Non-Profit Technology and the Force.com Platform

In contrast to my last post, which dove right into a problem and some code as a solution, I thought I would use this post to provide a bit of context about Citizen Schools’ use of Salesforce.com and why I think it’s the perfect solution for non-profits.

Some Background

When I joined Citizen Schools a bit over three years ago, they system landscape would have looked familiar to many non-profit technologists: a series of small, custom-built databases that serve very specific departmental or functional needs and an off-the-shelf fundraising package (in our case it was the Raiser’s Edge by Blackbaud). In addition, we had a fairly large implementation of Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 that was being used primarily for document storage, and were using Taleo for staff recruitment. Not surprisingly, none of these systems were integrated and data typically had to be entered into several of them over the course of various business processes.

As CTO, one of my responsibilities has been to develop a strategy for integrating our information across different functions (Program delivery, Volunteer Recruitment, Fundraising, Talent) to present a more holistic view of our relationships to different internal stakeholders. As any good technologist knows, there are multiple strategies for data integration within an enterprise, ranging from integration at the presentation layer to database replication to building pure custom solutions or buying in an enterprise platform and customizing it to meet your needs. In my time, I’ve developed solutions that have used all of these strategies and they all have their benefits, costs and tradeoffs. Most of them are also expensive, either in dollar outlays for software and consulting services to implement and internal resources to support and enhance.

The Problem

As a direct-service organization, focused on closing the achievement and opportunity gap for middle-schoolers, the technology team at Citizen Schools has neither an over-abundance of dollars nor of resources, so the question quickly became how to deliver on my responsibilities given my organizational constraints? How did I assess my options?

1. My background has mostly been in developing custom systems to support organization-specific needs, so that was my go-to approach, but it quickly became clear that with one FTE devoted to system development, our ability to deliver functionality quickly and consistently would soon be overwhelmed.
2. We had the Raiser’s Edge (RE)  as a core platform for our Development team – could we leverage that and customize it to support our other needs?  RE is the ‘Cadillac’ of fundraising systems, but it’s built on old technology (pre-.Net Visual Basic),  is expensive to license and would be tough to access across 40+ different locations for all the different business functions under discussion.  External consultants could likely be brought in to perform customization, but supporting those customizations and any requested enhancements would put us in a similar position to point 1 above.
3. Could we use Sharepoint or some other presentation integration tool to provide integration for end-users and then update the disparate back-end systems?  Given that Sharepoint was already heavily in use internally, using it as a platform to manage data and reporting had some attaction.  Unfortunately, as @IanHSmith tweeted this morning, ‘SharePoint is a barge sinking under it’s own weight’ and building applications on Sharepoint shares some of the worst attributes of pure custom solutions and package customization (this has gotten somewhat easier on Sharepoint 2010 than it was on 2007, which we had at the time, but is still, in my opinion, inordinately difficult).

No good options, the potential for a lot of organizational pain and expense, and not a real solid sense of there being a light at the end of the tunnel (other than it being a freight train headed for me and the team).

Salesforce.com to the Rescue

I’d worked with Salesforce a little bit and attended Dreamforce 2007 with a prior job and had been impressed by what I had seen, but hadn’t yet bought into the system as a really viable option for non-profits.  Attending Dreamforce 2008 while wrestling with the options outlined above served as the catalyst for me to convert and become a true-believer.  There are a number of features, that when taken together provide a compelling case for a non-profit considering using Salesforce.com.

• Price:  With heavily-discounted access to the full-featured Enterprise Edition, the Salesforce.com Foundation provides non-profits with a platform that they can expand and grow with over time at a price that won’t break the bank (especially since the first 10 licenses are free).
• Clicks-not-Code customization:  We rolled out our first two functional applications on Salesforce with virtually no custom coding because we could do things like adding custom fields, change page layouts and create whole new types of objects (think database tables) all without writing a line of code.
• Non-Profit Starter Pack:  As we started using Salesforce for functions other than fundraising, we have not used many of the features of the NPSP, but the Foundation’s commitment to it is evident and it looks to provide a significant set of functionality to non-profits for their domain-specific needs.
• Apex, VisualForce and the APIs:  As Salesforce continues to extend the Force.com platform, it’s capacity to meet our evolving business needs is expanding as well.  We now make extensive use of all of these features, with more to come – we’re especially looking forward to the launch of Siteforce as well as leveraging Chatter more effectively .

If you’re involved in selecting or building systems for non-profits, I’d strongly recommend evaluating Salesforce.com very seriously.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 at 5:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.