Assistance Dogs Australia

One of the areas of the system they’ve been making good use of is Lead conversion. Leads let them upload lists of potential donors they can market to without mixing them in with their existing donors. When a Lead responds to an appeal or makes a donation ADA are able to convert that Lead into a Contact record where all their main donors and other supporters sit in quick time.

supporter360 has built on the standard Salesforce Lead-conversion process to do a lot more including:

• No need to worry about a Company name
• Auto-creation of Quick Opportunity to process donations with minimal clicks
• If linked to a configured Campaign record, fund information is automatically pulled across
• Enhanced de-dupe facility allows to pop up a list to of potential dupes to select from

If you have supporter360 and aren’t making use of Leads, here are some of the steps to get you started:

1) You can upload a simple spreadsheet of Leads into Salesforce & supporter360 in many ways – there’s even a specific Lead Import wizard you can get to by clicking on the Leads tab circled in the image below

2) First click convert on the Lead to bring up the conversion window where you can set the various options3) In the event your Lead already exists as a Contact record, supporter360 gives you the option to review those potential dupes and open them up in a new browsers tab if you need to investigate further.

4) Once you’re happy you’ve got the right person or the Lead is indeed a new one, just click Convert and if there’s a donation to process and you ticked the ‘Quick Opportunity’ box you will get dropped into a fully-populated window ready to process your donation – all linked to the right Campaign source and fund.

Note: If you’re using supporter360 and can’t see all of the above options in the Lead conversion process you need to make sure you are on version 1.594

Followers of this blog may (hopefully!) have noticed it’s been a bit quiet the last few months…for good reason! We’ve been super-busy putting every ounce of energy into bringing supporter360 up as many levels as we could and to fill some of the gaps we wanted to fill. So what’s new?

Here’s a selection…

• Our Segment Builder which lets you select the contacts you want on a range of criteria – giving history, campaign history, regular giving status and history, relationships to organisations, funds given to etc etc
• Regular Giving 2.0 which is a massive leap forward in our regular giving engine – we’ve added facilities to process multiple funds, track upgrades, failures and much more!
• RUOLFI – our unique Reasonably Universal Online
  Fundraising Integration which has been designed to get your contact, transaction, relationship and campaign data from pretty much any online fundraising platform and into your CRM where so you can get maximum value from it
• Much more including improved donation / payment pages, payment gateway integrations with eWay (including Transparent Redirect on donation processing) and IATS, batch Opportunity processing, new enhanced relationship management, enhanced Lead conversion, enhanced giving history:

And some great things coming down the track that we’ll be rolling out over the next 6 months.

So after keeping our heads down for most of 2012 we’ll be back in our normal mode this year – we think we’ve got something to make a noise about and really do have a genuine contender as the donor and supporter management system of choice for the sector.

If you want to know more check out http://www.supporter360.net, register your details and we’ll be in touch.

Blackbaud took the decision to ‘retire’ Common Ground in favour of Raiser’s Edge and eTapestry (a system they bought some time back and some would argue mothballed to stop it eating into the main business of Raiser’s Edge).

Was it a surprise? Possibly…some people thought Luminate would go first due to the smaller number of customers but maybe they were the biggest customers that they didn’t really want to upset. By doing this Blackbaud know that all of those Luminate customers will now make their own exit over time and find other solutions to work with – obviously Salesforce is not somewhere Blackbaud want to be. That’s probably more appealing than giving them all their marching orders as well.

Like the other companies that have built solutions on the Salesforce platform aimed at the not-for-profit sector we’re obviously here with open arms. From a supporter360 perspective the timing couldn’t be better as we’re just starting to make major inroads into some of the biggest not-for-profit names on the planet. Hopefully we can offer a good alternative home and one that is about to get a major facelift with a new managed package that’s been designed to specifically with the larger environments in mind.

Want to know more? Have a look at http://www.supporter360.net 

The integration allows you to pull all of your online fundraising data straight into supporter360, including:

• Fundraisers and donors / sponsors cleaned and polished on the way in with duplicates checked
• Campaign hierarchies created automatically and pointed at the right funds in supporter360
• Relationships between sponsors and fundraisers created
• Soft-credits applied to fundraisers for the donations received
• Much more!

If you want to find out more we’ve got a webinar with GoFundraise on the 2nd of August – find out more about the integration and a link to the webinar sign up here.

Introducing http://supporter360.wordpress.com/ – have a read to find out some of the cool things we’re working on at the moment…and make sure you sign up for updates, there’s loads more to come.

If you’re attending Cloudforce in London I hope you made it along to the session being presented by the Salesforce Foundation and JustGiving.

They’re launching the integration we’ve built between the two systems’ APIs to allow users of either system to benefit from the great technology they both offer.

Right now we’re looking for some organisations to help us test out the connection further – we’ve been running now with real customers in the UK for the last month or two and the feedback is great.

If you want to participate or find out more visit our dedicated pages here.

