Percolator Report Back from Dreamforce 2015

Team Percolator was at Dreamforce in force this year, and if you didn’t make it to the craziness in San Francisco, here’s some of the cool stuff you missed:

Charlie Kahle from Washington Trails Association highlighted how his organization uses Salesforce and the tools that integrate with Salesforce (Conga, Exact Target, Click & Pledge, Volunteers for Salesforce, CRM Fusion, CQ Rollcall’s Engage, StepUp, and others) to manage the nation’s largest state-based hiking nonprofit. In their presentation, Charlie and Elise Cope (Rainier Valley Food Bank) show that their small-to-midsize organizations are doing mighty things with Salesforce’s Nonprofit Starter Pack.

Chris Zezza from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and Percolator pal Sam Dorman discussed Salesforce’s role in their community engagement work (and IAVA just implemented our app StepUp, but more on that later). They also talked about using product teams to improve IAVA’s systems and avoiding the feast-to-famine technology situation that many nonprofit organizations experience. You can see their session, including some inspiring stories from Zack Goldstein at Health Leads, here.

Lightning: Have you been struck by Lightning yet? It’s going to be a user interface revolution, and it was all the rage at Dreamforce. Lightning Experience is pretty like Salesforce1…but we Nonprofit Starter Pack users won’t see the benefits of the full Lightning Experience right away. For those NPSP users who feel like the Salesforce web interface is a little on the dowdy side, you only have to wait another 12 months or so. Want to see it now? Here’s a 15-minute preview.

Trailhead Nonprofit Track: So, if you were at Dreamforce, you could hang out in a giant hall filled with trail and camping-themed things (tents, trekking poles, raccoon dolls) and do hacks for prizes. For the rest of you, the trailhead training curriculum is available for aspiring administrators and developers, and it’s very cool. What’s especially awesome is the in-progress Trailhead Nonprofit Track. Check it out!

Girlforce: Girlforce, the 1,800-member powerhouse that empowers women in the Salesforce nonprofit community, hosted a Dreamforce meetup at the top of the Marriott, as well as many members presenting sessions throughout the week. They announced that their 2016 first quarter Certification Study Groups are open for signups, and all Power of Us Hub members are welcome to join. These collaborative study groups meet weekly for 8-weeks to prepare you for Salesforce certification.

Other stuff we saw that we thought would be interesting for our nonprofit clients and friends:

• SalesforceIQ – What better way to drive user adoption than to bring Salesforce right to your users’ inboxes? SalesforceIQ mobile app syncs emails to contacts, create contacts and accounts with a few clicks, and serves up easy-to-use templates for those regular interactions. We’re testing how it works with Nonprofit Starter Pack now; keep an eye here on the blog for more on that soon.
• Sage Live – Sage just launched an integration with Salesforce1. It’s brand spankin’ new, so we’d recommend waiting for them to work out the early kinks, but it could eventually be a good option for folks who want an accounting system that integrates with Salesforce but can’t afford FinancialForce.
• #DFGives – We got swept up in the great ways to give all week. All over the DevZone kids were learning to code, out on Dreampark thousands of care packages were stuffed and more than 1 million books donated, and at Dreamfest $10 million raised for children’s hospitals.

Of course, with 170,000 participants (almost 10% of those from nonprofit organizations!), and acres of booths, sessions, and activities, there’s too much to share. However, some stuff’s already on the Dreamforce channel on YouTube and many more sessions are up on salesforce.com/video now, searchable by the session agenda. It’s almost like being there.