Tag Archives: Common Ground

Life after Common Ground: Not-so-final thoughts

Posted on by

6 weeks ago, I began a series of blog posts highlighting different Salesforce apps I’ve been working with at KELL Partners since leaving Blackbaud/Common Ground behind six months ago. Here’s a summary of those posts and the features I highlighted, in case you missed any:

While this brings me to the end of the series as I had planned it, I know I could have gone on and on. More features on the above apps. More apps. For example there’s Volunteers for Salesforce, which was rescued from the ashes of Groundwire by the always helpful and brilliant David Habib. Or Brickwork, iATS integration with Salesforce and its form building tool, AURA. Maybe I’ll do another series in the future. What apps are you using that I should be talking about here?

As I was writing these posts, I found myself focusing on a common theme. What excites me most about these products, almost without exception, are the companies and people behind them more than features. I focused on features, sure, but with each application the feature I focused on said as much about the mindset of the company as it did about its functionality.

Simply put: It’s not enough to just have something to sell.

The best part about Salesforce is that it isn’t just a platform to build stuff on. It’s a large, inter-connected ecosystem and developers have to expect that their customers are going use their apps in ways they never imagined and alongside other apps they never heard of. That fact has to motivate companies, not scare them.

Support and communication is everything. And I’m not talking about simply answering “How do I…” questions. Organizations want to feel that they’re in partnership with the companies they’re working with. From my experience, nonprofits can forgive technology that has its rough edges here and there. They have far less patience when their emails go unanswered once the check is cashed and promises aren’t kept.

I started this series because I didn’t want Common Ground users to feel hopeless just because one old-style company didn’t get it and pulled the rug out. There’s a reason around 18,000 nonprofits have adopted Salesforce over a short time. It’s exciting and innovative. There’s so much to offer. The platform is worth it. The community is worth it. Stick around and you’ll be glad you did.

About these ads

Life after Common Ground: Part 6 – Apsona

Posted on by

This post is part 6 in a series of articles pointing out what’s cool about some of my favorite Salesforce apps for nonprofits. Previously, I highlighted favorite features in Nonprofit Starter Pack, Click & Pledge, Causeview, Soapbox Engage and Conga Composer. Now I’m going to talk about my favorite parts of Apsona for Salesforce.

Apsona isn’t a non-profit specific app, but it’s so incredibly wonderful and useful I couldn’t leave it out of this series.

Continue reading →

Life after Common Ground: Part 5 – Conga Composer

Posted on by

This post is part 5 in a series of articles pointing out what’s cool about some of my favorite Salesforce apps for nonprofits. Previously, I highlighted favorite features in Nonprofit Starter Pack, Click & Pledge, Causeview and Soapbox Engage now I’m going to talk about my favorite parts of Appextremes Conga Composer.

Before I started working for Convio, I thought I was comfortable with Conga Composer. It’s what I used at Fight Colorectal Cancer to generate our acknowledgement letters out of Common Ground. When you say “mail merge” and “Salesforce” in the same sentence, the next sentence is simply: Conga Composer. But it’s good for so much more than acknowledgment letters.

Common Ground has mail merge functionality built in. And it’s decent. IF you are using Word 2003 or 2007. And Windows XP. And a 32 bit Windows-based OS. And if your browser is Internet Explorer. If one or more of those requirements aren’t true, then the Common Ground mail merge sucked and believe me, those of us who worked on the Common Ground team knew it. It was a great concept built on Salesforce technology that was never upgraded with the times. In fact, 10 days before we found out Common Ground was getting the ax we had a long brainstorming session with the developers about what would be the next version of Common Ground mail merge. I’m sure it would have been amazing.

Before I dive into technology, I have to say something about Appextreme’s support team. Phone or email, it’s incredible. Have to experience it to believe.

Anyway, I know a lot of nonprofits are already familiar with how to do a basic acknowledgement letter using Conga Mass Merge, and it’s awesome for that. But did you know that you can use Conga to generate a fully formatted Word file of your monthly donors, let’s say for your newsletter or annual report?

Continue reading →

Life after Common Ground: Part 4 – Soapbox Engage

Posted on by

This post is part 4 in a series of articles pointing out what’s cool about some of my favorite Salesforce apps for nonprofits. Previously, I highlighted favorite features in Nonprofit Starter Pack, Click & Pledge and Causeview, now I’m going to talk about my favorite parts of Soapbox Engage.

