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Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers Dreamforce Presentation 2013
- 1. Adopting Salesforce Across National-Chapter Organizations Val Rozansky Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, Director of Knowledge Services @givingforum Bill Corkill Council of Michigan Foundations, Director of Technology @michfoundations Kim Snipes Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers, Member Information & Operations Manager @ABAGrantmakers
- 2. Safe Harbor Safe harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This presentation may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions proves incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed forward-looking, including any projections of product or service availability, subscriber growth, earnings, revenues, or other financial items and any statements regarding strategies or plans of management for future operations, statements of belief, any statements concerning new, planned, or upgraded services or technology developments and customer contracts or use of our services. The risks and uncertainties referred to above include – but are not limited to – risks associated with developing and delivering new functionality for our service, new products and services, our new business model, our past operating losses, possible fluctuations in our operating results and rate of growth, interruptions or delays in our Web hosting, breach of our security measures, the outcome of any litigation, risks associated with completed and any possible mergers and acquisitions, the immature market in which we operate, our relatively limited operating history, our ability to expand, retain, and motivate our employees and manage our growth, new releases of our service and successful customer deployment, our limited history reselling non-salesforce.com products, and utilization and selling to larger enterprise customers. Further information on potential factors that could affect the financial results of salesforce.com, inc. is included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the most recent fiscal quarter. These documents and others containing important disclosures are available on the SEC Filings section of the Investor Information section of our Web site. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other presentations, press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
- 5. 12 ORGs launch on Proprietary CMS & AMS Technology Project Conceptualized GOAL: Double Participation! 2005 2006 2011 2004 2013 Discovery and Build New Project: SalesforceDrupal Discovery and Build
- 7. MY NEEDS ARE SIMPLE, ALL I WANT IS EVERYTHING
- 9. Don’t worry, I got your back!
- 11. What did we find? • We have the same/similar constituent groups • We provide the same/similar services to these groups • We track the same/similar things But each of us does it differently...
- 17. How do we address these? • • • • Is common system really the answer? Can large and small associations work together? Compromise can be a scary word Differences can be an asset, not a liability Leverage commonalities Learn from differences Do it in phases
- 18. Phase I Phase II Lowest common denominator Add-ons and enhancements All needs are shared Individual customizations No individual customizations Work alone or share costs Core platform and levelled playing field Knowledge sharing and development platform
- 20. Bill Corkill Director of Technology @michfoundations
- 21. WHY?
- 27. Our Cost? Less than $20,000
- 28. 90% Savings
- 33. Kim Snipes Member Information & Operations Manager @ABAGrantmakers
- 40. 65 Custom Fields 14 Custom Reports 13 List Views 13 Record Types 5 Triggers 4 Workflow Rules 4 Validation Rules 2 Visualforce Pages COMMON PACKAGE
- 46. Forum Board Committee Partners Group Forum Board Committee Partners Group Advisory Group Advisory Group Salesforce Working Group
- 50. Our Secret Recipe Future Packages Individual Enhancements "Common Package" Salesforce NonProfit Starter Pack Salesforce
- 55. Need a Life Line? Phone a Friend Ask the Audience
- 57. User Adoption Institutionalizing Knowledge Exchange Question? Post it to the project site Technical issue? File a ticket Training your staff? Record and share If it’s not on the project site or our ticketing system, it doesn’t exist!
- 59. Rollout Must deploy rapidly Minimal Salesforce skills needed Learn with your own data ( Sandboxes!) Get me 90% there and I’ll do the remaining 10% KEEP CALM and ROLLOUT
- 62. Are Packages Restrictive? More in theory than in practice Unique configurations are encouraged and may get to the next package version Significantly reduces individual development costs Data consistency facilitates integration with other products
- 63. Salesforce Drupal Integration 24 Organizations: Same Drupal Distribution Same Salesforce Packages 1 Integration
- 64. LESSONS LEARNED
- 65. Takeaways … Effective Leadership + Communication = Trust Common Needs + Compromise = Savings Peer Learning + Power Users = Sustainability Engagement + Empowered Stakeholders = Good Governance Clear Scope + Shared Vision = Lasting Partnerships
- 67. Val Rozansky Bill Corkill Kim Snipes Director of Knowledge Services Director of Technology Member Information & Operations Manager @givingforum @michfoundations @ABAGrantmakers
- 68. Chatter on the session record in the Dreamforce App Or join other nonprofit and higher ed customers in the Foundation’s online community – the Power of Us HUB http://powerofus.salesforcefoundation.org
Editor's Notes
- The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakersisa national network of regional associations that support and grow effective philanthropy through its membership of about 5,000 foundations, corporations, organizations, and individual donors. We are the largest network serving the philanthropic community in the country.
