Success Story: Farming and the Environment

Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 February 2007 08:52 Written by Steve Wednesday, 28 February 2007 08:49

• we’re tracking their farmer’s market using campaigns and opportunities
  • tracking all registered vendors
  • tracking weekly commission on gross sales (F+E’s admin fee for having the market)
• we’re tracking relationships between farmers and buyers (restaurants, markets, institutions) with a Custom Object called Sales Agreement
• Sales Agreements tie food producers with buyers so F+E can see the landscape of interconnectedness
  
• we’re tracking sustainable farming statistics via Accounts and a Custom Object called Acreage
  • how many acres of land are under sustainable farming certifications?
  • how do those acreages change over time?
    
  • has a farm gone
    through the F+E qualification process?
• we’re integrated with their email blasting tool (What Counts)
• signups are via Web-to-Lead
• Contacts that have newsletter checkboxes selected are automatically pulled over to What Counts for delivery
  

Looking to expand

Last Updated on Tuesday, 27 February 2007 01:46 Written by Steve Tuesday, 27 February 2007 01:46

Last Tuesday as I sent out 6 proposals for Salesforce.com projects, I realized that I needed to ramp up the effort to hire someone to help out. I’m looking for someone just like me–independent, analytical, technical, with a desire to help environmental nonprofits use the best CRM available to them. Flexibility, willingness to learn, and collaborative spirit are key to being successful in this job.

ONE/Northwest is a great place to work, my best job ever. My colleagues are truly brilliant people. Because of that, we are a very flat organization–I’m not so much looking for someone to work for me, but with me. I want these kinds of skills to help us build our program beyond the 10 implementations we’ve done to date. We’re going to be very focused on meeting the needs of the small environmental groups as well and looking at sharing data between groups, as well as sharing data up to coalition efforts. The voter file is an interesting data set that we’ll be working with extensively this year. We’re doing some cutting edge work, things Salesforce.com hasn’t ever done before. It’s really fun.

ONE/Northwest is a great place to work. Salesforce.com is an amazing platform to work on. The Northwest (and Southwest Canadian) environmental movement is a movement that is winning and making change. And because Salesforce.com is web-based, I’m happy to consider remote office arrangements. The only drawback to all of this is you would have to work with me. Drop me a line if you want to chat: Steve @ this site’s url.

The official job announcement and description will come out in the next month or so, and of course I’ll post it here.

Process Modeling for the Masses

Last Updated on Tuesday, 27 February 2007 09:57 Written by Steve Tuesday, 27 February 2007 09:28

Ismael has some comments on the recent announcement of web-based Business Process Modeling tools. He’s pretty down on the concept, wondering why folks would prefer applications like Lombardi Blueprint to a full suite like IDS Scheer ARIS or a completely flexible tool like Visio.

I think there is a huge need for Blueprint-like services. In my work consulting with nonprofits around their business processes, I’ve come to realize that most of them have never systematically analyzed how they work. They’ve never taken the time to lay out their work processes, who’s doing them, and what problems there might be along the way. These groups are very busy, generally have no technical staff, and pay sub-standard salaries. It’s very understandable that they haven’t taken a systematic look at their work.

But, they are often very high functioning, and once they are exposed to process modeling they “get it”. A number of folks I’ve shown my process models to have taken on the mantle of process mapper for their org, and are spreading the religion. It’s been really fun to watch.

Tools like Blueprint will make process modeling more accessible to small businesses, like nonprofits. We’ll never need a process modeling suite–what we’re doing is not that complex. Viso works, but there are no process modeling best practices built into Visio, other than the concept of functional swim lanes.

Blueprint-like services have lots of best practices built in. The concepts of business owners, participants, problems, and sub-processes are all hard-coded into the service. This level of structure is the right level for the millions of folks out there who should be thinking about their work in a systematic way, but have no idea what BPM, ESB, and BPEL mean.

So hurray for business process modeling “lite” and vendors like Lombardi who are removing hurdles from broader uptake. Systematic analysis can be decoupled from programmatic expression of business processes, and in the small business world, it should be.