Truth be told, my favorite thing about Soapbox Engage isn’t a technology feature. It’s the company itself. When I was laid off from Blackbaud last summer, one of the first calls I made was to Ryan Ozimek, CEO of PicNet, the company that makes Soapbox Engage. Every time I talk to him, he reminds me why this all matters so much to me. There aren’t enough words to describe my respect for Ryan and the team he’s built and what they’re trying to do, penguins and all. If there was a dictionary definition of an application developer that’s in this market for all the right reasons, it would point to PicNet and call it a day.

But let’s talk favorite feature of the software. Soapbox Engage is way to take a stand alone front end for donation and event registration forms and easily get its data to Salesforce…a combination of a platform built on the open source CMS Joomla and Salesforce app. It’s part of the full Nonprofit Soapbox platform that PicNet offers, separated out for those who just want to sync data to Salesforce and don’t need the entire CMS platform.

Continue reading →

Life after Common Ground: Part 2 – Click & Pledge

Posted on by

This post is part 2 in a series of articles aimed at organizations on Common Ground who need to get excited about what’s next if they decide to stay on the Salesforce platform. I started this series by talking about the Nonprofit Starter Pack, now I’m going to focus on Click & Pledge.

Click & Pledge isn’t just a Salesforce application, it’s a platform. And wow, is it robust. An organization can build their forms to “speak” to Click & Pledge’s processor. Similar to Common Ground Fundraising, online gifts are processed and posted to Salesforce within seconds. While custom forms are definitely more complex to set up in Click & Pledge than they were in Common Ground Fundraising, the level of customization makes Click & Pledge definitely worth the effort.

Continue reading →

Life after Common Ground: Part 1 – Nonprofit Starter Pack

Posted on by

Most of my time over the past few months at KELL Partners has been spent getting to know all the wonderful tools and technologies in the Salesforce world that have come along while I was too busy focusing on Common Ground. I’ve spoken to so many organizations who are now in the process of deciding their next steps. Almost without exception, they’re scared and they’re cautious. And they should be. It was a big step to adopt a new donor/constituent management system and through no fault of their own, they have to change again.

I thought it might be comforting for those organizations if I laid out some of what’s pretty awesome on the other side if they decide to stay on the Salesforce platform…to blog a series of articles each focusing on one bit of much improved functionality in different applications as it compares to similar functionality in Common Ground.

I’ll highlight what should make you smile in Nonprofit Starter Pack, Causeview, Click & Pledge, Soapbox Engage, Conga Composer, Apsona, Volunteers, and more if I can. This isn’t an exhaustive list, it’s just the applications that I’ve become the most comfortable working with since joining KELL Partners.

Even though I’m framing these posts with Common Ground eyes, they’ll hopefully be interesting to anyone who cares about what’s happening and what’s cool in the Salesforce nonprofit space.

Continue reading →

Need to leave Common Ground? Analyze first. Then react.

Posted on by

In the interest of full disclosure, let’s get this out of the way first: I’m employed! Or I will be as of November 1 when I join KELL Partners full-time as Solutions and Support Services Manager. I’m very excited about this opportunity to join a team that I’ve gotten to know a bit over the past few years. I’m also thrilled to be taking on a role that will have me working with nonprofits post-implementation. More on that in the future, I’m sure.

During my month of unemployment I had the pleasure of working on a few meaningful Force.com projects that have nothing to do with my upcoming role at KELL. If you’re a Common Ground (or Common Ground Enterprise) client still overwhelmed trying to figure out what to do next, this one is for you.

Continue reading →

On Uncommon Ground

Posted on by

Last Friday, my short 9 month career working on Common Ground came to an end. I’m free (sorta) and sad (sorta) and angry (not sorta). Don’t get me wrong. Jobs come and go, especially in this economy. Startups fail. Companies cut back. It happens. My disappointment, sadness and anger is over the way too early death of a product that I believed in. That it was misunderstood and undervalued. It has nothing to do with the fact that I’m out of a job for the first time since 2005. I know I’ll be fine.

It feels good to be blogging again. When I accepted the job at Convio, I negotiated that it would be okay for me to blog. Even preferred. The reality was that I found it difficult to work for a large company and express myself here.

Overall, I’m incredibly fortunate and grateful. The support and friendship that I’ve felt in the past month from the #nptech and Salesforce communities I cherish has filled my heart in ways I can never adequately describe and will take years to feel that I’ve paid back. You know who you are. Thank you. And don’t even get me started on the people who worked on Common Ground. Wow. Brilliant, passionate and dedicated to making the best product they could while delighting customers. Definitely felt out of place in its recent environment. I will miss you all so much. I was so honored to be on this team.

