This year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference is fast approaching. While it’s still 10 weeks away, here at the NTEN office, we’re kicking into high gear for conference prep. Many of you are probably starting to book your hotel and travel. To help you find rides and roommates, we’ve started a couple of discussion threads on myNTC.

>> Looking for a ride? Join the Ride Share discussion on myNTC here.

>> Looking to share a hotel room? Find a roommate in this discussion on myNTC.

This week we’re filling you in on all the amazing events put on by other organizations before and during the NTC. Many of these events require registration, so make sure to sign up if you want to attend.

It's the dream, isn't it? CMS + CRM = website nirvana. If your constituents could log in to your site and see content personalized just for them, or a reminder that it's been a year since their last donation, you'd have technology that goes a long way toward helping you meet your mission.

We'll take a look at how to handle integrations between Salesforce and a trio of open source CMS solutions -- Plone, Drupal, and Joomla -- at our upcoming webinar, "Salesforce + CMS Integration Showdown: Plone, Drupal, and Joomla".

> Learn more and register today

This will be a good session if you're already working with these platforms, in the market for a new one, or just curious what others are doing.

You’ll learn what use cases are viable, see examples of integrations, and hear about what reusable products are available to get you up and running fast. Each system will be presented by experts in the field who’ve been there and done that before.

Flickr Photo: akakumoYesterday, I had the privilege of sharing the stage at an event on cloud computing hosted by the Salesforce.com/Foundation, Facebook, and Google. My job was to set the stage for the day and talk about why cloud computing is important for our sector. (If you want the slides, I put them up on slideshare, so free to download them.)

Though I think the cloud presents its own set of challenges for our sector, I also think it presents us with some amazing opportunities -- not just to save money on infrastructure and IT support, but to go about our work differently than we have before.  

I'll confess that I owe the genesis of my thinking around this to Steve Wright at the Saleforce.com/Foundation. I had the chance to interview him about his upcoming NTC session, and that set me to thinking about just what we COULD do with the cloud if we were able to look beyond the bottom line. 

What that is, I think, is collaboration and evaluation, facilitated by free-moving data.

You've noticed this, I'm sure. In the last decade, the pile of data we have to sift through to make decisions has grown from a molehill into a mountain. As communication and interaction have moved from analog to digital, we're able to capture more information than anyone thought possible. 

Think about it. If you ran a phone bank in the early 90's, the only way you had to guage whether or not your message was effective was to count the number of hang-ups. Now we send out an email and not only know whether or not folks took action for us, but which part of the message compelled them to click, and which parts of our list found the message most compelling. And we can know dozens of other things as our databases record those clicks. (This example is inspired by The Numerati. Buy it.)

Making sense of all this data is going to be our key challenge as a sector as we move forward. But the cloud is going to help us in this regard, because the cloud makes it exponentially easier for us to move data around. 

In the cloud, we can share client service data with other organizations and map it against the need demonstrated by census data. In the cloud, we can create visualizations of our data that make those multi-colored spreadsheets finally make REAL sense. In the cloud, we'll be able to record even more of the ways our constituents interact with us, and interpret what that means. 

That's the promise of the cloud. Now all we have to do is live up to it. 

Also - I have to mention that there were some great panelists with some really cool insights to share at this event.  Some of my favorite tidbits came from Scott Beale, Jake Brewer and Judi Sohn.  They all had great real-life examples of the challenges and joys of the cloud. 

My favorite advice of the day came from Judi who was addressing how difficult it is to get end users to switch to the cloud when they are used to, say, Outlook.  Judi's really smart advice?  Smart by moving the data to the applications they already use.  Pop your gmail to Outlook.  And, as users have questions or needs, point them to the cloud for answers.  Eventually, they will give up their software for the cloud.  

Jon Stahl has some awesome pants: the front and back of each leg is a different color -- red, green, blue and yellow. I first saw them back in 2002, when the NTC was still the Roundup. Amazingly, he still fits in them -- and he's bringing them to San Francisco in April. Luckily for you, he's also bringing his decade-long experience trying to get nonprofit software to play nicely!

Jon is leading a session at the NTC called An Open Civic Engagement Platform: A new generation of tools that play nice together. He'll be talking about the variety of ways we can now make our donor databases, content management systems, and email tools talk to each other and share data, and what this means for us as a sector.