- Forum has 34 member associations across the country. They are all independent entities and their participation in any project, including this Salesforce project, is absolutely voluntary. Each association really varies in size. Some are pretty large, comparatively speaking, and have 20-30 staffers. And some only have few staffers.
- We have a history of working together on technology projects. Over 6-7 years ago, 12 associations and the Forum collectively deployed an integrated proprietary solution that included a content management system and a membership database, not Salesforce. It was a great project, but it was incredibly difficult to scale and rather pricey to operate. What we learned, however, is that productivity of participating organizations has increased and the peer learning community really started to take hold, and remains active to this day. So we knew that we were on the right track…but so did our executive leadership and they set a lofty goal of doubling participation in the project by EOB 2013.
- So here we are…all proud of what accomplishment, facing yet another challenge. How do we scale the success we just had? As we started exploring our options, figuring out the interplay between collective and individual needs quickly became our biggest challenge.
- How do we reconcile between what we want and need as a network and unique requirements of individual associations? You’ll hear this theme throughout the presentation…
- We also needed to figure out how Salesforce will integrate with our websites that are powered by Drupal. I’ll say more about this integration and how we approached it later in the presentation. Integration wasn’t a choice for us. It’s a must have. I’d argue that it’s a must have for any organization these days, but that’s another presentation…
- And finally, how do we maintain and support what we built?
- Discovery…We needed to really look under the hood through surveys and individual interviews to get a fresh perspective of our similarities and differences.
- So what did we find? Let me fast forward for you…We have the same or pretty similar constituenciesWe provide the same or very similar services to our audiencesWe all track very similar things such as the levels of engagement, interest area, registrations and attendance, subscriptions, and so on…But each of us does it in our own way…
- We’re similar, but not identical… What else did we find?
- Knowledge silos – “I know how to do the stuff I need, but I’ve no idea if others are doing the same stuff or doing it more efficiently”.
- Most of us were reinventing the wheel by building disparate systems to address similar problems. 4 regionals independently used Salesforce NPSP while others used proprietary systems such as iMis, FileMaker Pro, and so on.
- We’re all struggling with deficiencies in power users. One association developers a power user and hold us to him/her for dear life. That power users leaves and so does the knowledge…In fact, one of our associations recently lost a key staffer to a member foundation. She knew all of our systems and how they integrated with each other? How do you find a replacement for someone like that when these systems have been so heavily customized over the years? It’s a challenge…
- We didn’t effectively leverage our collective resources and didn’t really exchange knowledge across.
- 1. One would think that discovery findings would do all the convincing for me, right? However, is building the common system really the right solution? Common systems by virtue of being common lead to constraints and can actually stifle innovation if not properly configured.2. Can associations of different sizes work well together or will the difference in their requirements kill the project before it even starts? For example, two regional associations represented here serve different grantmaking audiences – mostly the same, but there are important differences such as different membership structure and data models.3. Compromise can indeed be a scary word, especially when it needs to be done routinely. For us though, it was a temporary compromise and we’ll explain why.4. Part of my job at the national organization was to demonstrate that our differences can actually be assets because we can learn from them. It was really more about changing minds and managing that change than switching to a new technology. It was really about reassuring folks like Bill that in due time he could serve his constituents in a much more effective and measurable way. And it was also about reassuring Bill’s CEO that if Bill left his organization (something he’ll never do, right?) there’ll be a network of peers that can fill the void.
