Non-Profit Technology and the Force.com Platform

I’m just back form Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user extravaganza (it’s way more than a user conference) and wanted to do a quick recap of the highlights. The show has gotten so big (90,000 registered attendees this year) that it’s impossible to cover it all. After reading this, if you were there and had different highlights, please feel free to add them in the comments. In no particular order, my highlights were:

• (Re)Connecting with my other Salesforce.com MVPs: I’ve been an MVP for a year now, and the opportunity to catch up with these other passionate Salesforce evangelists in the flesh is a lot of fun. Their sense of community translates very well from the digital to the physical, they are fun to hang out with and they know everything about the platform. If you don’t know them, check them out on Twitter, the Salesforce.com community site or in your local user group.
• Connecting with the non-profit user community: the non-profit community at Dreamforce is a microcosm of the whole Dreamforce crowd. There are organizations that are considering using the platform, some who are just getting started and some who have been using it for a long time. Dreamforce is a great opportunity to connect, and to ask and answer questions. I was able to catch up with some great people from organizations like HealthLeads, Facing History, Facing ourselves, Linkedin and partners like Exponent Partners, Heller Consulting, Npower, Groundwire and Cloud4Good. A lot of the conversation centered around Blackbaud’s retirement of Common Ground and what seems like a pretty strong consensus that Luminate is likely to be next. Blackbaud’s got some work to do to reassure the remaining customers that they acquired from Convio – we’ll see what develops on that front.
• Having Citizen Schools recognized as an innovator on the Salesforce platform by receiving a Force for Change grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation: This was a huge honor. This spring we were invited to apply for a grant from the Foundation aimed at spurring innovation on the Salesforce platform and were fortunate enough to have a proposal accepted to do the design work for a portal that will bring together non-profit and school-based staff to use Chatter around a common set of student data to improve student outcomes. I will be posting updates on this project to this blog on a monthly basis, not only to outline how this kind of project is done, but also to solicit input from this community.
• Seeing some great sessions which gave me new ideas about things we can do in our use of Salesforce: . Dreamforce had more than 650 sessions over four days this year, ranging from introductions to different aspects of the platform to best practices for administrators to hard-core developer sessions to product keynotes. It’s too much to hope to catch it all, but fortunately most sessions are recorded and you get the opportunity to catch up on key things you might have missed. I hit a lot of different types of sessions this year, with a focus on Chatter, collaboration and Work.com (Salesforce acquired the social performance management platform Rypple.com and is rebranding it as work.com). Watching these sessions not only provides tricks and tips for us to better use our Salesforce.com instance, they also inspire me to try and do different things with it.
• Presenting my first Dreamforce session:. This was fun! I had the opportunity to present a session on Chatter deployment and adoption with fellow MVP Adam Bataran, who runs the Boston Salesforce User Group and is a rockstar at Iron Mountain, responsible for the ongoing use and global adoption of Salesforce.com for thousands of users. We had a fairly small session, but it was a great experience and something I’ve wanted to do for a few years. Key takeaway for anyone who’s interested: get an influential executive sponsor, sell him/her on it and get them to sell it.
• Getting excited by some of the new product announcementsThree big ones for us this year: Work.com, Salesforce Communities, and Chatterbox. I mentioned Work.com above and will likely have a full post devoted to it in the near future, but the vision that they present of doing goal-setting, performance management and recognition in a social, transparent fashion is, in my mind, a transformative one, and could be extremely powerful in the non-profit space. Salesforce Communities takes much of the capabilities of the current portal functionality, layers on Chatter and adds the branding and website design power of Siteforce to provide what looks like a robust platform for constituent-based communities. It’s in pilot this fall, with a hopeful GA date in the spring or summer of next year. Finally, the least clearly defined (or I may have missed the session) new product is Chatterbox, designed to take on the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive and Box in the realm of document sharing. As we look to migrate our document storage to the cloud, this is definitely be taking a look at this, though it’s not clear how much differentiation there is from these other products.
• Going to the amazing keynotes, this year including Tony Robbins!The keynotes at Dreamforce are great events and this year was no exception. Marc Benioff does a great job at selling the vision, and enlists some great customers to help make the case, along with the best product demonstrations going. If you couldn’t be there, check it out here here. One of the highlights for me every year is when Marc asks all of the non-profit attendees to stand up and then challenges all the other attendees to help out. What’s amazing is that the Salesforce community does help out, not just non-profits, but all members of the community. In the annual Leadership Keynote, GE CEO Jeff Immelt and former Secretary of State General Colin Powell spoke on a wide variety of topics (Powell, in particular, is very inspirational) and Friday included keynotes from Larry Brilliant, who led the fight to eradicate smallpox and later ran Google.org, Dr Dean Ornish, and finally a nearly three hour session with Tony Robbins, the motivational speaker and performance coach. I was skeptical at first, but I left totally motivated and inspired.

