Steve Wright, Program and Technical Director of the Salesforce.com Foundation talks to us about how social benefit organizations are improving their operations by using Salesforce.com to gather and understand data.

Jed Sundwall: How long has the Salesforce Foundation been around?

Steve Wright: Pretty much since day one. Basically, a large part of the vision of the foundation is that a company should take their initial stock before they go public, take one percent of that and use that to endow a foundation. And that’s sort of how we got started, sort of through the vision of Marc Benioff. Now, also the largess of Marc Benioff because he sort of funded us in the days before the company went public as well. So, that’s how we were able to be around from day one.

What is the objective of the foundation?

I should back up a little bit before I get into that, we actually have a one/one/one model, so one percent of the company’s founding equity was what we used to get ourselves started, and it’s been our endowment. One percent of the employees’ time, we give back to the community for our volunteers and program. One percent of the company’s product, we donate back into the community. So, the one percent of product is my world, and that’s sort of the crux of my answer. Our goal is to increase the efficacy of the global social sector.

We have a broader vision that looks at all three of those one percents that have to do with sort of creating change agents through volunteerism, as well as replicating the model. The other thing that’s really interesting to note is that we are in the throes of creating a true social enterprise. So, it’s the first one that we know of that’s ever been created inside the context of corporate foundation. Basically, what we’re doing is we donate the first 10 licenses of the Salesforce product, and then, any additional license or other products get sold at an 80 percent discount, and that revenue is what we use to sustain ourselves, or what we will use to sustain ourselves.

As a foundation?

Correct. We’re going to be a C3, C4 combination, actually.

Oh, interesting. I’m trying to remember who it was I interviewed. I think it was the Sam Adams Alliance that’s also a C3, C4 combination.

Yes, a lot of organizations like Move On are C3, C4. They use their C4 for political reasons. We’re using ours for revenue. And so, that model is beginning to happen more frequently.

Can you tell me what are the products that non-profits are using? Are there any that people are using more than others?

Sure, are you familiar with the SalesForce.com product?

I know it as an extensible CRM platform, but that’s about all I know.

It’s actually broader than CRM at this point, so to a large extent, we refer to it as Force.com. What the non-profit sector uses Force.com for is broad data management. So, we currently have over 4,000 non-profits in over 50 different countries using our platform. We know that people are using it for fundraising, and that tends to be sort of the touch point for most organizations, but many organizations are using it for programmatic management. So, we have some K-12 schools that are using Salesforce for student information. There are some human services organizations that are using it for human service case management in disaster relief organizations. So, it’s a broad brush of ways that Salesforce is being used in the social sector.

And from the very, very large non-profits, so Red Cross, United Way, down to Bob’s Non-Profit on the corner, so very small, community-based non-profits are using it, as well.

I know your products are sort of amenable to mashups. Have you seen any interesting applications done by any non-profits, mashing up your services with anything else?

Sure, mashup or integration. One of the things is that Salesforce, in and of itself, is sort of a mashup when you start to look at our app exchange. A lot of organizations are using Vertical Response, which is a totally separate e-mail tool. They’re using that to manage their e-mail blasts, but it’s tightly integrated with Salesforce. So, one of the things that’s always been difficult in sort of the mashup space is that it’s very difficult for any individual organization to do the mashing. You look at sort of the hallmark mashup, which was the Craig’s List and housing opportunities, right, stuck on a map? That took somebody with some fairly significant expertise to pull that off, and then, other people could go in and use it.

The Salesforce context of what a mashup is, is I want to take my highly personalized operational context and I want to see things on a map. I want to be able to communicate with folks in the way that I want to communicate with folks. Or I want to interact, have my private data environment, which is Salesforce, interact with a public data environment, which would be my website.

Plone has a nice integration with Salesforce at this point, built by the good folks at Plone and ONE/Northwest. People have done PayPal mashups, which are pretty straightforward to do, some basic e-commerce type of things. And that list goes on. If you go to sort of the AppExchange, you’ll see just tons of them.

Now, do you perceive any sort of trends? You mentioned there are smaller non-profits using your services, but a common challenge is that smaller non-profits are averse to technology or getting online, anything like that. Have you had any success in convincing neophytes or otherwise cautious organizations to start using your tools?