We talked about this -- and burritos -- a few days ago. Take a listen:

Flickr Photo: Cubbie_n_ VegasIf you're anywhere around my age -- I'm 33, I can admit it -- you don't remember how small the world used to be. Before the advent of the jet airliner in the 1950s, intercontinental travel was long, hard, and expensive. Only the very rich went abroad. Getting around the U.S. was no piece of cake either: until the interstate system, traveling by car was long, tedious, and expensive, too.

Infrastructure improvements, coupled with rising incomes and an increased awareness of cultures other than our own, has caused travel to skyrocket world-wide. The National Academy of Engineering figures that, "Over the past five decades, Earth’s inhabitants have increased their travel demand from an average of 1,400 to 5,500 km, using a combination of automobiles, buses, railways, and aircraft." This has fundamentally changed the way we live.

Now, let's think about your data.

The Salesforce.com/Foundation has just announced two new grant opportunities for 2008.  If you are a Salesforce user, you could earn up to $15,000 for your organization.  They have two types of grants during this round:

TURN IT UP GRANTS
The Salesforce.com Foundation is excited to announce the third annual Turn It Up grant round!  These grants, valued at 10,000 USD each, are designed to help existing salesforce.com license donation recipients enhance their use of the salesforce.com application.  Turn It Up grants will be awarded to nonprofits whose use of the application is most innovative and beneficial to the global nonprofit community.

TECHNOLOGY GRANT FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT
The Salesforce.com Foundation announces the 2008 Technology Grants for Youth Development!  The Technology Grants for Youth Development will be awarded to visionary nonprofit organizations whose focus rests on youth development, for technology projects or solutions that advance the organization's core mission.  These grants will be awarded in increments of 5,000 USD ranging from 10,000 to 15,000.

 

 

LOLnptechThe Salesforce Foundation's Innovation for Nonprofit Success, in NYC, was the big nonprofit technology this week event.

Jake Brewer, of Idealist.org, wrote an article for the Huffington Post, that gets at the heart of what we nptechies are all about: technology levels the playing field and allows even the smallest nonprofits to run their programs using the same tools as the big guys. Jake gives a shout out not only to Salesforce's contribution to nonprofits, but also to Google Apps and the organizations, big and small, that've been able to use these tools to further their missions. (There are too many NTEN members highlighted in this article to name here, so check it out!)

Judi Sohn blogged about the Salesforce event this week too -- but from a different perspective. She couldn't be there! Syncing Google calendars with her husband made her realize that she'd have to miss the NYC event. I missed it too, Judi, and I have Old Man Winter to blame for interfering with my travel plans! Thanks for the down-to-earth insights about using these tools.

Michelle Murrain is back this week with an aptly titled post (Tidbits) about a developers' challenge -- and an open source update, of course.

Do you use Salesforce? You may want to check out these two useful tools.

The first is DemandTools, a standalone application for manipulating data and administrating your Salesforce account. DemandTools features 14 modules, but one of its more popular features is probably its extensive deduping capabilities. It has certainly made this usually repetitive task much less time consuming for me. DemandTools also has the ability to verify addresses through a third party. It's not free, but comes with 450 free "credits" per Salesforce login.

DemandTools has many more features, but it's not overwhelming. CRMfusion, the author of the application, has very neatly documented all the features on its website, including mini-presentations of how each feature works.

The second tool is the Apex Data Loader, created in-house at Salesforce to import data. I recently used it to bulk assign contact roles to a large set of opportunities in order to run a report of opportunities with contacts from accounts.

In order to test out Apex Data Loader, log into your Salesforce.com account, click Setup, Data Management, AppExchange, Data Loader, and then Download.

Also, thanks to the folks on the Nonprofit Salesforce Practitioners mailing list for bringing these useful tools to my attention.

Are you in the market for a new database? Then we have a webinar that you should check out:

Salesforce for Nonprofits

Salesforce is one of the most popular web-enabled databases, and it's gaining adherants among nonprofits. Accessible from any browser, customizable in myriad ways -- and available to nonprofits for no fee through the Salesforce.com Foundation -- it's a powerful tool. But how can a database with a name like Salesforce be used by the nonprofit sector? This webinar will explore the functionality and community of Salesforce. We'll look at how several nonprofits, from a group of more than 1500, use Salesforce to cultivate and recruit donors, manage their electronic communications, and more. If you are looking for a new CRM solution, or just want to know more about Salesforce, this webinar will be a great starting point.

Presented by Rob Jordan, Idealist Consulting

> Register now!