I’m off to Dreamforce
I’m heading down to San Francisco on Sunday for Dreamforce and I’m pretty excited. Salesforce.com has some big things planned and I suspect I won’t be able to keep up with all the cool announcements from them and all their partners. ONE/Northwest has a booth, so if you’re going to be there, make sure to stop by and say hi. We’ll be officially launching our Salesforce Connector for Plone, which allows the Plone open source content management system to use Salesforce as it’s member database.
I’ll be taking part in two sessions. At 11:30 on Wednesday I’ll be demoing the Salesforce Connector for Plone in a session called Out of the Box: Portals and Web Sites Powered by AppExchange. And at 2 PM on Monday, I’ll be taking part in a session called Hands-On with the AppExchange for Nonprofits, where we’ll be talking about cool Appexchange add ons for nonprofits to use.
I’m excited to catch up with old friends and meet so many people who I currently only have an email/phone relationship with. And of course putting a face with all the names of Salesforce.com employees I’ve been interacting with.
I was thinking about this conference and how it’s really an example of the importance of CRM for any organization. I’m connected to Salesforce.com, the company. But I’m connected to them in myriad ways. I tried listing out the roles I play in their universe and this is what I came up with:
- Implementation partner
- Developer partner
- Beta tester
- Grantee
- Customer
- Blogger
- Exhibitor at this conference
- Speaker at this conference
Then need a flexible CRM system to hope to capture all those roles. Nonprofits are in the same boat. Constituents can be:
- donors
- members
- volunteers
- activists
- board members
- coalition partners
- event attendees
- peers
- sponsors
And you don’t have a complete picture of your constituents if you neglect any of those roles. That’s why I hate the term Donor Management. If the only role you’re paying attention to is the Donor role, your missing the big picture.
Anyway, maybe I’ll get a peak into Salesforce.com’s Salesforce database and see how all my roles are modeled in there!
