Massive turnout on the Dem side
Last Updated on Wednesday, 30 January 2008 11:50 Written by Steve Wednesday, 30 January 2008 11:50
Matt Stoller has a fascinating article in the Nation about how the massive turnout in this Democratic primary season is aided by new organizing techniques and technologies.
Adam Mordecai, a Dean staffer who helped run the Perfect Storm [Dean's 2004 effort to blanket Iowa with volunteer door knockers], described the problem as follows: “The one major issue that really foiled the perfect storm…was the completely dysfunctional voter-file system. The company we contracted the voter file to was way out of their league. Their system would crash perpetually, field organizers would be lucky if they could ever access the system to download lists and said lists were usually way out-of-date or incorrect because no one could get access to the system to update them. Iowans would get repeated calls from different volunteers within the same hour. It was a disaster. It alienated a lot of Iowans who were simply tired of hearing from Deaniacs over and over again.”
The voter file in political campaigns is really just CRM, if used correctly:
The new crop of campaign software tools sends data back instantly to a centralized database, so effort isn’t wasted on voters who have moved or died. And campaign knowledge is accretive, with voting history, political identification and contact history retained every cycle.
Doesn’t this sound like CRM to you? It’s really great to see Democratic campaigns getting CRM and understanding that to get that right they have to tackle the problem of having many, many volunteers utilizing that CRM in a coherent way. It sure looks like campaigns are doing that very well this cycle.
It doesn’t hurt Democratic turnout to have Mr. 27% still in the White House, but if you don’t actually get people out to the polls, that doesn’t matter. CRM can help in building the relationship and getting people’s support, just like it can in so many other arenas.
Learn MoreAppexchange on Hold in February
Last Updated on Friday, 25 January 2008 08:57 Written by Steve Friday, 25 January 2008 08:57
We always get caught off guard by these Appexchange listing suspensions:
…there will be a regularly scheduled temporary suspension of AppExchange registration for new applications from February 8th to February 16th, 2008. During this time no new applications can be registered, meaning that the AppExchange will not create private or public listings for any new apps.
Ever since Salesforce started doing rolling upgrades to their servers (shortly after a Winter release that went awry) there’s always been a period of time when the Appexchange isn’t taking new listings. This is because some Salesforce customers are on the old release and some are on the new release.
If you’re in the middle of a rollout, the inability to create new private packages for a full week is a real drag. Make sure to do your development before February 8th or you’ll be copying and pasting like it’s 2005!
Learn MoreMy Appexchange offerings are going away soon
Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 January 2008 04:56 Written by Steve Wednesday, 23 January 2008 11:21
Just a heads up that the Appexchange apps we’ve made freely available to date are going away soon. Salesforce.com has changed what they allow on the Appexchange and are requiring some significant hurdles to keep free apps up there. I may do the work necessary to keep our Plone Integration on the Appexchange, but I may also forgo that and just rely on the Wiki page to keep the project information. And if they take that away from us, we’ll just fall back to the plonesf Google Group. If Google shuts us down, I’ll send it to you via carrier pigeon.
These apps will definitely go off the Appexchange in the next few weeks:
It was fun while it lasted. We got no revenue from these posted apps, but I bet I fielded over 300 email requests from folks interested in using them.
I don’t think it’s a great decision by Saleforce to make it hard for these free offerings to be out there, but it’s their directory so they can do whatever they want with it. As of now, there is no way to easily share free components to other Salesforce.com users. But this URL is still available, so maybe someone will build a way to share uncertified, free apps, since Salesforce.com clearly doesn’t want to.
Update: To be clear (and fair), they aren’t kicking me off the Appexchange. It’s just that all apps now have to be certified on the Appexchange. And all vendors who are selling apps need to pay for each click-through to test drives. In their shift to this focus, I made the plea that free apps should be considered differently, and they agreed. It was just that I got a few too many emails from the system telling me that my apps were going to be delisted if I didn’t fill out the certification questionnaire. After some clarification from Salesforce.com today, I answered 3 questions and my native apps are now certified! Except the Functional Documentation app, which I want to have disappear anyway. The Plone app is a different beast since it’s a client app, so I’ll see where the process takes me there.
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