February 2011 Salesforce User Group Meeting

It’s February and whether you have a valentine or not, we know you’ll have a great time at this month’s Salesforce User Group meeting. It will be held on February 16, 2011 from 8am-10am and we’d love to see you there! If you want the chance to collaborate, network, and share ideas with other salesforce users who are right here in the Atlanta area, then be sure to attend this Salesforce User Group meeting! It will be at Hub Atlanta which is at 1375 Spring St. (address and parking info). Catering (coffee, breakfast yummies) will be provided by Cafe Campesino Atlanta.  Please RSVP here

Monthly Agenda

• 8-8:30am: Networking and breakfast (coffee, bagels, breakfast burritos, pastries)
• 8:30-8:45am: Announcements
• 8:45-9:15am: Salesforce Demo: Skoodat (B Corporation)
  Zach McElrath, Skoodat Developer, will show you how this B Corporation uses Salesforce’s Service Cloud and Collaboration Cloud! You’ll get a sense of how to use cases for client support and internal task tracking, as well as how a distributed team uses Chatter to make collaboration effective.
• 9:15-9:45am: Salesforce Training: Spring ’11 Overview
  Spring ’11 is rolling out now! Get a glimpse at the cool new features now available in this presentation.
• 9:45-10:00am: Networking and planning for future meetings

Logistics

Hub Atlanta is based at the junction of Midtown and Buckhead and a short distance from some of Atlanta’s most exciting sustainable projects. We are easily accessible at the intersection of Spring St. and 17th St., just south of the I-85/I-75 interchange. By public transit we are one block north of the Art Station Marta train stop.

Limited parking is available at The Hub. You can also part across the street at The Atlanta Ballet (lots of available parking).

Address: Hub Atlanta, 1375 Spring St., Atlanta, GA 30309

If you have any questions about this Salesforce User Group meeting, you can contact Christopher at cjj@ifpeople.net. We look forward to seeing you there!

Please RSVP here.

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Volunteer Recruitment and Social Media

Volunteers are crucial to a nonprofit organization’s sustainability.  You may have existing tools attract, and retain talented people who are willing to contribute to your cause, but now you can consider how social media can be part of the mix. Since internet users are more likely to volunteer it’s good to figure out how to use social media to engage people in your nonprofit’s volunteer efforts.

The three core functions of a successful volunteer program can be broken down to Recruitment, Retention, and Recognition. Each of these can be powered and accelerated with the strategic use of social media. This blog will discuss how this can be used for recruitment.

Recruitment

The first step in a successful volunteer program for your organization is attracting people to help out. In the hunt for volunteers, you can use social media to get some traction in your efforts :

• Leverage Your Existing Social Media Network: In your volunteer recruitment efforts, if you are placing a generic posting on a nonprofit job board, chances are some of the people who see your ad may like your organization or be keyed into your cause, others may not. If you are already engaged in social media, your existing tools are the first place to start. You have already established a connection and presence with people who care enough about your cause to follow you in some way. Your messages to your twitter followers or facebook fans have by default become more targeted because they are people who are already interested in what your organization represents. Design campaigns that go out to your existing networks.
• Make It Shareable: Social Media is called “social” for a reason. Increase your chances of being mentioned through word of mouth in the by giving people who sign up easy ways of sharing your organization’s project with their friends.

-Facebook- Get a more tech savvy staff member to use facebook integrations so when users sign up to volunteer with you, they have an option to share that message with their friends.

-Twitter- Create a hashtag for your event and use it for tweets related to the volunteer project. Then use Twitter’s Widget Tool to create a badge that shows all the tweets about the event based on the event.It will give people the impression that there’s a buzz about it and also give users a way to signal to each other that they are participating in the same event.

• Connect with Influencers: To widen the scope of your influence after getting the word out in your own circles, start engaging individuals with high leverage points in your target audiences. By getting buy-in from people who have wide audiences, your volunteer opportunities will not only be exposed to a larger number of relevant people, but will likely come from someone who is trusted in the community you are trying to reach.

Case Study: Volunteer 4 Long Island

This is a great example of an organization that used some of the above strategies for a successful volunteer recruitment campaign. They started by optimizing their existing social media vehicles and corrected the error in the site. After taking stock of what they had in place already, they chose to expand their reach by tapping into the specific network of Long Island Tweetups. They messaged specific twitter influencers in the group to get them on board with Volunteer 4 Long Island’s project. This lead to retweets, facebook messages, and several more volunteers signing up.

If you’d like to learn more strategies and read more case studies for how social media can be used to boost your nonprofit’s volunteer efforts, then be sure to sign up for the webinar on the topic in a few weeks.