- Probably everyone in this room that has ever worked on a technology project, did so in phases. We’re no different. We split the project into two initial phases. Phase I is what we call our Common Package. Bill and Kim will provide some details on what this package entails, but in a nutshell, Phase I was our lowest common denominator. All participants MUST share any given requirement to be in this phase. We knew from the get-go that there are lots of unique requirements out there, but in Phase I we’re only building the core platform and levelling the playing field for participating organizations.Phase II is our add-on phases and that’s when regionals like Michigan can develop their own workflows and triggers to address any unique needs. If these needs are shared by another regional association or a group of regional associations – GREAT – they can work together and split the related expenses. If additional organizations develop the need for this functionality in the future, they’ll pay their fair and equal share and original investor/s will receive a credit. It is during this phase that we’re really building a knowledge sharing and development platform.It was pretty challenging to convince those organizations that weren’t involved in our collaborative work in the past. And it was equally difficult to convince those that did to go through another data migration, training, and user adoption process.How did we do it? I’ll pass you to Bill and he’ll answer all of your questions.
- Let me quickly show you what we’ll cover today. Bill will share the process he’s gone through at his regional association before buying into this project.Kim, our resident Salesforce guru, will talk about our planning and development work.Bill will describe how we’re using Salesforce packages and how we’ve approached the often dreaded data migration work.Finally, I’ll close by saying a few words about the user adoption and rollout processes. I’ll also mention our integration work with Drupal and next steps for the project.
- As a Large organization we had many discussions and I had to answer many questions about why we were participating in this large national project.Many pressures to do this on our own:We had technical expertise on staffWe had the money in the budgetWe had the staff to do the workSo we had the money and capacity to go it aloneSo why would we and what were the reasons/discussions we had to change our minds?
- 1s point - no matter which way we go we need help form other experts.So going Independently or doing this collaboratively meant hiring a team of individuals for CMF and I would manage the project, define the deliverables, scope project and work in isolation from my colleagues (probably reinventing the wheel)Going as a group allows us to share and learn from each other and put together a stronger project by using in network expertise (Don’t reinvent the wheel)Proven track record
- Define what Joining and Participating mean to our groupJoining = hands off, pay for what you get (this may be what some organizations want)Participation = Active Participation and involvement in one or many aspects of the project.Setting Expectations was crucial for internal org culture, Board to staff must understand the type of involvement this takes (Time requirements)Joining would be hands off pay to get what you asked for, no increases in capacity, knowledgeParticipating - Active role in governance, process, requirements and deliverablesParticipating - Become aware of best practices and new processes
- Economies of Scale were and still are a huge cost saving benefit of participating on a project like this.Estimates for a project scope like this would have been around $200,000 (Cost Esitmate Slide)We have spent less than $20,000 (Expense Slide)realizing a 90% savings in budgeted expenses (Savings/Cash Slide)We have chosen to take a more active role so we have invested more staff time but that has been prioritized over other work so no significant staff expenses have been seen. Other organizations have augmented with consultants, part time staff or new hires as they see an importance to have tech savvy staff capacity
- Leadership must stand for and be behind this ideaOur CEO is a champion for this and reinforces this idea with staffHardest point to defend when things get tough or you hit a bump in the projectWe are fortunate and in the spirit of the non-profit sector we believe we should share our resourcesAs we and other organizations share this generosity, we get stronger team members, teams, leadership and the entire project is strengthened from withinThis is why Participation is so important
- Participation increases knowledge by having a virtual staff from the network working togetherCreates a better stronger product form the brightest people in your field.We had Technical Expertise but needed Salesforce expertiseOthers had business process expertise but needed technical abilityMy virtual team increases the scale and capacity that my organization can accomplish
- Ultimately flexibility is what sold us on the project - Best of Both Worldsbalance between individuality and commonality that we shared with the other participantsOur ability to build to our needs but learn and participate with other experts made us stronger and more successful compared to where we would have been individually.
