Salesforce.com for Nonprofits - The sky is the limit!

Last week Cloudy explained a little bit about the Salesforce.com Foundation and how it supports Nonprofit and Higher Education organizations by providing ten free Salesforce.com user licenses.  

What could your organization do with those ten free licenses?

-Build deeper relationships with your partners, donors, clients, and volunteers.  Salesforce allows you to see all your related information and interactions in one place, including donation history, emails sent, phone calls logged, events attended, relationships and affiliations recorded, and any custom information you collect.  This 360 degree view of your relationships is invaluable as your team works to partner with donors and volunteers, and to better serve your clients!

-Manage your donation and grant cycle, tracking your “asks,” pledged money, and received donations, with a full view of your data relating to each donor.  Standardize the donation process, see which campaigns and events are most effective, and analyze your donation pipeline with custom reports and graphs.  Automate some of your most common tasks, such as Thank You emails and receipts.

-Integrate your email, Quickbooks, event management, or other systems, and eliminate double-data-entry once and for all!

-Use Chatter to tap into the knowledge of your entire organization.  See what your teammates are working on as they add comments to records you are following.  Get a real-time feed of updates on the items you care about send right to your phone, using the Chatter Mobile app.

-Create reports and charts that give everyone at your organization the information they need to make educated decisions.  Your charts and reports will update automatically as data flows into place; you don’t have to keep creating them!  Executives, board members, program staff, and even volunteers can each see just the information they need.

-Check out the Salesforce AppExchange and click “Nonprofits” under “Industry Solutions” to see some of the Apps that have been designed specially for you.  A Salesforce App is simply a way of adding features and functions to your Salesforce.com; many great Apps are free, and many more offer significant discounts to Non Profits.


Read Cloudy's previous post for a little more about Salesforce.com and how it relates to nonprofits.

Here are Cloudy's reviews of a some salesforce apps that are being used by a few nonprofits he knows:
Conga Composer
FormAssemby

For an hour of free consulting for your nonprofit, contact us!

The Power of the Cloud: Within Reach for Nonprofits!

If you work at a nonprofit organization, you know all about doing more with less. When the economy is down, you don’t have the luxury of scaling back for a while, because that is when your mission in your community becomes most critical!  

Salesforce.com is the industry leader in cloud based enterprise information and relationship management systems, known as CRMs. It is used by more than 100,000 businesses worldwide to drive many types of business processes.

You might be wondering what a nonprofit organization needs with a tool that sounds like it is all about “sales”.  The truth is that the name is a little misleading, and even in the for-profit sector, salesforce.com is an extremely flexible, multi-purpose CRM: it is used to manage not only sales, but marketing, customers service, and the list goes on.  For nonprofits, salesforce.com has developed the “Nonprofit Starter Pack,” which is a free package that gets you started with functionality that suits the nonprofit world.  With a few additional Apps and customizations, you could soon be managing many of the facets of your organization in one place!

The power of a tool like Salesforce.com is undeniable, but without the Salesforce.com Foundation, it would be out of reach for most nonprofits. Founded in the year 2000, the Foundation is committed to supporting organizations that “make the world a better place.” To that end, the Salesforce.com Foundation donates ten free user licenses to nonprofit and Higher Education organizations.  

At this time, more than 16,000 such organizations are using these free licenses to achieve their mission.  Some that you have heard of are the American Red Cross, Goodwill, and Teach for America.

It is safe to assume that Non Profits in your area are using Salesforce.com to drive their processes.  There might even be a local User Group that you could attend to learn more about how your peers in the Non Profit sector are leveraging the power of the Cloud.  If you are in the Twin Cities area, contact Cloudy at Redpath and he can tell you when the next local User Group is meeting!  If you are in other areas of the country, Cloudy might be able to guide you to your local resources.

Next, Cloudy explains more about what your organization could do with ten free Salesforce.com licenses.

(Or, check out Paul’s blog on this topic HERE.)

Cloudy's Chalkboard: Creating Dashboards

Salesforce.com reports are a powerful tool for understanding your data, but when you have many reports, levels of complexity, and large amounts of data, it can be a lot to take in.  Charts and Dashboards are the best way to create snapshot views of your data.

Good dashboards give executives the answers to the questions they care about most, give managers a handy tool to drive meetings, and give users an organized view of the things they need to prioritize.  If you have never created a dashboard, here is a step by step tutorial to get you started.

Step 1: A dashboard is simply a visual representation of a collection of reports, so the first step is to create or identify the folder where you will store these reports.  If Cloudy is creating a Sales Dashboard, he will create a new report folder and call it "Sales Dashboard Reports."  Since report privacy is set at the folder level, now is the time to think about who gets to see this data and make the appropriate settings on the folder.  To create a new report folder, go to the Reports tab, click the folder icon at the top right of the folder menu, and select "New Report Folder."

Step 2: Create Summary or Matrix reports showing what you want to represent with your chart components  (Tabular reports cannot be used for dashboards).  The Format settings menu is found in the Preview pane of the Report Builder; if you are relatively new to report building, start with a Summary report!  Save your reports in the folder you created in Step 1.

Step 3: Create or identify the folder where you will store your dashboard.  As with reports, privacy is determined at the folder level, so consider those security questions now.  To create a new dashboard folder, go to the Reports tab, click the folder icon at the top of the left hand folder menu, and select "New Dashboard Folder."

A table can be configured to link
directly to the listed records.

Use a pie chart to show
proportions against the total.

Step 4: Create your Dashboard by going to the Reports tab and clicking the "New Dashboard" button.  Using the drag-and-drop interface, add the chart types you want to use from the "Components" tab, and then find the matching reports from the "Data Sources" tab and drag them onto the correct components.  You can use the same report for more than one chart if you want to represent the data in more than one way.

A gauge shows progress
toward a goal or a limit.

A grouped line chart show data
trends over time
                               

Step 5: Customize your chart components.  You can add a title, subtitle, and footer simply by clicking in those spaces.  Click the wrench in the upper right corner of each component to view further formatting options.   (For a tutorial on one advanced formatting option, see Cloudy's Chalkboard - Grouped Bar Charts)

When you are ready to view your completed dashboard, Click "Save As" and save the dashboard to the correct folder, then click "Close."  On the Dashboard viewing page, a "Refresh" button appears at the top of the page.  Your dashboard will not refresh automatically; you must either click the button or schedule refreshes to occur regularly by clicking the down arrow next to "Refresh" and selecting "Schedule Refresh."  On this page, you will also see the option to have a dashboard emailed to you or any other user on a recurring schedule.  This is a great way to keep managers or teams up to date.

If you have other questions about using dashboards, please leave a comment below, or Contact Us!

Cloudy Cumulus is part of Redpath Consulting Group, based in Minneapolis, MN (c) 2012