Convio is building CRM for the rest of us
Posted on June 19, 2008
Filed Under Internet & Technology, Nonprofit | 1 Comment
Allan Benamer has a great post which gives an overview of all the fun stuff that’s happening in the nonprofit technology space these days.
I was going to leave a comment on his post, but then decided it’s time to throw my own $0.02 into the conversation.
I will never forget the chat I had 2 years ago with the senior GetActive employee who oversaw data integration projects. I asked about plans for integration between GetActive and Salesforce. To say that he blew me off was kind. And look at ‘em now!
I am very happy for my friends at Convio and the Salesforce Foundation that this is happening. I’ve had a chance to see an early demo of Aikido, and it’s incredible for such a young project.
Alas, to answer some questions I’ve been getting, despite what may appear to be an obvious fit for C3 (Convio? Salesforce? Hello!) I have decided not to participate in the Charter program. I wanted to, I really did. There are features in Aikido that had me cleaning up my chin after I saw them (think: relationship management). But we’re too far gone in Salesforce. Even though Convio’s CRM is built on Force.com and is Salesforce, there’s currently no easy way I can add it on to my existing Salesforce instance without losing some of the customization I’ve built on over the years.
For example, let’s say someone buys pins on our website through our Convio eCommerce store. Overnight, the buyer is added as a contact in Salesforce, the transaction is added as an opportunity (along with appropriate workflow rules so the office knows to send the pins and we can track that they did and when). At the same time, the inventory custom object we have is updated to reflect that pins will soon be leaving the shelf. The Convio CRM wouldn’t be able to do anything with this, and I couldn’t have Aikido and the opportunity-based customizations I already had at the same time.
That was a deal breaker for us. Aikido is a great fit for an organization that will either be touching Salesforce for the first time, or has been using the nonprofit template with minimal changes.
Anyway, why is Convio for “the rest of us?” Back to Allan’s post:
Despite the self-imposed quiet period due to the acquisition of Kintera by Blackbaud, Kintera issued a press release on June 6th touting the ability to add custom entities (database tables) to Kintera and have them automatically exposed through the Kintera API. Yes, you can now develop unique third party apps in Kintera that have nothing to do with fundraising (even though everything has to do with fundraising).
Huh? Guess what, not every nonprofit has a developer down the hall. Even organizations twice our size (which are still pretty small) glaze over in fear when you start talking about custom development. They just want to save the world, they don’t want to program it.
I am not a developer or programmer. A lot of what I’ve been able to do for C3 in Salesforce has been possible just by reading some simple documentation where I didn’t need a programmer translate for me. It’s that easy. And that’s why I’ve become a bit of an evangelist for the platform. Since Aikido is built on the Salesforce platform, you’ll be able to tap in the AppExchange and all the functionality that already comes with the Enterprise edition. Plus, Aikido is fully supported by Convio. Organizations will have all the Salesforce support resources plus Convio support resources. Honestly, if you can’t get your question answered with all that you aren’t asking it right. Cool stuff.
Convio hasn’t released any information yet about Aikido pricing, but some of the preliminary strategy has been privately shared with me. I can tell you right now that what is most exciting about this project is how approachable it will be for nonprofits of all shapes and sizes. Trust me, they’re thinking of us little guys as well as the organization with the $10 million budget. It’s not just a new toy, it’s a strategy shift. This isn’t your grandmother’s Convio.
Much love for CRMFusion
Posted on May 21, 2008
Filed Under Nonprofit, Salesforce | 2 Comments
This morning I was in Salesforce creating some new Dashboard views. Lately, I’ve become addicted to the Dashboard. I’m having so much fun creating all different ways of looking at our data.
Warning…the rest of this post won’t make a lot of sense unless you’re familiar with Salesforce.
In the process of creating a dashboard component, I realized that about 150 donations this fiscal year were not allocated to the right fund (a custom field on our opportunities/donation object).
We use the Opportunity Contact Role object to link individuals to donations. I also found a bunch of donations (200 give or take) where the contact role was properly set to “Donor” but the Primary flag was not checked. Without that primary flag, any report that looks for “Primary Contact” (so a report run on Donations alone without the contact role object) would not find an individual name attached to the donation. It’s a bit of a bother to use both the primary flag and set that primary donor to “Donor” but it works well when we do.
Without CRMFusion’s Demand Tools, my choices to correct these problems would have been:
- Individually edit each donation record in the browser. Ugh. No. Way.
- Use the Salesforce provided data loader to download all the donation records, fix the fields using Excel and re-upload the corrections. Do able. But no.
The reality? In Demand Tools I used the “Mass Change” module to:
Find the opportunity records where the donation name contains the fund and change the “Fund” field to the correct value. We have strict naming rules on our donation records so every donation to that fund had it in the name. Easy.
Find all opportunity contact role records where Primary = false and Role = donor and change them so Primary = true.
Each change literally took 30 seconds to effect hundreds of records, and you get a restore file in case you make a mistake.
When I’ve attended nonprofit Salesforce user group meetings, I’m always surprised at the number of organizations that don’t know about this great tool…or the fact that the company matches the Salesforce nonprofit grant!
It’s a Windows-only desktop application, but it runs just fine in VMWare Fusion or Parallels.
Convio Case Study of C3
Posted on May 18, 2008
Filed Under Nonprofit | Leave a Comment
Google Apps and Salesforce - Finally! A first look
Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under Nonprofit, Salesforce | 9 Comments
There were rumors for weeks that this was coming. And here it is. Salesforce has finally rolled out its integration with Google Apps. Not just a simple “add email to Salesforce” from Google or “write document from Google Docs,” this is a whole suite of tools and settings to integrate every corner of Google Apps with Salesforce.
The obligatory demo video is below.
Here’s a first look at what it all really means, from the point-of-view of a nonprofit organization that uses Google Apps for email, chat and some documents and Salesforce for the main constituent database, calendar and inter-office task delegation.
Connection Cafe interview with yours truly
Posted on March 27, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Nonprofit | 2 Comments
I was honored when the folks at Convio asked me to be the first interview they featured on their new Connection Cafe blog on nonprofit technology.
Anyone who has ever had a real-life conversation with me knows that two subjects you can’t get me to shut up about colorectal cancer and nonprofit technology. Someone who wants to hear what I have to say on both topics better grab a cup of coffee and settle in before reading.
Seriously, thank you so much to Jordan Viator who could have edited me down to “visit CoverYourButt.org, take action and use Salesforce/Convio” but instead decided to go light on the editing pen, giving readers a really good picture of what C3 is about and how and why we’ve been operating the past 3 years.
By the way, the picture on the post was taken at the NTC Science Fair. On my head is the NTENny award I received at the NTEN member reception for Most Likely to Win a Pulitzer by Blogging, hence the “take this picture quick because I feel really silly” look on my face.