If you’ve never been to a Dreamforce, plan on it for next year. The non-profit discount makes it affordable (though SanFrancisco hotel rates aren’t cheap), but what you’ll take away from the conference is well worth the investment. This was my sixth time and I plan on going back for more in November next year!

Convio and Blackbaud have been bitter rivals in the fund-raising and constituent relationship management software arena, particularly for medium to large size customers, so Tuesday’s announcement that Blackbaud was acquiring Convio came as something of a shock to the non-profit technology world. There’s been a fair amount of commentary and speculation online over the last few days from bloggers, vendors of competing products and consultants who work in this space (see this post on NTEN for a link to some), but I haven’t seen much posted from actual customers so far. As a result I thought I would try to provide a perspective from someone who’s been a customer of both companies, using their flagship products. This isn’t to say that those other perspectives aren’t important – I just want to round them out a bit.

From Blackbaud’s perspective, the acquisition makes a lot of sense: they bring their primary competitor into the fold, gain a better foothold in the cloud and SAAS-based services(on top of their prior acquisitions of eTapestry and Kintera Sphere), supplement their service-offerings (from Convio’s online marketing/email services) and solidify their position as the ‘goto’ vendor for non-profit solutions. For Convio as a company, the benefits don’t seem so clear: the Common Ground/Luminate products have been direct competitors to Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge and Enterprise CRM products, capitalizing on the native capabilities of the Force.com platform to deliver added value for customers.

As I’ve posted elsewhere on this blog, when I joined Citizen Schools four years ago, we were solid Blackbaud customers with both their Raiser’s Edge and Financial Edge packages installed. In 2011, we left them completely (or so we thought), by migrating our constituent management and fundraising to Convio’s Luminate CRM package built on top of Salesforce.com and our financial systems to Coda from Unit 4. We’ve been live on Convio for about three months at this point and are generally satisfied with what we’ve got.

Tuesday’s news honestly has me concerned. When choosing a software vendor and product, I’m not just evaluating the current set of functionality against my requirements and budget, but am also looking at the company’s past and potential future. When we decided to leave Blackbaud, it was in part because neither their past nor their future was that compelling: The Raiser’s Edge is built on ten-year old technology, required substantial in-house resources (financial and staff) to host, support and enhance, wasn’t responsive to the changing needs of end-users and wasn’t scalable from a financial perspective. Neither was there a clear roadmap for the future – the promised version 8 of Raiser’s Edge had been talked about since at least 2006 (and still hasn’t materialized) and there seemed little understanding of the importance of mobile and social tools. It seemed that growth through acquisition rather than innovation was the strategy.

Convio seemed the opposite: by building on top of Salesforce.com, the Common Ground/Luminate product has mobile, social and agile as part of it’s DNA and leverages the best-of-breed multi-tenant SAAS architecture to avoid the supportability and maintainability headaches of on-premise software. Yes, they too have a (short) history of acquisitions, but they have also showed a commitment to integration (of their analytic and online marketing tools) that seems to be more of an afterthought for Blackbaud. It’s still an expensive product, but the value that we’d be getting and the future value that I saw coming down the road, combined with our already substantial use of the Salesforce platform made it a choice worth making.

Now though, I question some of that future value. After having spent millions (my guess) developing it’s enterprise CRM product and more millions in acquisitions (including Convio), what incentive does Blackbaud have to invest heavily in the ongoing development of the Common Ground and Luminate platforms, particularly if they cannibalize sales of their other products? Very little, I suspect. Instead, leverage the online marketing and new analytics platforms and integrate with Raiser’s Edge and/or Enterprise CRM. Common Ground and Luminate will likely remain as offerings for customers who want a true cloud solution (which Blackbaud has thus far proven unable to deliver), but I expect little in the way of additional enhancement there, which is ironic, because the capabilities of the Salesforce platform are where real value is going to be added over time (Salesforce touch – access on any device anywhere, Chatter providing context on data and enterprise social collaboration, an open development platform to allow individual organizations to quickly customize to meet their needs, and deeply discounted through Salesforce’s commitment to getting great tools in the hands of non-profits).

So what does it mean? Consolidation happens and we have to roll with it, though we may not like it. This feels like a real opportunity for smaller competitors to jump in. Affinaquest, Sage and CiviCRM as well as other, open-source or custom products all have opportunities here, particularly as Blackbaud digests it’s newest meal. I know that if I were still in my decision-making phase, the decision to go with Convio would not be nearly as clear as it was 9 months ago. I’d be looking for alternatives that can offer not only the basics of fundraising and CRM, which are becoming increasingly commoditized, but that also satisfy the mobile, social and agile imperatives that are increasingly critical to non-profit success, whether it be in technology or achieving the mission.

I’ll be watching carefully to see what comes next.