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January Salesforce User Group Meeting and Sprint!

ifPeople is bringing in the new year with new ways technology can empower our local nonprofits!  We are organizing another Salesforce Nonprofit User Group meeting, which is on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 from 8am-10am and we’d love to see you there! If you want to the chance to collaborate, network, and share ideas with other salesforce users who are right here in the Atlanta area, then be sure to attend this Salesforce User Group meeting which will be held at The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta (address and parking info). Catering (coffee, breakfast yummies) will be provided by Cafe Campesino Atlanta.  Please RSVP here

The agenda is as follows:

8:00am-8:30am – Coffee and Networking

8:30am-8:45am – Announcements

8:45-9:15am – Dreamforce Panel

To highlight the excitement from December’s Dreamforce event, we will have a panel of highlights from participants at Dreamforce. The format will be “lightning talks” – 3 minute from each of several participants highlighting their favorite take-aways. If you attended Dreamforce and would like to share your highlights, please let us know (comment below or email us).

9:15-9:45am – Integrating Websites with Salesforce

The Atlanta User Group co-leader and ifPeople co-founder, Christopher Johnson, will demonstrate how the Open Source Content Management System Plone can be used to integrate a website with Salesforce in minutes! If you’re interested to get a sneak peak at the tools, see here and this webinar, and please join us for the followup hands on session when we put the knowledge into action (Sprint on Jan 24, event info here)!

9:45-10am: Q & A

We’ll discuss potential topics and presenters for future meetings.

If you have any questions about this Salesforce User Group meeting, you can contact Christopher at cjj@ifpeople.net. We look forward to seeing you there!

Please RSVP here.

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Salesforce Nonprofit Atlanta User Group Meeting on November 18

If you want to the chance to collaborate, network, and share ideas with other salesforce users who are right here in the Atlanta area, then be sure to attend Atlanta’s next Salesforce User Group meeting Thursday, November 18, 2010 from 8-10am. The meeting will be held at The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. Catering (coffee, breakfast yummies) will be provided by Cafe Campesino Atlanta.  Please RSVP here

The agenda is as follows:

8:00am-8:30am – Coffee and Networking

8:30am-9:00am- Salesforce in Action at a Nonprofit

Jo Ann Lewis, Director, SalesForce.com Administration & Adoption, Points of Light Institute.  This session is a review of how Points of Light uses Saleforce.com to bill and track Affiliate Membership Due. Find out how to utilize SalesForce.com to keep track of you affiliates and subscriptions! Jo Ann has worked with SalesForce.com for many years.  She is a certified admin with a focus on process design & business analysis.  She joined Points of Light Institute in September after spending the majority of her career in the For-Profit world.

9:00-9:30am – Salesforce Reports Mini-Training

Mike Melnick, Principal, AskTwice presents on Getting Your Data Into Salesforce. Migrating a company’s datastores can be one of the most compelling ways to build user acceptance to a new system and one of the more valuable assets in running your business.  We will be discussing various methods for importing both system and user level data into Salesforce.com including data cleansing, importing into system objects, custom objects, and designing data exports to best fit your Salesforce implementation. Mike Melnick has over 30 years experience in system analysis and database design and in the past 15 years has been managing enterprise wide implementations on three continents and in 15 countries.  Currently he is the principal at AskTwice, a consulting firm offering expertise managing projects in Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence, and Healthcare IT.

9:30-10am: Q & A

We’ll discuss potential topics and presenters for future meetings.

If you have any questions about this Salesforce User Group meeting, you can contact Christopher at cjj at ifpeople.net. We look forward to seeing you there!

Please RSVP here.

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Atlanta Nonprofit Salesforce User Group October Meeting Details

If you want to the chance to collaborate, network, and share ideas with other salesforce users who are right here in the Atlanta area, then be sure to attend Atlanta’s next Salesforce User Group meeting next Tuesday on October 12, 2010 from 8-10am. The meeting will be held at The Foundation Center for Greater Atlanta. Catering (coffee, snacks) will be provided by Cafe Campesino Atlanta. Please RSVP here

The agenda is as follows:

8:00am-8:30am – Coffee and Networking

8:30am-9:00am- Salesforce in Action at a Nonprofit

Anita Stinett, Director of Partnerships for the organization Heart For Africa.  Anita will conduct a demo that shows how her organization customized Salesforce to manage volunteers and donations abroad.

9:00-9:30am – Salesforce Reports Mini-Training

Marty Maxwell, Project Director at ifPeople, will give a brief training on how to use reports, one of the most powerful features in Salesforce.

9:30-10am: Q & A

We’ll discuss potential topics and presenters for future meetings.

If you have any questions about this Salesforce User Group meeting, you can contact Christopher at cjj at ifpeople.net. We look forward to seeing you there!

Please RSVP for this meeting here.

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October Salesforce User Group

ifPeople continues to carry the banner of bringing outstanding technology to Nonprofits! Helping our local nonprofits, we are organizing the Salesforce Nonprofit User Group, which has its next meeting on October 12, 2010 from 8am-10am and we’d love to see you there!

It will give Atlanta’s community of salesforce users a chance to meet and learn from one another. The meeting will feature two presentations that highlight how salesforce is being used to improve their business processes. One will be by a local nonprofit who shows their actual usage and the other will be a learning session (tentative topic: reports and dashboards). There will also be a Q&A, and some food and coffee for networking from a local, fair trade company.

