Here's a little tip for anyone scratching their head over why they don't have access to creating new Campaigns in Salesforce even if they are full System Administrators for a Salesforce instance.

If you're not seeing the New button when viewing Campaign tab, it could be as simple as checking a box on your profile.

Many people come and go in our technology world. That's the way it works. It's a environment ripe for temporary transplants to make a splash, wash up on the shore, and move on. Rare are the folks that stick around for the long-haul, making substantial impacts on the way organizations use and collaborate around technology.

One of those rare folks is Holly Ross.

When I learned about Holly's departure today from the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (N-TEN), I couldn't help but flashback to 2004 (maybe it was earlier, but I don't want to date either of us). I'd met a few times with Ed Batista, who was the Executive Director of NTEN at the time, and he introduced me to Holly.

We went out for lunch near the N-TEN SF offices, and from our first conversation, I knew that Holly was in it for the marathon, not the sprint. She was so passionate about the work of N-TEN in its early days, it was obvious that she was going to make a significant difference.

Three executive directors and some years later, Holly has been the heart and soul of N-TEN for me ever since that first lunch. She's an inclusive spirit, someone always looking for opportunities to bring people together. She's a fun person, always smiling and laughing. And most importantly, she's a strong-willed advocate and support of changemakers in our sector.

If you’re a nonprofit using Salesforce, chances are you are looking for strategies for increasing user adoption among staff at your organization. One element of this is solid training of staff that allows them to understand some essential concepts and get their hands dirty.

But how does one do that effectively and efficiently, and make sure the training sticks? This was a question we were bandying about at the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Starter Pack developer sprint.

Naturally, I thought of Van Halen.

While there's healthy discussion happening in the Nonprofit Salesforce.com Practitioners user group, an area that isn't highlighted enough is new ideas for the Nonprofit Starter Pack.  I don't mean just feature ideas for fundraising, donations, case management, etc.  I'm talking about bug reports, bug fixes, documentation, tutorials, translations, and more.

With such a great community of users and implementers, this seems like a missed opportunity.

During chats at the Nonprofit Developer Sprint in DC this week, Salesforce Foundation staff  made it clear that they welcome community support in a variety of contexts, including ideas that can make the software itself better.  Hence, the Foundation's fantastic support of events like this week's sprint.  The challenge, it seems, is that there hasn't been a path to community engagement in the form of cultivating new feature ideas, bug fixes, documentation, etc.