Soapbox Engage Blog

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.

Imagine if you're a third-party developer creating integrations with the Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP).  Right now, you need to build services on your own that manage the routing of data, creates matching between inbound data and existing data in the NPSP, and much more.  With the NPSP spread across multiple Salesforce packages, integrations for donations, event registrations, and more can be quite cumbersome.

What if instead, the NPSP had a pre-built set of APIs that you could tap into, providing you a landing zone for your inbound data.  A location where you needed to know little-to-nothing about the NPSP, but your organizational clients could know that their data was being properly routed to its own home.

Well my friends, a few good folks from the NPSP developer sprint in DC this week have started to make this happen.  Life as we know it for ISVs will become much better.

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.

If you're interested in getting your hands on the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) for Salesforce, there's two standard ways to get started.  Depending on your needs, especially if you're just tinkering before building a full Salesforce implementation for your organization, one of these installs will likely be more useful to you than the other.

The most common way is through a system called Trialforce.  This is the type of Salesforce org that is created when you sign up for the Salesforce Foundation's free product donation form.  The benefit of using this version of the Nonprofit Starter Pack is that it comes pre-built with a number of items that aren't included in the managed package version of the NPSP, like record types that are specific for non-profit organizations.

This can save  you a lot of time getting up and running; however, if you're looking for a customized installation of Salesforce, you might end up spending quite a bit of time deleting customizations.

For the past 15 years, I've dabbled a bit in the world of open source software. During most of that time, I've worked within communities free of corporate structures, many of which have produced some of the best software the world has ever seen without any corporate governance.

The background explains why I'm so interested in seeing things done in a different, corporate structured way, in the Salesforce.com world this week. Starting today, the Salesforce Foundation is bringing together a small team of developers to Washington DC for code sprints on the Nonprofit Starter Pack, a set of tools that organizations can use to more effectively use the Force.com platform for fundraising, contact management, and more.  I'll be among those folks contributing ideas and code to the project, and looking forward to collaborating with my buddies in the Salesforce world.

Make no mistake about it: the Nonprofit Starter Pack is the single most important open source contribution Marc Benioff has put his company's 1/1/1 giveback model towards supporting. And, with the not-so-new-but-still-new-to-me code repository (hello to GitHub) and great leadership, the project is moving down an exciting path that I foresee disrupting the nonprofit CRM marketplace in a very positive way.

I can't wait any longer. I have to ask.

What did you get us for #GivingTuesday?

Nothing? Not one little thing?

Ah, not yet, you say. What with all the Black Fridaying and Cyber Mondaying, you've been swamped, eh? Totally understand! Haven't we all!

You're a consultant. You know Salesforce.com like the back of your hand. You use this power for good - not evil! - by working with groovy non-profits heaven-bent on crushing disease or feeding hungry folks or lovin' Mother Earth or doing any manner of creatively-inspired mayhem that cultivates the social good. And you help make that happen through Salesforce.com development.

That's you, eh? Sweet! We like you already!

We're two of a kind, we tell ya. And we should totally hook up.

There's a lot of blah blah blah these days about social media this and that. We get it. It's cool. We're down with the Twitters and the Facebookery.

But what does it all really add up to? If you share something, how to know if it means squat?