This has been a title for a post since well before January – I’ll now delete the draft!  Enjoy …

Charityhowto.com have further video training guides for nonprofits on YouTube (here)

Gartner Group top 10 trends for 2010

Last month the Gartner Group analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends for 2010. Number one is Cloud Computing – up from third position last year.

So for a small to medium sized charities what are the benefits of Cloud Computing?

Firstly, there is an acronyms you’ve most likely heard in connection with Cloud Computing: SAAS.

SAAS (Software-as-a-Service) is where a service provider gives access to their software via the Internet. All you need is a PC, a browser, and Internet access. All the back end hardware and software is managed for you.  So let us consider the SaaS aspect of Cloud Computing – what are the opportunities of SaaS for small to medium sized charities:

• No support costs – though there may be an annual license
• No need for in-house IT support staff – all installations, upgrades, back-ups, and on-going maintenance are handled for you
• No server – so no purchase, maintenance, or support issues. You don’t need to worry about installing the latest patch, replacing ailing hard-drives, the replacement funding strategy.  They’ll be no annual license, or support contract
• Access: staff, and volunteers, can access your application from almost anywhere. Just a PC, web browser, and Internet access
• No urgency to upgrade in-house computers – less powerful PCs will do fine

But there are risks:

• You are dependent on Internet access – but you could always access the system from home, a library, or even the local coffee shop …
• The up time and response time – see for example the System Status page at trust.salesforce.com
• Backups – you still must take back-up copies of your data!
• And maybe, depending on the size and nature of your charity, Security and Regulatory compliance issues

Garner Group Hype Cycle 2008

In the Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle special report of 2008 Cloud Computing was highlighted as “the latest super-hyped concept in IT”, with 2 to 5 years before main steam adoption.  It’s already main stream!

For small to medium sized charities, then, with limited capital, limited space, limited access to technical staff, do consider choosing SaaS and reduce your dependence on hardware.

Salesforce.com is the poster child of SaaS. It can be used for SFA (Sales Force Automation), or as a CRM (Contact Relationship Management) tool.

Consider fund raising as an example.  Salesforce.com has created a special configuration of it’s SaaS for non-profit organisations, and charities.  This Non-profit edition of Salesforce.com provides:

• Tighter communication with your donors
• Stratification of donors
• Collaboration between staff – fully manageable by Salesforce.com.  Merge all those disparate spreadsheets, databases, and notes into one easily accessible system …
• Creating and managing a donor development pipe line
• Manage contacts, accounts, and communication sequence: you can also richly manage the relationships between contacts and accounts such as affiliation, board member, reporting relationship, …
• And, with Salesforce.com you can always add new screens, adjust the layouts, add extra fields, include relationships between records, install new applications from AppExchange (“… the complete marketplace for cloud computing“, many of which are free for non-profit/charities) – essentially fully adapt their software to your organisational needs

Obviously, much of this can be handled by a custom built database – but the long-run costs of developing and maintaining such an application can become prohibitive.  Using a SaaS CRM like Salesforce.com to deploy a streamlined application is almost always going to be faster, and more flexible.

Finally, keeping the theme of fund raising, using Salesforce.com is about gaining and retaining donors; not about “managing” them – it’s more about managing the increasingly rich information you gather about them.  But ultimately it’s not about “donor” strategy, process, or the technology.  It’s people – and this includes your staff.

Steve Anderson has provided an excellent, and very accessible YouTube video guide to upgrading the nonprofit salesforce edition:

See my earlier post on this upgrade here

On Friday 11th September a new release of the Salesforce.com nonprofit starter pack was made available. Steve Andersen, a Solutions Architect at the Salesforce.com Foundation, who helps nonprofits organisations use Salesforce.com, recommends that “everybody upgrades“.  The full article can be read on the NPSP Announce (a Google Group) – the article has many links including how to install the nonprofit pack, and release notes.  For administrators of the nonprofit pack this Google Group is well worth you joining.

The full release notes for Salesforce.com Winter ’10 can be found here (a pdf document) (note there’s no explicit reference to “nonprofit” in these release notes).

If you haven’t already found it there is a very thorough introduction to the Nonprofit Starter Pack on Salesforce’s Developerforce wiki.  In this wiki you will find details on the purpose for the nonprofit pack, some links to descriptions on its functionality, a list of the packs Strength and Weaknesses, some notes on how to deal with Individuals, some notes on installation issues, and a link to Feature Requests and Wishlists.  In particular there’s a link to Nonprofit Starter Pack Upgrade Best Practices.

In the first instance you should find out which version of the Nonprofit Starter Pack you already have.  There’s an excellent short video by Steve on YouTube just for this.

The developerforce link has the following advise for when you are considering upgrading your version:

1. Always back up your data before upgrading packages
2. Burn a sandbox of your production database and upgrade the sandbox first, checking for any errors
3. Upgrade Contacts and Organizations package first, then Households, then the others
4. Spend extra time testing if you have written any Apex code or have Workflow rules to make sure they don’t conflict with package features
5. Carefully follow any special instructions provided on the individual package install pages

Now, item 1. should be a given.  Your Administrator should be doing at least a Weekly, or Monthly (if you have a very low data volatility), backup.  To access this function follow this menu chain:

Setup | Administration Setup | Data Management | Data Export | Export Now or Schedule Export

(Do remember to have, and follow, some well documented good practice for naming, storing, and verifying your backups!)

If you’ve never used a Sandbox (item 2.) they’re well worth exploring – not the least for testing new Applications, for training, and for checking upgrades.

To create a Sandbox follow this menu chain:

Setup | Administration Setup | Data Management | Sandbox | and click New Sandbox

Click on the link and read the Help for this page!  Do give your Sandbox some appropriate short name – as Salesforce automatically appends the sandbox name to usernames and email addresses … So if you name your sandbox upgrade, and your login username is user@company.domain, then your login for the upgrade sandbox is user@company.domain.upgrade (but use the same password).  You will see a reminder, like Force.com Sandbox: Upgrade, near the top right of your page so that you know your you’re in your Sandbox.

The generation of the Sandbox can take some time – so don’t leave it until the last minute on Friday afternoon to explore Sandboxes!  You’ll receive an email from Salesforce advising you of its availability.  Do note there is no direct way to replicate any modifications you make in your sandbox in your “live” instance – you’ll have to re-install the App’s, adds those customised fields, redo the workflows, …

Finally, the NPSP – Nonprofit Starter Pack on Google is another valuable site to bookmark.  Here you can find a community, supported by Steve, for airing your problems with your instance of the nonprofit pack.

I hope something in the above is of some help to you.