There’s two different issues there. There’s the size issue, and then, there’s sort of the issue being new to technology. Small organizations always have a difficult time using enterprise class tools because resources have to get spent one way or another, whether or not they’re hiring a consultant, or they’re ramping up an employee. So, one way or another, a small organization has to set aside cash or time to make it work. And that could be true of any enterprise class tool, as it is true for us, as well.

Now, the issue of being new to technology, that’s actually an easier problem because if somebody is resourced to get an organization to help them get up and running, then the Salesforce interface is very intuitive. And so, you really need little to no technological expertise to use the tool. You need technological expertise, time and energy to get the tool up and running.

This is actually something that I encountered. I was working with a non-profit in Brazil, and they started using a CRM platform to handle fundraising and everything, but it was vastly complicated to set up. There was one guy who knew how to set it up and you know the way a lot of non-profits work, there's so much turnover, no one was sure if he'd be around for very long.

Right, so what I would say with Salesforce is we are able to change that equation somewhat. So, even on the set up side, if you’re really doing stuff that’s fairly out of the box and you’re not doing major mashup up integrations and things like that, the set up is not technically challenging. It’s why I really sort of stress the idea of enterprise class tools are always difficult. The part that’s more challenging is what we call the business process review. So, being able to step outside of your organization for long enough and look deeply enough at what it is you do and how you do it in a way that will allow you to codify it in a CRM-like system is non-trivial. It’s not technical, either, but it’s non-trivial.

Right, and many non-profits are strained for resources and time. Putting that kind of thought into these things, it’s hard to come by.

It’s very hard to come by, and I think that’s more challenging in my mind, is that it’s not the issue that non-profits desperately need IT resources. I think that the best of what Web 2.0 has been able to provide is for non-profits to be able to not need, and I’m not saying reduce because whatever they have, they can use, but to not need as deep an IT resource for a lot of operational stuff.

Right, and that’s where software as a service comes in.

That’s exactly right.

Can you tell me about any of your biggest non-profit fans? I’d like to be able to point to some sort of shining example, if you have any in your mind, like case studies.

Sure. It’s always sort of which story you want to tell, right? Personally, I like to tell a lot of the smaller stories. We certainly have some very large non-profits and are growing with our large non-profits because we are actually growing with our ability to address non-profits, via our social enterprise. I’m going to find our official list of snapshots here. United Way is certainly somebody that’s been interesting to us. It’s a name that’s fun to say out loud. Easter Seals has been with us for a long time. Volunteer Match is a great partner of ours, and we’re doing even more deep integrations with them, which are real exciting.

A lot of the other ones that are really fun are, let’s take an organization that’s called Rainforest2Reef. They are a very small organization and have been with us for many, many years. They do reforestation work, and wildlife and jaguar rescue in Mexico. They’ve been on our platform since just about the beginning, in the neighborhood of five or six years now, and they’ve been able to sort of revolutionize how they’re able to do their work. And they’re able to go to Mexico and make it work because the platform is networked by default.

The other one would be Cross Cultural Solutions, which I think is a wonderful example. They’re entirely global. They’re in 16 different countries last I checked, using Salesforce in each of those countries.

On that note, what is it about Salesforce that allows these countries to work globally? Does it provide a particular advantage?

Because you don’t have any software and you don’t have any IT infrastructure. We deal with all the plumbing. All that you need is an IP-enabled device with a browser. We even have great mobile functionality at this point. There’s a school in Zimbabwe that was able to radically increase the number of volunteers they were able to take in through Cross Cultural Solutions because of Salesforce.

It used to be that volunteers would show up with their paperwork, and that would be the first time that they’d know about this person in Zimbabwe. The individual could show up as quick as the information about them. Their capacity to deal with people was radically limited, and now, they’re able to totally change that equation. I think they said they quadrupled the number of volunteers they were able to use effectively in the country.

The other great San Francisco example is one called Family Service Agency. If you’ve never heard of them, they’re a human services organization, the largest one in San Francisco. They deal with those people who are most in need, mostly around mental health issues. As of, I don’t know, three or four years ago, they had 10 e-mail addresses, now everyone does. All of their files were in Manila folders. Now everything is electronic. They have cut by a factor of 10 the amount of paperwork they have to do, dramatically increasing the amount of face time they have with clients. Most interestingly, they were able to change their goals from how many hours or how many clients they reach to how many clients they cure.