If you’re interested in learning best practices from fellow salesforce users in the area, be sure to make it out to the meeting this month! Register Here

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Thank you for your support!

We’re so grateful for all the help from our supporters in our recent YouTopia proposal to create a community of practice around using web technology effectively in social enterprises and nonprofits. We didn’t make the final 20 to win the free branding help, but even so, we will keep up our work to make technology more accessible to more organizations working to make the world a better place.

Overall, we came in 8th place in the socially responsible business category.We’re really pleased to have gotten so much support and interest in the idea (despite having done no prior promotion or awareness!). This was our first announcement of our plans to work on a community of practice around using web technologies effectively. While the idea is still fairly loose and in formation, we’ll be working more on it in the near future (hopefully with the help of Free Range Studios!).

I’d also like to acknowledge our clients who made a great run at it too:

• KFTC’s The True Cost of Coal got 1,136 votes from 413 people and finished 2nd in their category (check out this great org)
• Climate Interactive’s Interactive Climate Dashboard got 373 votes from 137 people (check out this great org)

We’d love to give a shout out to our friends at Indigenous Designs (a fellow B Corporation), who were selected for the final round in the responsible business category! Check out their Mindful Purchase for People and Planet proposal. Good luck in the final round!

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Can you take 3 Minutes to build the social change movement?

ifPeople is honored to be a nominee for the YouTopia grant of $15,000 of branding services from Free Range Studios. To win this, we need your vote! Can you please take 3 minutes to register on the website and vote for our “Collaboration for Social Innovation” idea?

Our idea is to build a community of social innovators leveraging web technology to increase their impact. This community, which is already forming based on the work of our clients and our partners, will share lessons, exchange ideas, and collaborate. This community would include other partners and their clients who share the desire to build strategic and technology capacity in the sector.

We’re asking for your help in making this nascent community grow and thrive by supporting our YouTopia proposal! Why do we want to do this? Technology is a big challenge for most social enterprises, yet it’s also necessary for magnifying their impact.We use Plone and Salesforce.com to radically increase our clients capacity for communication, engagement and action. We believe this network will improve collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst organizations using similar tools and facing similar challenges.

Better Tech skills = Bigger Impact = A Better World

Voting is easy. You just need to create an account on the UserVoice website and then you can distribute 3 votes in the “Socially Responsible Business” category (you can give all three to one or distribute them). Vote for ifPeople here.

Please let us know any questions about the proposal in the comments. Thanks for your support!

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Large User-Generated Content Collections: A Blessing or Curse?

Every week new sites pop up that are built on user-generated content. These “Web 2.0” sites encourage people to become users on the site and then share all they got. Other users can then comment, rate, and connect. Fairly basic scenario that has been repeated in everything from photographers to graphic designers and knitters!

While the site owners are always pleased to see the explosive growth in content (and usually clicks ==> ad revenue) that can come with a growing user base, the result in the content isn’t always beneficial for users. Here’s a simple example to illustrate what I’m talking about, should take about 5 minutes for you to complete (unless you get very distracted on step 2!).

First, check out this clip from NPR from this past week on the Do-it-yourself user community site instructables.com Click here to listen to the story.

—

Hear something intriguing? Hopefully! Now head over to the website they were talking about and pursue whatever that interesting nugget you heard about was at instructables.com .

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What happened?

If you’re like me, you got totally overwhelmed by a massive quantity of content and quickly got lost in some not-so-good stuff. For example, I saw laptop stand on the front and thought – good idea, beats the random object propped under by laptop this evening – what can I do? My first click gave my 15 different howtos on laptop stands and pretty soon I saw there were actually over 50 on the site! Those 15 were just the featured ones…and even using metadata on the faceted browsing (not a bad interface), I wasn’t able to get it down to just “give me the good stuff”. I went from pursuing something that I thought could be useful to quickly realizing I was going to spend more time sorting through what was useless (for me) and what could be useful than it was worth. I need a distilled version, a search that reads my mind, or just less options.

This is a challenge for content-rich sites that are populated by user-generated content. It’s great to have a forum for getting this information out – what amazing creativity and enthusiasm the users have for the site! But it puts a high burden on site owners to provide proper tools to experience the site in a way that doesn’t make it useless.

What sites have you tried to use that have dealt with this well? What have done it poorly?

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Plone Makes Sharing Feedback Easier

Voice your opinions at Plone's User Feedback Forum.

One of the reasons we use Plone CMS is for its strong community of open source developers. Its members are always quick to answer questions and share their latest Plone innovations.

Recently, Plone made this community even stronger by creating a feedback system that allows users to discuss, suggest, and ultimately vote on ways Plone can be improved. Developers work on high demand improvements, and collaborate with the Plone Framework Development Team to establish a release date.

Right now, the top improvement suggestion is to increase the operating speed of Plone 3. There are a lot of great suggestions in there – have a voice by voting now!

Check out Plone’s feedback forum here.

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