I read a post on the Idealware blog today that had the title ‘Multiple Constituent Groups, One Database? How to Track Everyone Who’s Anyone to You’ that laid out a nice method for analyzing the relationships between different groups of constituents and then went on to conclude:

‘The vision of a single database is attractive, but the reality might be neither practical nor cost-effective for your organization. Should you track all your constituents in the same system? Only if it makes sense for your particular situation. At the end of the day, that’s not easy to know.’

I’m writing this post to rebut this argument from the perspective of a non-profit that is moving to do exactly that – create a single database for managing multiple groups of constituents – and some suggestions for how and why other non-profits should consider doing exactly that.  In fact, I would argue that your default position should be to use a single database and only consider having an additional one(s) in extreme circumstances.

Back in June, I posted about how we’re currently using Salesforce.com at Citizen Schools and laid out the different types of constituents that we’re tracking in the system (current staff, volunteers, staff alumni, current students, student alumni, leads for potential staff).  Since that post, we’ve brought all of our donor infomation into Salesforce and also begun tracking key district and school partner contacts as well.  We’re currently planning on bringing all other constituencies under the Salesforce umbrella over time.

So what’s the value proposition for bringing everyone into one system.  Here are a few important ones:

• One system increases reduces training costs by providing a single interface for users.  Forcing users to move between different systems to accomplish tasks is inefficient and confusing.  With multiple systems, users need to concentrate more on where they are working and switching between applications, rather than just logging in to the system and working in it all day.  Additionally, given the number of ‘hats’ that typical non-profit staff wear, having one system allows all users to know how to use that system to access data even if it’s not their primary job, or to transfer within the organization and not have to learn a new system on top of new job responsibilities.
• Having all the data in one place gives us the opportunity to reach out to different constituencies as needed.  Earlier this year, when Americorps funding was threatened in Congress, we needed to reach out to all of our constituencies with a call to action.  Because we did not yet have all of our donor contacts in Salesforce, the process of gathering the list to do our outreach was significantly more complicated.  A single source allows you to segment your lists much more effectively rather than having to pull segments from multiple systems and then compile.
• Reporting from one system is vastly simplified, particularly when it comes to getting data for funders.  You’ve had to deal with it, a proposal for a funder that wants to know everything about your business, from number of (clients/students served/etc) to the number of donors and revenue data for the last ten years.  One system makes it easy to get at that information.
• Finally, constituents are rarely static; they have a history with your organization and their relationship with you will change over time.  A client may turn into a donor, or a donor to a volunteer, or a volunteer to a key advocacy or policy connector.  Maintaining their history in multiple systems means you never have a complete view of the constituent’s relationship with your organization, which means that anyone trying to do outreach to them is operating at a disadvantage.  Additionally, building and maintaining integrations between systems is a complex process, taking resources that are either hard to come by, or if available, could be better deployed adding business value (I know this from experience).

So how does Salesforce.com (or another single database  system) allow this to happen.  To me, the answer lies in the flexibility of the platform. Fundamentally, regardless of the complexity of a constituent’s information, there is a core set of data (name, address, email, contact/do-not-contact status) that’s going to be captured.  In Salesforce, this would be maintained in the Contact object (and most of those types of fields are already built in).  Your additional data would be reflected either as additional custom fields on the Contact, or as related records (for example multiple records of a constituent’s volunteer experiences).  The wonderful thing about the Salesforce platform, is that all of this configuration can be done without writing a line of code or involving your technology team/person/consultant.  When you need to add fields, it can be done in minutes, by anyone with the requisite administrative access and training, rather than relying on your overworked tech folks.

‘But’ you say ‘I don’t want to have to see empty fields of volunteer related data when I’m looking at a client record!’  Never fear, Salesforce allows us to define different views of the data by creating different page layouts for different types of records.  Additionally, these page layouts can be limited by a user’s role and security profile, so you can segment access to data within the same system.  This works really well for reporting, as you’ve got your core data accessible from one location, as well has having your constituent type-specific data accessible to authorized users.

You also gain the advantage of having one interface with a common set of tools and usage conventions to learn, accessible to any computer, smartphone or tablet with access to the internet.  Increased accessibility and ease of use reduce barriers to  adoption and usage, which in turn leads to better data completeness and quality.  Try getting that with all of your multiple systems!

Penultimately, there’s the question of cost.  Salesforce gives you your first ten seats for free and offers a substantial discount for all additional add-on products.  This can still add up to a substantial amount for a large roll-out, but when you compare the costs of purchasing or building multiple systems, hosting them internally or externally and maintaining them, you’ll find the total cost of ownership equation to be in Salesforce’s favor.

Finally, there is a vibrant ecosystem of add-on applications on the Salesforce AppExchange, many free or discounted for non-profits, that can be used to enhance your organizations processes, as well as a solid core of consulting partners who can assist with more complex implementations.

To sum up, there may, in fact, be cases for having more than one system, but you should evaluate the business case very, very carefully and truly assess the costs (dollar, time/efficiency and opportunity) before heading down that path when compared to the costs and benefits of the Salesforce option.