And that’s just because of Salesforce?

Because they’ve got data. They have a context, in which to hold their data and they can look at it and measure progress, in a way that they never could before.

Speaking of that example, in particular, I don’t know how much you would know about the inner workings of it, but was it individuals there that were able to figure out how to do that, like you mentioned earlier, putting the thought into codifying their work, or was the foundation able to help them?

They hired an organization, called Exponent Partners, who are here in San Francisco. They were able to get a grant from the city. I believe it was from the City of San Francisco; it might have been a State program. But, they were able to get a grant to fund Exponent Partners to build out a major system for them. And this was a true enterprise class roll out with I think they’ve got something in the neighborhood of 100 plus users logging into the system, mostly clinicians. They really used it as sort of clinician management to start, and they really said, “Clinicians, if you guys want to get paid, you’ve got to put it in the system.” And clinicians quickly sort of adopted the system, and then, all of a sudden noticed that they had a level of visibility to their own clients that they’d never had before.

Exponent Partners is the organization that did the implementation. And it’s another thing that’s actually really worth putting out, I think, that’s incredibly exciting, is that from the very beginning at the foundation, we really said that the power of sale forces is the potential for scale. It’s why I really like to talk about increasing the efficacy of the global social sector. But, there’s no way we can even approach equations of scale without a very, very strong ecosystem of partners. Pretty much every one of our partners, Exponent Partners certainly included and many others, are all hiring. These people have more work than they can manage. And what they’re doing is implementing Salesforce.

Everything you’re describing sounds wonderful, but in the back of my mind, I keep thinking who can put the thought into this? It might not come intuitively to people, but like you’re saying, you can get a grant, you can hire any one of a number of consultants like this that knows how to do it.

That’s right. Another consultant organization would be ONE/Northwest. These are folks that your readers know well. NPower is a national network that you’re probably familiar with. All of their offices at this point are doing Salesforce implementations. If you go to the foundation website, there’re a whole lot more.

The new and exciting stuff that’s beginning to happen now is that as we start to get something that looks a little bit more like critical mass, we’re beginning to talk about projects that look across organizations. So, how can we help understand our progress towards solving the world’s most intractable problems? Well, if we have data proximity, the people who are actively solving these problems have their data all in the same arena, then maybe we can start to look across organizations to understand bigger questions. Things are still real foggy in this phase. It’s the kind of work that people have tried to do for a long, long time, the kind of work that people have thought Web 2.0 would help us with. I think we have a really unique opportunity, especially with Salesforce, because Salesforce is the operational context of these organizations. So, we’re not asking organizations to go do extra work to tell the world about what they’re doing. We’re asking them to run reports, essentially.

That’s sort of the first thing that comes to my mind is, if you’re housing all this data, managing all this data, especially people in the non-profit sector, people doing research and getting all sorts of information, how can they get it out and share it with one another?

That’s exactly right. Technically, it’s made easier when people are on the same “platform,” just because they’re using the same sort of commands, for lack of a better way to describe it. It’s not like one organization has any visibility into another organization any more than they would if they had software on their own desktops. It’s more, to a large extent, once we’re out in the cloud, once we’re doing an effective job of managing our businesses towards outcomes, just the fact that that outcome data is able to exist now when it really wasn’t even able to exist before, lets us start to talk about common ways to express outcomes.

The old conversations about XML standards or broad looped data standards have always gotten mired in that backroom conversation, where people say, “No, I need this piece of data, no, I need that piece of data.” What we have the potential to do at this point is to iterate and say, “Look, we’ve got 300 people, and they’re all collecting these six things already, so let’s start there.” And that environment is very exciting.

Right, because then, it’s just up to your imagination. Basically, you have that hard work done, the grunt work, and knowing you have the data already being collected from who knows how many sources, the sky’s the limit.

Exactly right, and a large part of the way we talk about ourselves is we want to take the plumbing out of the way and let people solve the problems. Let’s really remove as many of the technical barriers as possible, or at least removing them is probably not feasible in any context, but they are lower.