Science on my ipod

Last Updated on Friday, 20 July 2007 10:44 Written by Steve Friday, 20 July 2007 10:44

I was recently prompted to buy an iphone thanks to a bunch of folks in the Salesforce community who chipped in money for the purchase. The phone is great, and it’s the first ipod I’ve ever owned.

I’ve been running a lot in my triathlon training and I’ve been listening to podcasts on my hour plus runs. This American Life, of course, but my favorite is one called Radiolab out of WNYC in New York. It’s an hour long show that takes broad topics and looks into the current state of our scientific understanding of them, and does it in a highly produced format.

It’s a killer show and I’ve found myself looking forward to my runs just because I’ll get to listen to another Radiolab. I’ve been talking about the thought-provoking topics so much at work that I’m sure they’re all as sick of me talking about it as they were sick of me talking about Critical Mass 6 months ago. Oh well, at least I don’t talk about triathlon at work…

Try out Radiolab–you’ll dig it.

Modeling Engagement Strategy in Salesforce

Last Updated on Wednesday, 18 July 2007 04:38 Written by Steve Wednesday, 18 July 2007 04:38

At ONE/Northwest we’re all about helping groups engage their constituents in helping communities live in harmony with the environment. Most of our work is centered around that goal, and we’re getting more adept and more complex in the kinds of engagement strategies that we’re working on.

These strategies are often multi-step processes, where the goal is to engage a lot of people in a low level way, then take those that act and suggest to them a deeper level of engagement. The concept isn’t new–we’re just trying to move people “up the ladder” of connection with the organization and the cause.

We’ve been using Salesforce.com to model each of these “asks for action”, be they advertisements, email appeals, or phone calls to supporters, as Campaigns. This morning, Gideon and I spent a half an hour modeling out what it might look like to chain together these Campaigns into much more rich engagement strategies.

Here’s what a single Campaign looks like in Salesforce:

It’s a way to track a bunch of people you want to ask to do something. We’re going to add all our members and also everyone who’s ever attended one of our events. Then we ask them if they want to take this action and record their responses on this campaign. This could be manual or automatic though an integration with our website or an online action tool like Democracy In Action.

But what if this Campaign is just one step of many? What if we want to chain together outreach efforts in a coordinated fashion?

To track something like that we created a Salesforce custom object that can be used to group together Salesforce Campaigns. I called in Uber Campaign when I created it. Here’s what one looks like:

You’ll see that it has a series of Campaign steps which happen in order. Those steps also have a description of who is going to be invited to each. In the first step we ask all our members and event attendees.

In the second step we’re asking folks to help us lobby. As lobbying is a lot to expect of folks, we’re going to ask everyone who responded positively to the first step and everyone who has helped us lobby before. To add folks who responded to the first step we can pull up a report of our first campaign of everyone who responded positively.

Then, we can easily add them to the next step by clicking the Add to Campaign button at the top of the report. This will pull up the interface for adding them to the next step.

We’d then run a report of folks who’ve done lobbying with us before and go through the same process of adding them to this campaign. Now we’ve got a set of folks who might be likely lobbyists for us. We’ll track who responds and actually shows up to our lobby day by changing their campaign status.

In the third step we’re asking for something really big–take time out of your life and come all the way to Ottawa to lobby the government. We’re going to ask those folks who attended step two, via the same process as above, and add everyone who lives in Ottawa, because the bar is much lower for them.

So this is a very simplified example of how to lay out a series of Campaigns and move folks through steps in an engagement process. Again, we spent 30 minutes on this, proving that when you’re in Salesforce.com, the technical barriers aren’t the bigest limits. What limits you is thinking through the business cases–what do you want to get done? What’s the strategy? What should we ask folks to do? Those are the important questions, we shouldn’t have to think about the technology.

Displaying Salesforce data on a Plone site

Last Updated on Tuesday, 17 July 2007 03:55 Written by Steve Tuesday, 17 July 2007 03:55

My awesome co-worker Andrew Burkhalter just posted the second article in a series about how sf.com and Plone currently can work together showing an example of displaying some Salesforce data on a Plone website. The first article discussing the underlying framework is here.

Plone is an open source CMS. The Salesforce.com foundation generously funded ONE/Northwest to build a connection between the two last year. A small but committed group of Seattle developers has been working on adding functionality to what we built, and it’s getting pretty interesting. Much thanks to Andrew, Jesse Snyder of NPower Seattle, and Brian Gershon of the Web Collective.

Andrew will post a couple more entries about the integration. We’re going to get the Plone integration packaged up with instructions and get it posted on the Appexchange this summer.