Flexibility vs. Tight User Experience

Last Updated on Saturday, 25 February 2006 01:18 Written by Steve Saturday, 25 February 2006 01:18

For technology to support your specific work processes, it has to be flexible. You may need different fields for tracking donors than other people do. I’m talking about “key fields”–fields that help you to make decisions. Fields like “Donor Rating”, or “Issue Interests”, or “Newsletter Subscriber”. The data in these key fields are what help you get your work done. You can send a quarterly briefing to all donors with your highest “Donor Rating”, you can send a legislative action alert to people who have idenfied Legislation as an “Issue Interest”, or you can blast out your Newsletter to everyone marked as a “Newsletter Subscriber.”

If you can’t add these key fields, the technology isn’t going to support your work, or you will have to change the way you work to match the technology. That usually isn’t a very successful path to take.

But even bigger than fields, your technology should be able to support whole new processes. What if you want to start selling t-shirts to the same base of constituents that are your Donors? Can your donor management system support that? How about volunteering? How about tracking who is coming to your next conference? It’s pretty hard for a technology platform to be flexible enough to handle not only new fields, but new tables and relationships between tables. Who knows what you may throw at it in 6 months–will it be able to suppor that? Or will you have to add technology to track the same people and organizations you’re already tracking?

I’m finding that Salesforce.com can do this–it can grow to support things you never thought about. A current client is doing Donor Managment, Grant Mangement, Membership, Volunteering, Retail Sales, and Events all in Salesforce.com. The same donors may fit into all those different areas, so why not do it all in one system? I’m very pleased with how things are turning out.

The main drawback to this flexibility is that the UI isn’t tuned to get a certain process done. If you look at a donor management system, it makes it very easy to manage donors. It streamlines things like pledges, stock gifts, householding, and soft credits. It may be completely impossible for it to do ticket sales for an annual event, but it has donor management down pat.

Salesforce.com can do all the nuances of donor management, it just doesn’t have a UI tuned to that. I think the ability to capture myriad work process in the same system outweighs the UI inefficiency, but luckily that’s not a trade off we have to make. Salesforce.com allows you to modify the UI to enforce business processes. You can drop your own interface in where you need it, effectively filling the gap between flexibility and tight user experience. I’ve been experimenting with this heavily over the past month. For my current client, I’ve built 10 custom code modules, 2 custom tables, and countless fields. And, according to the client, it’s all coming together in a pretty tight package.