- Thanks, Bill!My name is Kim Snipes and I am from the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers. We launched our Salesforce instance in January of 2012 and I jumped at the chance to participate in this project and I got involved at the most fun part – discovery!
- 24 organizationsFun really beginsDeep dive into requirements and create something that reflects what we’re about to learn in discovery that can be shared and distributed in a managed packagehow do we get from 24 orgs with different requirements (HERE) to share customizations in a distributedred package (THERE) So, now that we have 24 organizations signed up for Salesforce, the very simple task in front of us was to take all of their requirements, their expectations and create something within Salesforce that would capture and reflect the needs of all these regional associations across the country!
- So important to get discovery process rightCreate buy in with inclusive process but at same time not overwhelm final productSo what is the final product – collection of customizations packaged and distributed to regional associations in their SF instances – COMMON PACKAGEDiscovery:SurveysWeekly callsHeard from Ras how using current systems and what they wanted to be ABLE to doCompiled information and asked them to rank – top were chosen to be included in prototypePhase II list = parked “nice to have” features; allowed up
- HOW MANY OUT THERE HAVE HAD A LESS THAN STELLAR EXPERIENCE WITH A CONSULTANT?That’s what I thought!Glue of discovery – and work ahead of us ==consulting partner. Vetted and selection managed by the forum selected JACKSON RIVER am only allowed to say their name once so take note! They became our partners in crime
- Final piece of discovery – knowledge sharing from existing SF usersWeeks where on phone with val or val and billSpecific examples like using campaigns and opportunities for membership renewal process child campaigns for different cycles; opportunities for each membershipTwo of us were using the affiliations object and an account record type to track committees and group participationApps to increase user adoptionEfficiencies – generate acknowledgement letters
- All in agreement – in network expertise was major advantage for this projectConsultants patiently listened to us share solicited and unsolicited advice, ideas and recommendationsIn the interest of full disclosure, however, I will say this – we all brought some of our own emotional baggage! Very attached to how we were working in SF and major turning point is when we let go and allowed consultants to do what they do best – validate and build on our work based on best practices
- team effort - Collaboration with external consultant and current Salesforce users in the networkBuild spec – play book – time to build prototype version of Common PackagePower users able to heavily assist with this work
- Developer instance – quickly became second homeHere’s how it all came together and what the first version of the COMMON PACKAGE looked likeOnce prototype built – QA began and continues to this dayBeta testers and used sandboxes (best practice!) to test the packageEnd of phase I in sight – am sure a lot of the regional associations felt we were leading them down
- A dark endless staircaseReality setting in – new system. Data migration. Training. All very overwhelmingPower users ramped up propaganda efforts and
- Spread the Salesforce loveKey role for power users –be cheerleaders for peersI dare say that most regionals turned a corner and felt we were leading them less down the dark scary staircase and more down the
- Yellow brick road
- Those who have experienced launch or rollout of Salesforce knows best approach is full emersionThat was our approach from the very beginning –to get to know Salesforce is to get your hands dirty.
- FFWDRelease 2.8 when we return from DFLive instances launchingData migrating – don’t worry, bill will talk about that bundle of joy in a moment…Best of all---expertise is growing!!
- key part of building bench strength of network—governance structure that is flexible/agile and the Salesforce working group that plays integral role in continued development workAgile governance – allows us to adjust and reconfigure as project grows and as needs changePast summer made key changes that places decision making authority in hands of those playing active participant role in the project
- Continue to keep development process agile as wellSFWG serves as our SCRUM masterSFWG maintains active and loving relationship with our external SF consultant – (HI BRIAN PICKETT) Like the 4 power users during the initial build, SFWG develops and builds new features when appropriate and is thinking all things SF on behalf of the networkAlways done under brian’s watchful eye….TwofoldCost savingsBuilds network capacity – and next generation of usersNext we will hear from bill about how we’re moving forward and everyone’s favorite topic – data migration!!
