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!

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.

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.

The biggest complaints from users of content management systems is that the sites often have to be maintained (or risk hackers defacing it) and that it’s not easy to update the content. For large or complex sites, these complaints are often inevitable, but for small sites, Google Apps is perfect.

For organisations that want a few dozen (or less) pages to present timely information to their clients, donors, or beneficiaries, picking the right technology is vital, otherwise the website will never be updated – as seen by pages with the most recent ‘news’ from three years ago.

We just helped www.good4you.org.uk setup their website, and they were overjoyed. What had been hacked, and a headache, was now showing a single home page within an hour of starting work. What surprised me even more was that the charity founder didn’t even call me back to ask questions, but had 7 more pages up by the day after!

I did a few extra things, like setting up Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools, and that was it. The site can be updated as easily as sending an email, and there is no maintenance or technology to worry about, ever. Just simple peace and mind.

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.

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.