, but Access helps me a lot. Did I mention that the SForce Data Loader is great? And not just for data migrations. Want to change everyone’s Country from US to USA? 3 minute operation with the Data Loader. 2 minutes of that is waiting for the records to come across the Internet.

Wish me luck on my current project and I hope to write up the million things I’m learning along the way as soon as I have time (August?).

Hopefully sooner.