Bookmarklet for doing web research

Last Updated on Thursday, 22 March 2007 03:40 Written by Steve Thursday, 22 March 2007 03:38

When you’re researching constituents (donors, community leaders, politicians) you’re probably using the web. Google is now a verb, for heaven’s sake. But if you find juicy tidbits, it would be nice to add that info to a person’s record in Salesforce, where it will become part of your complete picture of them. So I created a simple bookmarklet that will grab what you’re looking at and open a create new Task form already populated with what you’ve highlighted on the page.

Drag this to your bookmarks toolbar.

After creating the bookmark, you’ll have to change two things in the URL:

• Use the right na# at the begining of the URL
• The first field passed is the URL field. Tasks don’t have a URL field. This bookmark will work without one, but won’t capture the URL anywhere. You’ll have to create a URL field and put it on the page layout. Then get the form field name (which will be a nasty guid) and replace it in the bookmarklet to correctly record the URL in the task

To find the guid for the field name, you can use a cool tool that Ron Hess pointed me to a while back.

In Firefox go to Salesforce.com and hit a New Task button on an Account. When the edit form for the task loads up, go to Tools | Page Info in your browser. Hit the Forms tab and it will list all the forms on the page. You care about the EditPage form. Select that and it will list all the form fields. One will be labeled whatever you named the custom URL field, but will have a guid for a name. Grab that guid and put in the bookmarklet, replacing the guid right after salesforce.com/00T/e?.

Once you get it working, you can prepopulate a new Task form with web information. Then just relate that task to a Contact and/or another object and save. Your web research is then in Salesforce.com. Easy as pie!

A quick blurb about ONE/Northwest and our Plone work

Last Updated on Thursday, 22 March 2007 09:05 Written by Steve Thursday, 22 March 2007 09:05

We build websites for groups in the Plone content management system. ZEA Partners, the European Zope/Plone organization, wrote up a brief case study of our work. Jon Stahl has a bunch of quotes in the article,

Open source communities and nonprofit organizations are a great fit. We are both passionate, mission-driven and have strong commitments to sharing, collaboration and social benefit. We’ve benefitted tremendously from the hard work and experience of the Plone community, and we’ve tried to give back in kind.

While Salesforce.com isn’t open source, they show a desire for openness with the way they look at their platform and your data. We’ve been working to help create a sharing community around use of the platform at nonprofits–I’m pretty pleased with where things are at this point, even if we’re nowhere near as advanced in size and collaboration as the Plone community is.

Process: Donation Processing

Last Updated on Thursday, 22 March 2007 07:26 Written by Steve Thursday, 22 March 2007 07:24

None of our processes up till now have handled real money. In this post we’ll look at what happens when the check comes in.

Processing money is where organizations start to differentiate their processes. For example, some groups have Memberships, where a donor gets an annual term and some level of member benefit. A key part of managing members is managing their expiration dates, and making sure memberships don’t lapse. Other groups just take donations that are generally on a yearly cycle–if a donor gives $100 in June 2005, it is considered a loss if their next gift doesn’t come in by June 2006 for at least $100.

This process map (Fig. 1.) starts with a check and the decision if the gift is a donation or a membership. Then we check to see if this is an expected payment (it’s already in the system) or one we weren’t anticipating.

Fig. 1. Processing the money when it comes in is where things start to get a bit complicated (PDF)

The gift then gets connected to an appeal, to help us determine the source of the money and also allow us to measure the return on those outreach efforts.

The last, and very important step, is to create a new gift 12 months out. This gift will be marked as “Prospecting” so we know it’s not a check that came in, but rather an opportunity for revenue in the future. By doing this, we’ll make sure not to lose track of this donor and their potential gift. And we’ll also inform our financial forecast for the next year. If you put all your potential gifts on the calendar, you can then see what your revenue picture will look like (Fig. 2.)

Fig 2. Some sample data representing all gifts for 2007. Red indicates gifts that have been received. Blue indicates gifts that have not yet been solidified.

As you might imagine, this can be very helpful in the budgeting process, and in dealing with cash flow issues. Most groups have their giving weighted heavily toward the final quarter of the year, as in this graph. By forecasting potential revenue, that picture becomes much clearer and can be managed more effectively.