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Peter Mitton over at SalesforceUser.com has published his first training video: Creating and Finding Tasks. Peter is going to pass on some of the trainings he’s developing from his experience as a Salesforce.com user and administrator. Check out his first video if you want to learn a bit about Tasks and Events in Salesforce.com and how to use them.

Thanks Peter!

Check out this cool service for posting Powerpoint slides on the web. SlideShare takes you ppt file, converts it to flash, then makes in embeddable on your site for viewing. Here are my slides from one of my Dreamforce sessions:

Cool tidbit–the files are hosted on Amazon’s S3 service. Check out the slides shown next to a video of a session on Salesforce’s site.

My friend Jeff just announced that ActionStudio now has it’s first generation web services interface. He’s made his PHP classes and examples available for download.

ActionStudio has added Web Services support to allow groups to send emails and faxes to elected officials from their own Web sites. This gives groups complete flexibility in managing the presentation of their campaigns and collecting data.

This is really cool! We’ve been trying to figure out how to add some online advocacy functionality to Salesforce.com. While Jeff’s initial release is limited, it’s a great sign. His SOAP interface allows me to pass activist information to an Action Studio campaign from anywhere.

Off the top of my head, I’m picturing a Web to Lead form that captures all the relevant information for an activist, then we can use Winter ‘07 outbound messaging to hit a listener that will pass on the message to Action Studio. There, the message will be sent on to the correct target.

On the Salesforce side, that Lead will be added to a Campaign, tracking their action in your CRM.

Things could clearly be simpler, but you just have to look at some of the tight email integrations out there to see that it’s possible. Thanks Jeff for taking this step. I look forward to talking to you about how to tighten the integration with Salesforce!

I pointed the nonprofits at Dreamforce to my blog, so I thought I’d point to a number of my old posts that might be helpful. You can always search for topics, or just dig through the CRM category as well.

• Handling People, Organizations and Households in Salesforce: Here’s a run down of how I model the basics–people, orgs, and households. Salesforce.com is so flexible that we often do even these things differently!
• Opportunities in a Contact-centric Salesforce database: If you’re going to model things the way I do, with people as Contacts, how best to use Opportunities?
• Opportunity Teams: Get creative with Contact Roles on Opportunities.
• Ensuring CRM Data Quality with DemandTools: It’s all for naught if your data is lousy. DemandTools makes having high-quality data a real possibility.
• Get those Salesforce Hyperlinks under control with Firefox: Firefox is a great browser. It’s better than IE, especially for use with Salesforce.com. Here’s a simple tip that will help you use it better.

Hope these are helpful to my new readers!

At Dreamforce I realized there are a lot of nonprofits out there using Salesforce who are in the same place–they know they aren’t using Salesforce to it’s full potential, but don’t know how to change that. They suspect there are iideas out there, but can’t tap into them.

Dreamforce allowed us all to get together and share ideas. This was really cool, but was only for a couple days. So what can we do to keep us all learning and sharing year round?

First, check out the nonprofit boards at Salesforce.com. Cheri Sugal has developed a plan to move her implementation forward after learning a lot at Dreamforce. She’s posted her plan only two days after the conference ended! Nice work Cheri and thanks for sharing with everyone. Hopefully some folks facing similar hurdles will learn from your post.

On my site, I’m going to try to line up some folks to talk to me for 30 minutes about their Salesforce implementations and post them for nonprofits to listen to. I’m hoping that the stories of Salesforce users will be helpful to other Salesforce users. Let me know if you think this would be a worthwhile idea. Wendie and Pete, beware, I’ll be calling you soon!

We’ll see when I can actually pull that together. In the meantime, check out this interview by Anne Zelenka of Judi Sohn about the Colorectal Cancer Coalition’s implementation of Salesforce.com. You might learn something from Judi, who’s been through an implementation at her nonprofit. You can listen to it in the embedded audio player below.

Thanks Sonny for the tip!

A group of us have gotten together to talk about the challenges and opportunities of doing Salesforce.com implementations with nonprofits. This isn’t an end-user group, but a group that deals more with issues of consulting, implemeting, and administering Salesforce with nonprofits. We’re focusing how we can work together to make Salesforce.com a better platform for nonprofits.

