Two things in my life (well, at least two) were in need of serious overhaul – my ageing phone, and this website’s former design.

Well, tonight I ordered a Samsung Galaxy S from Amazon to replace my iPhone – the very first iPhone model available, 3 years old with a cracked screen. It was OK back in the day, but 2G on Orange is a disaster – sometimes a minute or two to load a map. I’m looking forward to 3g speeds, and the freedom of the Android app store (though I hope Salesforce hurries up with their Salesforce-Android app).

And, also tonight, my redesigned website went live. I’m still using WordPress, but have said goodbye to the trusty Atuahulpa design I began with, and have moved on to the uber-professional Sansation design.

And, in a fit of professionalism, I’ve started using the Hub Kings Cross for hot-desking, and so far am liking it. What next!

I’m setting up funnels for a charity to help them see how people sign up for free resources, and most importantly, how and where people abandon the process. Goals tell you how many visitors do a certain thing, but funnels tell you if they stopped heading towards that certain thing.

Only I hit a bug in Google Analytics! Once you reduce the steps in the funnel by one, a blank step is left in your funnel, messing up your funnel. I couldn’t seem to fix it, so I moved it to the last position, Goal #20, planning to ignore it forever and create a new one, and suddenly it was fixed! That’s the trick – if you have a funnel with a blank step, move the goal from one position to another, and voila it’s fixed. You can always move it back to the original position after.

Civil Society IT has conducted their annual survey on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems used by charities, and the clear winner was Salesforce. You can buy the report from Civil Society IT, but here are the key stats for 2010.

Usage is dominated by Raiser’s Edge and Microsoft Products such as Access, Excel or Outlook – those combined makeup 39% of what respondents use. People who use Raiser’s Edge would recommend it to others 71% of the time, while the Microsoft solutions fare worse, at around 50% of the people recommending it.

Salesforce has a tiny slice of the market share – only 3% of respondents use it. But, 100% of the Salesforce respondents would recommend it to other charities, and respondents gave it higher marks than any other solution/vendor in the following categories: Technical Support, Commitment to Charity Sector, Functionality, Cost, and Integration with other Systems. Wow!

While the immediate attraction for many is its price, which is free for organisations with under 10 users, Salesforce has recently won several large contracts, according to the report, “including Business in the Community, which has an annual income of £21.4m, and Teach First, which has annual income of £4.5m.”

If you’d like to see if Salesforce is for you, or find out more information, please Contact Us and we’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have.

I just had a wonderful Saturday session with a group of architects committed to improving the world through architecture. I wouldn’t have normally put the two together, but if you think about construction in earthquake zones, or refugee camp housing, or really anywhere where you care about buildings not falling down (a pretty broad category) then architects come in handy.

They had been frustrated by ineffective email with limited storage space and a poor webmail interface, unwieldy document storage and collaboration, lack of shared calendars, and a website that was difficult to update.  Enter Google Apps. Now, all the problems are solved, and they will probably save money in the process, all while being able to do so much more, and so much more reliably (say goodbye to losing your email when you lose your laptop). We were able to train all users in a single workshop on Saturday, and several of their more advanced users are now administrator, making them entirely self-sufficient.

ASF is a great organisation, more info on them at their website, www.asf-uk.org.

Update

With Google Apps, you can place your signatures in the correct place by going to Labs and enabling Signature Tweaks – your signature is now below your message but above the quoted text. Still no rich text, but Blank Canvas has enough downsides when working with Salesforce to make it’s use problematic.

Original Post below

We all like a professional signature and the bottom of our email, but unfortunately Google Apps has only the most basic text signatures for their email. Worse, Google Apps positions the signature at the bottom or your whole message (after the quoted text) rather than where you want it, at the end of the message you are writing (and before the quoted text). Luckily, a few other people have expanded what you can do to your signature through browser plugins.

My favorite is for Chrome and Firefox, called Blank Canvas. It allows images, rich HTML, and it puts your signature exactly where you want it. You can even have multiple signatures, and select among them easily. Breaking slightly with the cloud-computing paradigm, this has to be installed and setup on each computer you use, but is still a breeze.

The one hiccup I have is that when starting a Gmail email from within Salesforce, and clicking on the handy Gmail link in salesforce, the new email doesn’t include a signature. This has more to do with Salesforce, I believe, than the Blank Canvas plugin.

[Update, as of 27 May 2010 - ExactTarget have apparently increased the discount given to charities from 20% to 50%!]

We had our Salesforce Not for Profit User Group meeting earlier this week, and had a great presentation by Craig Stimpson and his colleague from ExactTarget. We also tried to hear from Vertical Response, but they were not able to provide us with either an employee or even a partner – presumably because they are US based, so I presented a few key details about them.

There are some significant differences between the two, and if you want the short short version, Vertical Response is free to charities that send 10,000 emails a month or less, but lacks many of the features of ExactTarget, which costs about £2250 anualy for 10k emails a month but offers a lot more.

Installation: Vertical Response has a weird error message with poorly coded HTML once you install it. Follow these steps here, which is what the error message should have pointed to.