- Packages are like Cake Like Cake, Our Salesforce instance is like a cake made of layers of Packages
- Here is what our cake looks likeStart with Salesforce! Nonprofit starter pack is a good example of a package Ours is built on top of NPSPWe can still add more packages as a group in the futureI as an individual organization needed flexibility to accommodate my needs as well. "Commonality vs. Individuality" that I spoke to earlier. - Talk About Accounting Needs and customizations that were unique are incorporated for separately.Our tasty frosting is the App Exchange - products that can be added at any time that sit on top of all of this to make this cake even sweeter!
- From a national perspective, it’s all about the user adoption.
- Institutionalizing knowledge sharing in the network. What do I mean by that? It’s all about eliminating knowledge silos and conducting our work in the open.You have a question, post it to the project siteYou have a technical issue, file a ticket that can be seen and followed by allYou’re training your staff, record the training and share it.You’re documenting a step-by-step instructions about how to do something in Salesforce, you share it with the network. Even if it’s specific to your organization, you share it nonetheless. As Bill had done with data migration instructions….
- We started a comprehensive national training initiative. These are some of the tools that we used. Lots of recorded webinars and lots of individual learning. Luckily, there are so many resources available on Salesforce. Forcifyme is great. Salesforce Knowledgebase is very comprehensive.We use a product from AppExchange that allows to record guided step-by-step tutorials.Onboarding new users and staff members became much easier over time.Without packages, user adoption would be pretty challenging for us. Packages also helped us with rollout.
- We know our members – some are pretty familiar with Salesforce and some are just getting the hang of it. Rapid deployment was one of our important criteria. Minimal Salesforce skills required. We roll it out and let them learn with their own data…and we get them 90% there and they’ll do the remaining 10%. I’ll talk about this 90/10 formula in a minute.
- Our goal was to simplify the rollout process so even the most inexperienced Salesforce users could deploy our common package. We didn’t ship a huge box of legos with complicated instructions. Instead…
- We essentially shipped a pre-build lego set that’s modular. It still comes with instructions but it’s prebuilt for those that are scared of change…
- More in theory than in practice. We try to ship 90% of functionality and page layouts through the package and let regionals configure and customize the rest.We encourage everyone to innovate and create new functionality. If they come up with something that can be used by others, we’ll add it to the version release.If any organization pays for development of new functionality and it gets added to the package, their development costs will be reimbursed as other organizations get access to it.One of the great things that packages let us do is to ensure data consistency. This becomes especially important when we integrate Salesforce with Drupal.
- For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, Drupal is an open source web application platform.We follow exactly the same model for rolling our Drupal distribution to the network of associations as we do with Salesforce. We actually helped our vendor develop the current integration module and contributed it back to the community. You can find it on Drupal.org – Salesforce Suite.Salesforce’s open API framework is very robust and we map all of our contacts, accounts, affiliations, committees, memberships, event registrations, products sales and so on from Drupal to Salesforce. Most of these sync bilaterally, but Salesforce is always used as our canonical data source. We generate all of our reports from Salesforce.The reason I’m giving you a quick synopsis of this integration is not just to pat ourselves on the back (although that never hurts), but to highlight the fact that we couldn’t even contemplate a reliable integration between Salesforce and Drupal without packages. What we’d see is regionals tackling this requirement independently and more often than not end up with something custom, proprietary, unaffordable, or even worse, unsustainable.
- Trust boils down to two things: buy in from our executive leadership and effective communication across the networkSavings – self explanatory, but definitely requires compromiseI can’t emphasize enough the importance of having power users in your network. No project is sustainable without your power users.Governance – have the right people for the job on your committees and give them the decision-making authorityFind the right vendor for your project that will be more of a partner than a vendor.
- So where do we go from here? We now have 24 regionals on our common platform. We still have some room to grow by onboarding other member organizations and expanding to other network of funders.The future looks bright for us. The number of power users in the network is increasing. Regionals are getting great feedback from their members. We’re getting inquiries from colleague organizations. While we certainly thought about an exit strategy and evaluate satisfaction levels every year, we continue to offer a pretty compelling value proposition.We hope that what we shared here today will be useful to many of you contemplating a similar endeavor. We’ll open it up for questions and will be available after the session. We’ll also make sure to stay engaged via the chatter group.