If that sounds like something you’re interested in being a part of, join the conversation!

Subscribe to Nonprofit Salesforce.com Practitioners

Email:

Visit this group

Salesforce users and employees are now posting new feature ideas at ideas.salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is going to be watching the results on this site, and they’re prepared to use this as an indication of what features users really want.

Go vote for the ideas you think are best. Here are some suggestions:

• Formula fields that can access fields from related items: show the sum of Opportunity value on a Contact record.
• Show fields from related objects on a page layout: similar to above, but without having to create a formula field.
• Subtract the Contacts and Leads on a Report from a specified Campaign: just like the Add to Campaign button, but subtraction. Add everyone to a training Campaign who has an open Opportunity, and then subtract everyone who has already been to your trainings already.
• Use Salesforce email templates directly from Outlook: crank out boilerplate emails without having to use the Salesforce email interface.

Vote for these! And browse to look for features you think would be great to have. If you find or create some, let me know and I’ll vote for them.

All the sessions at Dreamforce were captured, and are being released on Google video as they get processed.

Check out this session with Exponent Partners, Network for Good, and United Way of America.

It was great to meet a bunch of folks using Salesforce to manage their nonprofits. The Salesforce Foundation brought us all together at Dreamforce, and I think it was really fruitful.

First, we got to meet each other. I watched as people who were the only person who knew anything about Salesforce at their small organization met others who were in the same boat. I watched as they shared what they were doing, what they were struggling with, and asked questions of those of us who have had more Salesforce experience.

The best interaction on this front for me was an informal lunch meeting I had with 5 nonprofit users. We talked about Opportunities, Campaigns, and Contacts. It was a great way to share information.

Another great part of bringing us together at Dreamforce was that we got to go to the sessions not specifically targeted at nonprofits. We got to sit in on Marketing sessions that talked about best practices for outreach, we got to sit in on data cleaning sessions that talked about how to keep your data trustable. And some of us got to sit in on developer sessions that expanded our horizons on how to wield the power of the platform today, and tomorrow with upcoming releases.

We’re out of the nonprofit ghetto. We’re using the most flexible business software out there, and it’s about to get tons more flexible and powerful.

Thanks again to Steve, Meghan, and Tucker for bringing us all together, for having the first nonprofit track at Dreamforce ever, and getting a number of us booths in the expo hall. It was really a great experience.

And to all the nonprofit folks who attended: keep in touch. Not just with me, but with each other. Keep sharing information, keep helping each other out. The Salesforce platform has taken away a lot of technical hurdles to our success, now lets work on the other hurdles together.

I was nominated for an Appie Award at Dreamforce in the category of Best Customer Innovation. There were 3 other nominees in the category, one of which was Cisco Systems, who currently has a 6000+ seat rollout of Salesforce.. Let’s say I was a long shot.

But, I figured I should work on what I would say if I did win, because I’m not very good at making coherent, spontaneous comments in front of hundreds of people. So here’s what I came up with:

I’m a Salesforce implementation partner and I build Salesforce databases for environmental nonprofits. There are 3 main reasons I recommend Salesforce.com to potential nonprofit customers:

1. Salesforce.com is flexible enough to support our unorthodox business processes today, and as they change.
2. On-demand technology allows nonprofits to focus their resources and energy on making a difference, not managing their servers
3. Salesforce.com is an incredible philanthropic partner, giving nonprofits access to the best on-demand platform there is for managing their businesses.

Thanks Mark for your vision of philanthropy. And thanks to the great folks at the Salesforce Foundation—I wouldn’t be here without you.

Of course I didn’t win, Cisco won–I was shocked. It was really cool to be nominated not in the Nonprofit Category, but in a general category, up against Cisco. I think that validates the Salesforce.com idea that getting nonprofits on Salesforce.com makes good business sense. We nonprofits may be small and cash poor, but we’re smart and doing good work. And we’re a whole lot better at sharing than the for-profit folks are, so just watch us kick butt on this platform.