Support: Vertical Response is based in San Francisco, so UK customers have to wait to 6 am PST, or 2 pm UK time to speak to an agent or receive a response to an email inquiry. ExactTarget is UK based, so on UK hours.

Price: Vertical Response offers non-profits 10k free emails a month. After that, the next 10k are £65, or if you need volume, the next 100k are £450. With VR, you also pay as you go. Fairly straightforward.

With ExactTarget, you pay for the System (there are core, advanced packages and enterprise packages) as well as paying for Emails, and you might decide to include a support package your first year. Additionally, you must have an annual contract, and any pre-purchased emails that you don’t use are not rolled over to the next year. Charities receive, at a minimum, a 20% discount off retail pricing, and should request (even haggle?) for a greater discount. For our demo, the tools we were shown would have required, at a minimum, about £4,000 annually. Whether that brings in added sales or donations to make it worthwhile is something that only you can determine.

Education: Both companies provide a wide range of video tutorials on using their product. I haven’t used much of either, but both look positive.

I’m going to be implementing them both in the next few months, and will add to this post as I go along.

Tuesday, March 2nd saw my first time co-hosting the Salesforce NFP Usergroup with Tom Clayton of www.raisingit.com. Ciaran Rogers has been running it for the last 18 months and doing a great job, so we felt we had big shoes to fill.

The usergroup provides a place that both active and prospective users of Salesforce.com can come together, share tips, solve challenges, network, and see what tools are available. Staff, volunteers and trustees of not-for-profits and social enterprises alike find it incredibly useful. It’s indirectly sponsored by Salesforce, but run by the volunteer hosts.

This last meeting was great, with over 30 attendees. We had a half-hour networking sessions at the beginning while eating a few sandwiches, and a few more chances to network during tea breaks. We also had two presentations, one by Matt Morris and one by Clyde Williams, and a few users spoke about challenges they were having and the group tried to solve them.

I think the user challenges were a great part, because not only was the solution solved instantly, and of course everyone else learned how to solve it, but the best bit was that everyone also saw how to approach challenges and how to problem-solve within the framework of Salesforce.com.

Our next meetup is Tuesday April 6th from 1-4 pm. We’re trying the new time because a few people mentioned that leaving during the peak of rush hour was brutal, and that made a lot of sense!

If you’d like to sign up, please do so in two places:

• On the lower right of this salesforce.com page, selecting the User Group as “Nonprofits UK”
• Join our LinkedIn group, used for discussions and announcements

You may not receive a message for a few weeks, but you will receive further details about the meeting including location, theme, agenda, and speakers, as well as a link to RSVP.

We look forward to seeing you!

–Update, June 26th, 2010–

I had the chance to chat with Tony Pickering of FinancialForce at the regular London SF UG, and came away impressed with Tony’s grasp of the market and of Tony himself.

My frustration at FinancialForce’s decision to not give away their product to charities that otherwise couldn’t afford it was based on the fact that (aside from allusions from their CEO suggesting they would) additional users would cost FinancialForce close to nothing – a few pennies of server time each month. FF’s up-front costs might be huge, but their marginal costs for a few users is minimal. Well, according to Tony that’s true and not true. Tony said the problem was the support costs. Their organisation simply didn’t have the resources to provide support to charities for free.

OK, I said, offer a limited package with a few licenses and no support, with the option of paying for support, say 10 hours for a grand.. A perfect up-sell, I thought.

The challenge with that approach, according to Tony, was that FinancialForce was not like other packages.

It has legal, tax, and business implications. Compare it to Salesforce or any CRM which only has business implications. For example, if you mess up your CRM  you don’t mess up your bookkeeping, and HMCR agents with little sense of humor don’t start asking questions. If you botch your accounting package, those are risks. Furthermore, if a charity was too small or cost-averse to pay for the full price of FinancialForce, they would probably skimp on implementation, and risk not setting it up properly – increasing the risks.

Theoretically, after small charities with no means or experience tested FinancialForce and/or used it for free, and gave it bad ratings because they didn’t have the experience or expertise to implement it properly, FinancialForce’s rating and reputation on the App Exchange would be mud. All for the sake of attracting a few hundred charities that would rarely become paying customers, FinancialForce would have shot itself in the foot, and scared away the larger players who actually were prospective customers interested in hundreds of licenses.

So, at this moment FinancialForce sees small charities not as an opportunity to get their name out there, but as potential legal liabilities and most likely to give them a poor rating on the app exchange. Personally, I think these are reasonable and material concerns, and I don’t think I would want those risks without a well defined compensation for that risk.

So, the way I see it, they aren’t going to offer the product for free to small charities until they can mitigate the support costs and protect their reputation and legal liability. The question then becomes, how do we fulfil FinaicialForce’s business needs while helping the charities that would benefit massively from this product? Ideas are welcome, go ahead and post a comment!

–End of Update. The original post is below–

I spent a decent amount of time last week evaluating and using Financial Force, which is an Accounting System deeply integrated with Salesforce.com. The lack of accounting in Salesforce has been an issue, keeping it at the CRM level and preventing it from moving to a company wide system, if not full-fledged ERP.

