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How Nonprofits Can Save Thousands on Salesforce Consulting Services

11/23/2016

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So you've decided to get the 10 free donated licenses from salesforce.org for your nonprofit - congratulations! If one of the reasons you're excited about Salesforce is because of the license donation, you're probably interested in how you can keep your costs down and your return on investment high while using this incredibly flexible constituent relationship management software in the cloud. Here are a few tips:

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1. Be flexible. This can mean a few things, of course, but the general rule of thumb to remember is to focus more on what you need to accomplish rather than how it needs to be accomplished. In other words, put your needs in the form of "we need to report on how many new donors we have attracted each month" rather than "we need a report in PDF format with a green column showing how many new donors we obtained for each calendar month."


2. Get on the trail! The more you're willing to use learn yourself, using the fantastically free Salesforce Trailhead online learning tool, the better off you will be. Think about it - spending a lot of money per hour to have a consultant do a custom training for your Salesforce administrator or staff is probably not worth it for about 80% of what your staff needs to learn. If your staff can complete certain trails and badges before doing certain customized training with your consultants, you will save hundreds if not thousands of dollars. What's even better, is that this will assure that everyone comes into the custom training your consultant does with the same base level of knowledge. And what's more exciting is that you can track people's progress in Trailhead and make sure that everyone has earned the same badges.


3. Know the true drivers of your timeline. Almost everyone who hires a consultant wants the project done immediately. What is the real reason for your urgency? Do you have an event coming up? Is there a board meeting? The more honest and open you can be with your consultant and of course the more flexible you can be in your date, the better off you will be. The more urgent and desperate you are the more likely you are to pay a pretty penny for expedited services.


4. Be willing to do work yourself. Not only is learning Salesforce an excellent investment for the long run at your organization, you can save thousands by doing some of the data clean up yourself or other tasks that can be extremely expensive if only consultants do them. Ask your Consultants directly what tasks you can take on to lower the total project cost.


5. Dedicate the internal resources. Almost every client I work with has vastly underestimated how much internal capacity a CRM project can take. There's a wide variety of knowledge that only nonprofit staff have and are actually better positioned than the consultant to do - for example, working with the executive team, mapping out certain processes, clarifying internal timelines, and creating the exact field mapping from the legacy system.


There are many more ways to save money working with consultants. One great way to start is to just ask. That said, working with Salesforce is an investment and if you truly have no budget you may want to reconsider your decision until you learn more. How can you learn more? Glad you asked. The Nonprofit CRM Summit has a free session for you on nonprofit system administrators as leaders which you can get right here. 

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Top Ten Takeaways from TrailheaDX

6/7/2016

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TrailheaDX this morning was awesome! It was a great way to get some Dreamforce-type energy and see some of my favorite Salesforce superstars in a Trailhead-themed environment. Here are my top ten takeaways from the keynote:

