We dig the community we work with: smart folks committed to the social good who are seeking innovative ways to bring about positive change as effectively and efficiently as possible. Of course, we know that all the smarts and ingenuity don't get you too far without the funky dollar bill.
The good folks at Community IT Innovators (CITI) mused on this topic the other day, leveraging a post by Bennett Grassano of TechSoup entitled Ten Tips for Funding Technology as food for thought while also diving into the NTEN & Progressive Exchange communities for ideas.
All of these ideas of how to shake the money tree to fund non-profit technology projects had us reflecting a little equation we posited back in November on this here blog:
Or, put another way, can non-profits investing in technology to integrate their website and their Salesforce instance get a leg up on securing funding for those investments?
We be willing to bet dollars to donuts, as my grandmother used to say.
"Why?", you query. We'd thought you'd never ask. Essentially, because it opens the door to check off several of those ten tips Bennet shares. The more you can integrate your website with your Salesforce instance, the more the silos between a static web presence and your back office systems get busted up in ways that make both more dynamic, more able to engage with clients and donors and supporters and members, and more wired to deliver program services and rather than talk about program services or bean count program services.
In other words, we're talking program dollars, baby, rather than that dreaded overhead line item on your budget's Excel spreadsheet.
Got a page on your website describing your mentoring program? Great but not very persuasive for funders to cough up some cash. Got a page on your site that describes your mentoring program, a form that submits mentor applications directly to Salesforce, and a password-protected matching system also integrating with Salesforce for mentors to find mentees. Now you've got yourself a program.
"Whoa, you just jumped several orders of magnitude in terms of cost for that website, buddy!" you exclaim. "Sure, maybe it's easier to get some funding for projects like that but you just radically increased the amount of funding we'd need to score."
We hear ya. That's the whole reason why we're building affordable tools that integrate websites with Salesforce.
Got an idea for transforming your website into a program powerhouse by connecting it to Salesforce? Hit us up! We'd love to chat.
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