PS – here’s a pic of the launch, Joseph from Salesforce and Jamie from JustGiving

As we’ve known since we stumbled over Salesforce in 2009 (OK, it was a bit big to stumble over back then even, crashed into maybe!) the benefits of the newer technologies are so far ahead of ‘traditional’ business IT delivery it’s pretty hard for anyone to cling on for too long to reasons why not to use it.

Have a read, if you’re still wondering whether or not to move into the new world hopefully this will help.

http://delimiter.com.au/2012/05/14/nsw-agencies-push-very-hard-for-saas-rollouts/

There are numerous government agencies, financial institutions and health providers in Australia storing customer information with Salesforce who have validated we enable them to comply with privacy legislation relevant to their industries.

– Trust is salesforce.com’s number one value as a company, and privacy and security are integral to the company’s trust mission.

– Salesforce.com complies with applicable Australian privacy laws in providing the salesforce.com services to customers, including:

• The Privacy Act, including:
  • The National Privacy Principles
  • The Information Privacy Principles
• APRA guidance on outsourcing and off-shoring

– Salesforce.com’s privacy certifications include:

• EU/U.S. Safe Harbor
• TRUSTe Privacy Seal + Safe Harbor Seal
• TUV German privacy certification
• Japanese privacy certification

– Salesforce.com’s security audits and certifications include:

• IS0 27001
• SAS 70 Type II/SSAE 16

– Salesforce.com assists customers’ efforts to comply with requirements they’ve determined to be applicable to their use of the salesforce.com services by offering a robust set of customer-controlled privacy and security features that can be implemented.

– There are additional resources available to customers: Security Implementation Guide, Trust website.

Really enjoyed Connecting Up Australia 12, some great conversations and a fantastic international line-up. Was good to catch up with Terry Stokes from LASA, an organisation we’ve worked closely with in the UK for the best part of a decade. Also great to hear Gunner’s keynote this morning, couldn’t agree more with pretty much everything he had to say about the cloud. Was also relieved to hear the positive words about the Salesforce platform, something we’ve bet our organisation on for the huge benefits we think it can bring to the sector.

So what was the big take-away this year?

The last couple of years have been very much focused on social media and its impact on the sector. For sure it is and will continue to be a massive part of the modern world and something every organisation has to get to grips with – never before has there been such an amazing opportunity to engage directly with supporters wherever they may be.

At the same time there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on in the technology world – not unconnected, nothing is unconnected these days – but it’s broader in its direct impact for organisations. It was great to see this year that the discussion has broadened out and there’s much more emphasis on the whole technology picture. The talk was very much of how organisations can benefit from the new technologies of every description – cloud, social, web, mobile etc. And just as importantly, what to worry about in the process.

Without doubt each year it becomes more and more exciting to be involved in technology and the not-for-profit sector. It has moved from a backend processing function to being absolutely key to every organisation’s success (or otherwise).

Looking forward to #CU13! See you there..

So why weren’t organisations fundraising from Salesforce? The technology platform was clearly miles ahead of anything else so why not? Two main reasons (imho) – the standard data model with each contact being in an account is great for B2B but not so great when you’re talking to 1000s of individuals who may or may not be linked to any company.

The second is transaction processing – Salesforce was designed with relationships in mind, not taking in large numbers of transactions in, tracking where they came from and where they’re going.

So that was where supporter360 was focused – how can we make it so users would feel like Salesforce was built with the not-for-profit sector and fundraising in mind and remove those two stumbling blocks? The first problem was the hardest to overcome – the data model is at the heart of Salesforce and we needed to find a way that didn’t break Salesforce (and therefore access to all of the applications on the AppExchange + all the future updates) but allowed a person to exist in the system without the need for an account.

There are lots of work-arounds out there but most of them involve massive compromise. We think our solution is the perfect model and actually enhances the standard Salesforce data model quite significantly. I was in a demo yesterday and the fundraising director – who had worked with Salesforce before – said ‘Oh, great – that was the very problem that I was going to raise but you’ve solved it!’

We’ve kept pretty quiet about this element of supporter360 so far but we think it will be the secret weapon that makes all the difference. The user experience is much more logical and clean.

The next part was the transactional side of the system. If you’re fundraising you need to be able to take money in whatever way it’s offered to you (legitimate sources only of course!) – people might have all sorts of stipulations such as the funds money needs to be allocated to or when they might give you the money. You can’t say ‘No, sorry we can’t take your money as that’s too complex for us’ – you need to say thanks and have a system that handles the complexity with ease.

So we built a system that allows for pretty much any type of transaction – split gifts as many ways as you need; pay all or part pay; pay in regular chunks or irregular chunks.

My job’s now a bit too easy – the things that Salesforce keep rolling into the platform (we’re currently having great fun solving problems all over the place with Visual Workflows) on top of the perfect data model and powerful transaction processing plus all of the other things we’re building into the system are making showing people the system great fun!

And we’re only really getting started, that’s the really exciting bit. Now the nuts and bolts are tightened up to the right level we can work more and more on the exciting bits to help organisations get their message across and bring in the money as inexpensively as possible. Keep posted

If you want to know more check http://www.supporter360.net