Dreamforce 08 and the CRM vision
Posted by Tompkins Spann at Nov 04, 2008 12:51 AM CST
Categories: Content Management, Nonprofit Trends

I'm here in San Francisco at Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference.  Wow...  What a spectacular event.  The keynote this morning lived up to expectations with the unveiling of Force.com sites plus cloud computing integrations between Force.com, Facebook, and Amazon's Web Services, topped off by Neil Young on stage promoting an electric car called Lincvolt.  Watch the full keynote yourself here, or read this blog's summary.

It's hard not to get caught up in the hoopla and vision from the massive firehose of Salesforce.com koolaid being offered.  As I sat through the keynote and several breakouts my mind quickly jumped to how nonprofits can take advantage of these innovations, but as I sit in my hotel room digesting the day I have to ask... do nonprofits really understand CRM?

What is CRM afterall?  I don't believe our industry has come to realize the "true" definition of this acronym.  For some it's a lofty claim on what is really just a donor database.  For others it's a methodology applied to how organizations build relationships.

I posit that CRM = Convergence.  It's the ultimate convergence of mission programs and organizational operations.  CRM allows a nonprofit to finally get all of their data together, tearing down the barriers that have plagued nonprofits ever since the first donor database siloed the development team from the rest of the organization and allowing the converged team to work more efficiently, more collaboratively and with a single mission-focused purpose.

Is my definition lofty?  Yes.  Is it possible?  Definitely.  The technology component to "true" CRM is only ~20% of the solution, and NO platform does it better (not even close by a million miles) than Force.com.  The hard part of realizing the CRM dream is with the challeng of reversing what many Executive Director's, Development Director's and Board Member's have come to believe is "how it's done".  Reshaping this understanding and restructuring how the organization leverages it's data is 80% of the challenge.

The response to Common Ground, built on the Force.com platform here at Dreamforce is inspiring and exciting.  I'm already scheming for Dreamforce '09 to have Marc Benioff focus 90 minutes on Common Ground (ok, I'd settle for 10 minutes =).

Tomorrow is election day (VOTE) and another keynote, more vision and more great ideas.

I leave you with a shaky, blurry image from my cell phone showing Convio on the big screen during today's keynote. 

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