Continue reading →

A Way to Track Membership Dates in Salesforce using Cross-Object Workflow

Posted on by

I have a confession. One of my fears when I left Fight Colorectal Cancer to join Convio is that I would lose my hands-on experience in Salesforce. That I would get too much distance from the day-to-day of actually using Salesforce/Common Ground at an organization. Crazy. Truth is, every day I’m faced with a new and interesting challenge to solve.

Our application, Common Ground, doesn’t have any membership functionality (yet). So when an organization wants to track membership, they need to either install another 3rd party app or add custom functionality to their Salesforce instance. Recently two different organizations wanted to track on a contact/account records the date when membership will expire based on when a membership payment was last received. The first wanted the date to be exactly one year later, the other wanted the date to be the last day of the month a year later.

In both cases, I didn’t want to advise creating any new custom objects or record types since it would make it harder for our team to provide support later. I came up with a rather simple solution that uses the brand new in Salesforce Spring ’12 cross-object workflow field update feature and just a couple of custom fields.

Start with a custom date field on the account object (ex: Membership Expiration) and a custom formula date field on the Contact that simply pulls the value from the account custom field.

We will use a cross-object workflow field update to fill in the field on the account based on the close date of an opportunity, which will then automatically be duplicated on all contacts in the account. Lost you yet? Don’t worry, it’s easier than it may sound.

Rather than create a new record type, I just added a new picklist value to the Common Ground Transaction Type field to indicate that it’s a Membership payment. We just need something in the opportunity to differentiate a membership payment from other gifts since we only want our workflow rule to fire for membership payments.

Now, the workflow rule. In this sample case, the rule will fire when the Transaction Type equals Membership and will be evaluated when the record is created or edited and didn’t meet the criteria before.

Now the fun part. Set a Field Update and tell it to update the custom date field you created on the Account. New in Spring ’12!

Select the custom date field you already created, and have it fill in a formula to set the date. In this case, this will calculate the last day of the month a year later.

DATE(YEAR(CloseDate)+1,MONTH(CloseDate)+1,1)-1

At first I was figuring out which months had 30, 31 or 28 days and figuring out how to account for leap years, etc. Then it dawned on me…just set it to the first day of the following month and then roll back a day. Tada! I love when the tricky problems are solved by simple solutions.

If you want the date to be exactly a year later, then use:

DATE(YEAR(CloseDate)+1,MONTH(CloseDate),DAY(CloseDate))

And there you have it. Update a date field from opportunity to account to contact with a single workflow rule and a couple of custom fields! (The Last Membership date field below is just a roll-up summary field)

First month on the new job

Posted on by

Back in September, as I posted that I was leaving Fight Colorectal Cancer to join Convio, I had a picture in my head of what my new job would be like. I’m happy to say that the reality is turning out to be better than I was imagining back then. I love my job. I love the people I’m working with now just as much as I did before. I don’t love sitting on a Windows PC all day, but I’m getting used to it. Outlook 2007 isn’t that bad.

First, let’s move the elephant aside. The people directly responsible for hiring me had no idea when they hired me. Everyone except for the folks at the very top found out on the same day, which was 2 weeks after I started. I have no idea what it means or how it will shake out. I can’t talk about it. I’ll delete any comment that even mentions it (reread the sentence that begins with “I can’t talk…”). From now until I’m told otherwise, it’s business as usual so moving on…

I was originally hired last year for the role/title of Senior Implementation Specialist on the Common Ground Programs team. After spending time with my Manager and flushing it all out, we agreed that the title didn’t quite fit. “Implementation” implies that I’ll only be working with Common Ground clients when they’re first getting started, and that couldn’t be further from reality.

Most clients don’t approach Common Ground the way I did at Fight Colorectal Cancer: knowing Salesforce and its ecosystem first. Most clients buy Common Ground as a stand-alone product that just happens to run on the Salesforce platform. It’s like getting this big, new house with all these empty rooms. Convio has put all its attention into the kitchen and bathrooms and added a heavily customized bedroom or two on to the garage. Folks can live quite comfortably that way. But look at all they’re missing out if they never touch the den, living room or the extra bedrooms on the 2nd floor? If they know nothing about the ground their house is built on? That’s where I come in. I look for the pain points (and opportunities) that clients are having on the Salesforce platform and help alleviate them. Not consulting, although I do handle a few support tickets and am working on some projects with clients directly, but systemically so it benefits the most clients at one time. It’s a bit of training, a bit of documentation, a bit of reworking processes, a bit of liaison and bridge-building internally and externally.

I still get to play a role in the larger Salesforce/nonprofit community. The big difference is that instead of bringing knowledge and connection back to one organization, I’m bringing it back to all organizations on Common Ground.

My title now? Senior Client Success Specialist, Common Ground. Much better.