We noted in Friday's post World Cup, soccer strategy, and nonprofit success with Salesforce that one powerful way of fostering said nonprofit success with Salesforce is educating nonprofit Salesforce administrators to do for themselves.

It just so happens that the Salesforce.com Foundation has two great ways for nonprofits to tool up, and they are free!

For those watching the World Cup, it's obvious to see key differences between futbol on the world stage and football of the more provincial American style. The latter is a start and stop affair where huddles occur before every play with each player told where to run, where block, what to do. Much of the time, the strategy is to instruct the team in a way that applies the most force at a given point on the field to gain advantage over the opponent. Conformity to the plan and expert execution is of primary importance. Individual invention, save in very small measure, is of little concern. The team is a machine. The player a cog.

Futbol, on the other hand, is an entirely different affair. There are no huddles. There are very few plays. There is an overarching strategy but it is left to small groups of individual players to orchestrate the execution of that strategy moment-by-moment by responding to their particular situation at a particular time in a particular way.

Transformations that radically improve a nonprofit’s ability to meet its mission can often happen in unexpected ways. Just ask Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids:

“We didn’t have a desire to redesign our website. We just wanted to move over our existing site from Convio Luminate to a new platform,” said Moss. “You almost had to be an expert with Convio to do anything with our previous system. That was no good for us.”