  1. Trailhead First: If you have yet to earn your first Salesforce badge, now is the time to start. From the name of the conference to the promotional videos to the developers and administrators Salesforce chose to highlight, Trailhead was central to everything at #TrailheaDX.
  2. More Trailhead: Super badges are super awesome. As Samantha Ready announced, super badges will now allow trailblazers to showcase their expertise at solving real-world scenarios. Check them out now… on Trailhead! Keep in mind this is in addition to the new badges being added all the time - check out the new Summer ‘16 Release, API Basics, and Search Solution Basics to name just a few of the most recently added things to learn!
  3. Values are Core: Diversity in technology is celebrated at Salesforce, with representation on the main stage from two incredible organizations, Code 2040 and GDI (Girl Develop It), in addition to local favorite Stride Center (looking for Salesforce volunteers!). Be sure to check out the web sites of these organizations and follow them on social media to learn more.
  4. AI is not Sci Fi: With a hands free demonstration of Amazon’s Alexa technology with ‘sentiment’ and logged in Salesforce, we’re now living in the future. I’m glad there are organizations like http://pacscenter.stanford.edu/digital-civil-society/ to think about the implications of intelligence technology in action.
  5. Salesforce Developer = job: There’s no question that Salesforce wants to recruit more people, worldwide, to be Salesforce Developers. Statistics were cited that there are 2.8 million Salesforce Developers currently and there will be 1 million developer jobs by 2018 (IDC was cited).
  6. We are all Salesforce Developers! I loved the slide showing the range of options for developing on the Salesforce platform, showing that there are solutions ranging from no code to low code to custom code. Parker Harris highlighted that Lightning will mean less code is required. Lightning Components are super exciting.
  7. We all need to know how to Develop! Ok, not really, but Salesforce Administrators, Business Analysts, and Developers all need to get along to solve our organizations’ problems, right? The best example of this was when Sarah Franklin demonstrated (with the awesome LeeAnne’s help) that Process Builder can be boosted by Apex code, and even get a jolt from the internet of things’ Thunder. My takeaway: Admins and Analysts need to know the capabilities of code so we can work effectively with developers.
  8. Process Builder is HUGE! If I heard correctly, 100 BILLION processes have been processed using process builder in the last year. Yeah, I just checked here https://admin.salesforce.com/salesforce-lightning-process-builder-hits-100-billion-transaction-milestone, and it’s true. Good thing #AdminHour on Thursday, June 16, 2016 at 11:00am PT/2:00pm ET on Twitter and Periscope is on Process Builder for Beginners! Join us!
  9. Demos are awesome! Check out Shawna's great Zillow demo with Lightning Components and more!
  10. Promotional videos are glamorous and fun! Fun fact: it was super exciting to be sitting next to Adam and getting to yell really loud whenever he was the featured Trailblazer in this video. Go Adam!

Love learning? Want to learn even more Salesforce? Follow the Longshore Consulting blog, subscribe for news updates, and follow the #NPOCRM hashtag to hear all about the Nonprofit CRM Summit, coming August 1-12, 2016. It's for nonprofit executive, program, development, and technology staff to learn best practices, successful strategies, and hands on tools to succeed with Salesforce - and it's free! 

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Adoption: For Real for Real at #AdminHour #3

5/6/2016

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2016 Nonprofit CRM Survey Results are Here! #NPOCRM

5/2/2016

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That's right, the results of the 2016 Nonprofit CRM Survey -- #NPOCRM -- which was created, conducted, and analyzed (with love) by Longshore Consulting, are ready!

In March and April of 2016, nonprofits from across the country, of all sizes, answered a series of questions about their current use of Salesforce. Questions asked about overall satisfaction, ease of use compared to 12 months ago, happiness with 11 different Salesforce products and services, and open-ended feedback opportunities.

One of the biggest takeaways from the survey is that nonprofits are currently not focused on implementing Salesforce Lightning and upgrading to the Nonprofit Starter Pack v 3.0. To find out what the biggest concerns and priorities are for nonprofits, be sure to download the full survey results.

HINT: One of the top three worries nonprofits have is ‘removing dirty data from our Salesforce instance/deduplication.’ To solve that issue for you, Longshore Consulting created Clean Your Instance: a 7 Day CRM Challenge for Nonprofits. It’s completely free, and you’ll learn how to prevent duplicates and how to easily monitor and prevent dirty data, in just 5 minutes a day with step by step videos.
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Another surprise is that most nonprofits either have multiple Salesforce administrators or do not have a trained Salesforce administrator at all. Not many have been to paid Salesforce training, like ADM 201, and the feedback on it was not overwhelmingly positive. This is a bummer because the survey results also indicate that the organizations with a trained administrator are more satisfied with Salesforce on all 3 indicators of overall satisfaction, including whether it makes Salesforce easier to do their job.

To find out the Salesforce products and services that nonprofits ranked highest (and lowest), get the full report.

Please check out the results and comment below or on social media using #NPOCRM to let me know what you think (what surprised you? what will you do differently?), and also please tell me if you'd be interested in attending a free webinar to go into more detail on the results.

Thank you again to the 159 nonprofits who Salesforce responded (100 results were 100% complete), your feedback is invaluable!
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