PICnet Blog

I’ve been very impressed by the individuals gathered here this week for the Salesforce.com Non-Profit Summit, including the Salesforce sector leaders like Steve Andersen of One/NW and Rem Hoffman of Exponent Partners. Even more interesting was learning that some of our favorite clients and friends, like Bryan Nunez of WITNESS have been using Salesforce.com for years!

Today’s discussions have been focused on the past and the present, and Gunner lead us through a series of breakout sessions that allowed us to expand our understanding of the sector. One important “ah-ha” that I realized is the following: handing Salesforce.com to most organizations is like giving them the keys to a high performance race car when all they really want is a 10-speed bicycle. Ok, maybe 18-speed, but you get the point. Heather Carpenter’s team came up with a wonderful cross-sectional chart the married key feature sets with verticals in the non-profit sector (like health care, social services, etc).

If Salesforce.com is going to be more effective in reaching directly to the end-users, it will need to provide a more targeted series of building blocks that will easily get organizations up and running on their platform in an end-solution manner. It will need to do this without adding pain to the consultants in the room, of course, which better knowing the SF.com team pressing for better NPO services has lead me to believe this is quite a reasonable request.

Further ah-ha’s:

• Steve Andersen really knows his stuff (duh), and I have the video to prove it. Check out the clip below where Steve saves SF.com a few dollars by laying out an effective road map for them in our sector.
  
• Gunner wears his Joomla hat even when not attending endless Joomla conferences
• DIA has officially opened a new office in San Francisco
• more than half of all the traffic running over SF.com servers are from people accessing the system from their own application and not from the SF.com site, which seems to add credence to the notion that we in the NPO sector should be doing the same (one of our primary bridges we’re building into Soapbox)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 8:53 am and is filed under nptech, Salesforce.com, npsf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.