Today’s guest post is by Matt Eldridge. Matt served as IslandWood’s Senior Vice President. IslandWood’s mission is to inspire lifelong environmental and community stewardship. They do this through events and programs at several facilities, including their flagship 250-acre outdoor learning center on Bainbridge Island in Washington. IslandWood uses Salesforce to help their team manage events,…
You’re a nonprofit effectively using Salesforce and the Nonprofit Starter Pack 3.0 to manage your donor relations and constituent communications. You’re looking at the next step for your connected nonprofit, and you want to bring some form of programs management into the database. Maybe you want to track direct service delivery, or you want to…
HomeKeeper is a Salesforce-based system for affordable homeownership organizations. It combines a day-to-day program management system with a shared measurement system. It is currently in use by over seventy organizations across the country. This post shares the history of how the HomeKeeper system came together over many years. The story is of local impact and taking social change…
Salesforce.org (and Salesforce.com) recently changed their pricing, configuration, and naming for licenses. This blog post reflects these changes. Through the Power of Us program, Salesforce.org provides a great benefit for every qualified 501c3: a grant for 10 Lighting Enterprise Edition licenses. They also provide a significant discount for licenses needed beyond those 10. Even with…
There is a trust component that is built into the work we’re doing with implementing Salesforce and that has huge implications in terms of ownership and buy-in. Salesforce is changing the way we think about the programs and services we provide to clients. The system will connect all of our staff (who operate in 20+…
This week, I’ve been working in an org that was first built out almost 8 years ago. They’re a tiny staff, and don’t have a dedicated admin. Now, having an admin is absolutely crucial to long term success with Salesforce, but sometimes that just doesn’t happen. And if you don’t have an admin, or you’ve…
You can now use Custom Metadata Types to define and store your own metadata settings — and you can deploy these between orgs! Previously you had to use Custom Objects or Custom Settings, which don’t bring data over when you deploy them. Using Custom Metadata makes managing your deployments easier and lets you think about…
We recently collaborated with an organization who does highly-effective therapeutic work with at-risk children in the Seattle area. Children served by this organization often have a complex web of caregivers, relatives, foster parents, siblings, half-siblings, case workers, and other significant people in their lives. These children frequently change living situations. It is critical for this organization…
The foundation of a successful Salesforce implementation project is a great project team, and key to that project team is a great client-side project lead. That’s not us, and it’s not necessarily the client’s internal Salesforce administrator, either! (Though it can be the same person. We’ve covered in depth before why you definitely need an admin,…
Many of the biggest hurdles organizations face when implementing Salesforce are not about technology at all. In fact, they are much more about the approach the organization takes towards the process overall. Our friend Sam Dorman has created an excellent Getting Ready Playbook that’s available for download and is also part of the Salesforc.org’s Power of…