Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A CRM can be defined in many ways – but at its essence it facilitates the management of relationships
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between an organization and its customers (or constituents). It is a contact management solution (in the sense of containing names, addresses, phone numbers, and so on) but it stretches far beyond this in providing mechanisms to facilitate relationship (e.g. reminders, automated communications, and so on).
Salesforce, the company, offers free licenses (10x) to non-profits and a majority discount on additional licenses. I am in the process of configuring Salesforce for us by our church. This page is meant to illuminate various aspects of my experience. CRM’s are usually oriented around the concept of generating sales – so it requires some significant reworking to repurpose a CRM for non-profit purposes…and this document will outline that process. A good overview regarding Salesforce’s offerings to non-profits is offered on the Salesforce Foundation website.
Salesforce has created and continues to develop a Non-Profit Starter Pack (NPSP) that installs on top of Salesforce to provide a significant number of common changes needed by non-profits before utilizing Salesforce for constituent management. One can use the NPSP or choose to customize the solution on one’s own. We will be looking at customization based on top of the NPSP.
The Non-Profit Starter Pack:
- Contacts and Organizations
- Households
- Recurring Donations
- Relationships
- Affiliations
Integrating Google Apps:
Offering volunteers and employees the ability to have a central dashboard for their work with your organization makes life easier. Since we use Google Apps at CCC, one of the first things I’ll do is integrate Google Apps into Salesforce.
- Setup –> Administration Setup –> Google Apps –> Settings.
In our case I’m going to activate Gmail to Salesforce, Add Google Docs to salesforce.com, and Google Docs tab. [Note to Self: What is the difference between adding Google Docs to salesforce.com and the Google Docs tab? Google Docs tab has been disabled as of 1/5/12.]
Understanding the Salesforce Ecosystem:
- AppExchange – Add-ons to Salesforce which enable additional functionality beyond the defaults. These are built by Salesforce, third-party organizations, and individuals. Some are free, some are paid. They are of varying quality.
- Data.com – Provides access to a humongous database of verified business contact information, facilitating communication with various organizations and individuals.
- Desk.com – Provides a help desk for small organizations.
- Chatter – A private, social network for an organization.
- Radian6 – Allows one to manage social media presence.
- Force.com – Build custom applications. This includes three divisions: AppForce (for applications used internally), SiteForce (for public facing web sites), ISVForce (for creating applications to sell to others).
- Database.com – For building custom databases.
- Heroku – For building custom applications.
- RemedyForce – Enterprise help desk (compare to Desk.com).
AppExchange Possibilities:
Here are some applications from AppExchange that I think may be worth investigating.
- Salesforce for Twitter and Facebook – (FREE)
- Milestones PM – Project and Task Management. (FREE)
- DupeCatcher – Real-time, point of entry deduplication. (FREE)
- Timba Surveys – (FREE)
- Mass Edit + Mass Update + Mass Delete – (FREE)
- Volunteers for Salesforce – (FREE)
- Action Plans – Creates reusable action plans for performing activities. (FREE)
- Click & Pledge Integrated Payment Gateway – (FREE)
- Event Management – (FREE)
- The Inspector – Analyzes field usage, helping determine what fields are and aren’t being used. (FREE)
- xSMS – Manage inbound and outgoing SMS messages. (FREE)
- BudgetingForce – For managing budgets. (FREE)
- Idle Opportunity Alert – (FREE)
- Seven Interactions – Hallmark branded direct mail (FREE)
- FormAssembly – (PAID)
SalesForce:
This is a comparison of the Sales and Service clouds based on the Sales Force Automation page and Customer Service and Support page.
| Feature: | Sales | Service |
| Chatter – Real-time intra-organizational communication. | Yes | Yes |
| Accounts | Yes | No |
| Contacts | Yes | No |
| Contact Center | No | Yes |
| Customer Portal | No | Yes |
| Social Media | No | Yes |
| Knowledge Base | No | Yes |
| Mobile | Yes | Yes |
| Marketing | Yes | No |
| Leads | Yes | No |
| Data.com | Yes | No |
| Opportunities | Yes | No |
| Quotes | Yes | No |
| Approvals | Yes | Yes |
| Workflows | Yes | Yes |
| Files | Yes | No |
| Libraries | Yes | No |
| Yes | Yes | |
| Live Agent | No | Yes |
| Calendaring | Yes | No |
| Community | No | Yes |
| Analytics | Yes | Yes |
| Forecasting | Yes | No |
| Partners | Yes | Yes |
| AppExchange | Yes | Yes |
| Contracts | No | Yes |
| Entitlements | No | Yes |
Portals:
There appear to be at least three types of portals. A good article on this topic is available here.
- Self-Service Portal (SSP)
- Customer Service Portal
- Partner Service Portal
Resources:
- Official Salesforce Learning Center – Offers training and guidance in using Salesforce and best practices.
- Official Salesforce Answers – Provides a Q&A section for users of Salesforce. You can post your own questions and search through a fairly vast database of Q&A’s other customers have made.
What Changed:
- Accounts Tab is now Organizations Tab.
- Opportunities Tab is now Donations Tab.
Important Reads:
- Understanding the Account Model – Essentially, Salesforce was created to handle individuals associated with companies, not just individuals. This causes problems for non-profits. This document explains how NPSP attempts to fix this problem. IMHO, this is a huge weak point in Salesforce, the system should be rearchitected to support individuals across the platform – not just non-profits.
- Lead Conversion.
- Merging Contacts.
- If you have paid memberships you’ll probably want to read Understanding the NPSP Membership Model. As best as I can understand this isn’t applicable to organizations like churches.
Great post, Dave! For additional Salesforce / Google Apps integration, check out Cirrus Insight, the #2 most popular app on the Salesforce AppExchange. It displays information from Salesforce right alongside emails in Gmail. It also allows you to create new Leads and Contacts in Salesforce without leaving Gmail. It’s a 30-second install and a 30-day free trial.