Managing Director, Green for All

Head to Portland, Oregon and prepare to be amazed at the number of residents using a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation. The Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA) is a nonprofit membership organization working to promote bicycling and improve bicycling conditions in Oregon and SW Washington. The BTA creates healthy, sustainable communities by making bicycling safer, more convenient and more accessible. Using a combination of advocacy and education, the BTA works to make citizens voices heard on behalf of bicycling and gives cyclists the tools, confidence and knowledge they need to be safe and accepted on the road.

Challenge

BTA was faced with a very common challenge, a database in FileMaker Pro that was only current for memberships and donations. Much of their important engagement history data lived outside of the FileMaker database. BTA used Mandate Mail for email outreach and while it provided them with full-featured blast email functionality, it was not linked to the database in any way. List segmentation took place outside of FileMaker Pro and subscriber responses (new sign-ups, bounces and unsubscribes) only came back into the database through time-consuming exports/imports. Aside from membership & donations, relationship tracking for events like the annual auction, volunteer tracking, and key advocacy efforts lived in Excel spreadsheets and email, and not in the primary database. Like many of our clients who come to us with a FileMaker Pro database, not all staff had access to the database resulting in a pattern of staff not totally trusting the data in the database and setting up their own systems for managing information.

Solution

Our database team customized a powerful Salesforce.com database to help BTA manage their 5000+ members, hundreds of community volunteers, individual gifts, corporate sponsorships, contract activities and government and foundation grants. Multiple staff now have access to the database so relationship history with each contact and organization is accurate and easy to maintain. We also set up Vertical Response email broadcasting that integrates with their Salesforce.com database, automatically managing new sign-ups, bounces, and unsubscribes.

The Challenge

Futurewise walked in the door with an elaborate but aging custom-built Microsoft Access database for managing its member data.  The database couldn't support online interactions with members, and wasn't accessible to field organizing staff outside the Seattle office.  Because of this, Futurewise was very limited in its ability to use its database as an effective tool for organizing members.

In addition, Futurewise lacked a systematic way to track the effectiveness of its efforts to influence the many local land use policy decisions it watchdogs.

Our Solution

We migrated Futurewise's database to Salesforce.com.  Salesforce provides a complete solution for managing Futurewise's member data.  Because it is web-based, field staff can access it just as easily as main office staff.

In addition to the traditional membership management features, we also built a custom module for Futurewise to track its work on local land use policy decisions.   We interviewed Futurewise staff about their mental models for tracking their work, then built up simple database objects using Salesforce that captured the relationships between decisions, outcomes, decisionmakers, jurisdictions and campaigns.

Futurewise can track each decision of interest in their database, where that decision is happening, how much effort they've expended on that issue, and whether the ultimate outcome of the decision is favorable or unfavorable.

We were able to take full advantage of Salesforce's built-in tools for creating reports and dashboards, meaning there was little custom code to write beyond defining the database fields (a point-and-click operation).

Futurewise is now actively managing its policy work in Washington counties with help from their Salesforce.com database. This has given greater visibility to the policy team, and has helped fund development staff gain a much better sense of the work going on in each county, making it easier for Futurewise to quantify and report on its successes to donors, funders and supporters.

If you'd like to see the Futurewise decision tracking system in action, you can watch this five-minute screencast we offer a quick walkthrough of the features.

Groundwire implemented a Salesforce.com database, which allows them to better manage their extensive door-to-door fundraising and outreach operations. They can now get information that not only tracks their fundraising dollars, but shows metrics on canvassing team performance, the intake for the daily canvassing shifts, and fundraising performance by geographic location. The database includes customization to help streamline their recurring payment process through batch processing.

Their Salesforce.com database also supports their new strategy for member communications, providing timely, auto-generated (and personalized) messages.

The Challenge

Green For All approached us as a brand-new organization poised on the verge of explosive growth.  Green For All Executive Director Van Jones was already a fast-rising star in the national environmental movement, and Green For All was struggling to keep up with the massive surge of interest in green jobs that Van's vision and passion were unleashing.

Green For All needed a database solution that could rapidly grow along with them, and could support not only traditional member organizing processes, but also help them cope with the thousands of requests that Van's outreach work was generating, which were currently flooding his email inbox.

Our Solution

We used Saleforce.com to build Green For All a system that included not only traditional membership management features, but a custom system for capturing and managing requests for assistance, information and personal appearances from Van.

Requests for assistance are now captured via forms on the GFA website, which flow directly into GFA's new Salesforce.com database.   Requests are captured in a structured way, e.g. speaking requests include a field for the event date.  The database allows GFA staff to work together to manage, respond to and track each request. 

Even better, each person who contacts them gets added to the database, so that GFA can followup with people in the future!  For example, when Van Jones makes an appearance in Seattle, GFA staff can find all of the people who have contacted them from the Seattle area, and invite those folks to the event.

The Idaho Conservation League is Idaho's leading voice for conservation, with members throughout the state. ICL hosts a variety of paid and unpaid events each month from their annual Evening on the River gala auction to their ongoing hiking series. With these unique needs for collecting online payments -- new memberships & renewals, appeal gifts, and paid event tickets -- Groundwire provided a full-featured integration between their website, online payment processor, and Salesforce database to make collecting online payments a breeze.

Our Solution

Building on the work of the open source community, Groundwire continued development of an existing add-on product for Plone called GetPaid to meet ICL's online payment needs. GetPaid is a flexible framework for payment processing and e-commerce in Plone. On the website, ICL can take advantage of Plone's best-of-breed form building tools to fully customize the look and feel of their donation pages. Behind the scenes, new donations and ticket sales are passed seamlessly into their Salesforce database, eliminating the need for tedious data imports.