I found that while FinancialForce still had a few wrinkles to iron out, it is exactly what I need in an accounting system and integrates beautifully with Salesforce data. So I was very happy to get a call from a sales agent at Financial Force telling me that they had finally determined the pricing structure for charities using Financial Force.

But first, some perspective. You can’t use Financial Force without using Salesforce.com, and charities pay nothing for the first 10 Salesforce licenses and receive roughly an 80% discount off the rest of the licenses. In dollar terms, a charity with 20 employees pays Salesforce about $3,000 a year, while a normal business would pay $30,000 for the same thing. Salesforce’s commitment to the non-profit sector is wonderful, and truly helps charities and social enterprises achieve their aims.

Financial Force told me they are offering a discount of only 20%, and on top of that they require a minimum of two licenses, meaning that it’s not possible to spend less than (if I have my figures correct) $4,800 annually. I find this flabbergasting on many levels. (Update – the price of the charity package I was quoted was in US Dollars. The price now, I believe, is £3,600 GBP for the 2 users/10 viewers, which may have an additional 20% reduction).

Firstly, it doesn’t fit with the overall Salesforce ethos. Most of the companies selling products on salesforce’s App Exchange have a policy of a few free licenses and additional licenses are heavily discounted. Salesforce.com, which started this ethos with it’s 1% Philanthropy policy, is a partial owner of FinaicialForce. So you have the parent company practically giving away it’s product to charities and the subsidiary company offering charities a paltry discount.

Secondly, this is surprising because it doesn’t really cost FinancialForce anything to give out a few licenses and help charities. I’m sure their up-front costs were huge, but the marginal cost of supplying the electricity and storage space to an additional user is probably just  a few dollars a user. If charities aren’t going to pay for the full amount (and I doubt many will) why not help them at virtually no cost to yourself and save charities bundles of money? If Microsoft and Cisco can do this, why can’t Financial Force?

Mainly, though, it’s bad business. Micro-Economics 101 and any B-School teaches that, if you can, you should price each customer what they are willing to pay (called Perfect Price Discrimination). That’s why airline seats vary so much in price, why similar stereos range from £200 to £1000 (can you really hear the difference?), why Persian Rug stores haggle, etc. I’d be floored to think a small charity would seriously consider $4,800 a year vs. the one time purchase of Quickbooks for £300. I’d be willing to bet Financial Force’s gross income, if not net income, from the charity sector would be higher if they offered a 90% discount rather than a 20% discount.

The final beauty of giving it to charities for practically nothing is that FinancialForce can build a huge user-base. These users would know how to use the product, could recommend it to their next (possibly for-profit) employer, and can smugly respond to a friend’s complaint about Quickbooks’ blithering incompetence with VAT and multi-currency.

Let me propose two questions to the good people at Financial Force, who may know a thing or two about building software but from where I stand appear incredibly short-sighted when it comes to marketing and business strategy.

1. What is the estimated value of having one bookkeeper/accountant become familiar with FinancialForce to the point they can make an informed recommendation to all their clients about whether to use it vs. the competition?
2. How many additional bookkeepers/accountants would become knowledgeable if you offered FinancialForce licenses to charities for free, as your parent company does with its product?

Multiply those two numbers together to find your opportunity cost of NOT offering FinancialForce to charities for free. Now, figure out if that number is higher or lower than your expected income from the charity sector with licenses priced at a 20% discount.

If your opportunity cost of not offering it for free is lower than expected income, you made the right decision and you are a smart business. If it is higher, well, I’ll let you complete the sentence.

I’ve just setup Appirio Contact Sync to handle the contacts between a Salesforce account and Google Apps, and while it was slightly useful, I wouldn’t bother doing it again.

Firstly, the pricing structure of the paid version is prohibitive (and a bit dumb). Whether you have 1 user or 50, the price is a flat fee of $2500. If you increase your users to 51 from 50, the price double to $5000. I would imagine Appirio must have has a large fixed cost per account or account setup, but considering they are selling to people who are used to paying per-user costs, paying per-50-user costs may be a real turn off. So given the cost, the free version was the only option.

The free version requires significant admin time, as each user has to be setup individually, and auto-syncing happens only once a day.

But the worst is that the syncing isn’t very effective. In Salesforce, I have a contact John Smith with an email address john@jsmith.com, and in Google Apps that same contact, but only his email address and not his name. Appirio somehow seems unable to match people based on their email address, and instead sent me a sync report that included:

Exception Notification
This is an automatically generated message to notify you that the following contacts could not be synchronized:

Well, duh, of course there’s no Name, that’s why I want you to sync it! I can of course manually add the name, and then the phone number will probably sync, but if Appirio contact sync can’t use email as a unique identifier, I’m a bit disappointed. And, it looks like the paid version will have the same problem, as the list of reduced functionality for the free version doesn’t mention anything about limiting syncing contacts to those with a name.

One simple solution is simply to not bother with this tool, and just use Salesforce as your main contact repository, and avoid using Google Apps for contact lookup.