Sometimes I wonder if we are just a bunch of worrywarts here at NPower and are exaggerating the kind of terrible things that can happen to a nonprofit’s technology. But, then I hear a real life horror story that reminds me that planning for disaster and business continuity are critical.

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Is your current technology keeping up with your organization? That was the dilemma facing Girls on the Run of Northern Virginia (GOTR), a nonprofit dedicated to educating and preparing girls ages eight to thirteen for a lifetime of self-respect and healthy living. Recognizing that their current technology infrastructure was unsustainable, GOTRNOVA engaged NPower to determine how to cost-effectively meet their current and future technology needs. NPower quickly determined that GOTRNOVA could “leap-frog” traditional technology by deploying Google Apps, which saved them $7,500 in potential hardware and software costs while also providing a reliable email and groupware environment. “We knew we wanted a solution that was cloud-based and platform independent, but we didn’t really know what products were out there. NPower suggested Google Apps and it’s proven to be the perfect solution for consolidating all our critical office functions – email, document management and collaboration, shared calendaring, and contact “, says Lynn Harrington, Manager of Operations GOTRNOVA. “In just six months, we’ve gone from boxes of paper files under people’s desks to an online repository of mission-critical documents that’s organized, searchable, secure and always backed up.”

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The response for our call for applications was tremendous this year with 25 nonprofits submitting applications. Finalists will be selected in September 2010. They will be invited to deliver a live presentation to the Technology Innovation Awards Judging Panel that includes representatives from Clark Construction, Corporate Executive Board, Fannie Mae, Marriott, Pepco, and more!. The winners will be announced at the Celebration of Technology on November 4, 2010. Potential sponsors, please learn more about the Celebration by going to http://www.npowergdcr.org/support/events/a-celebration-of-technology.

Tech Tip provided by Bob Bailey, our resident Salesforce guru

Can't find the information about donors that you are looking for in one place? Is it in multiple places with different versions? Are you sure you know who gave and for how much? Is the information in Quickbooks? Do you know how to use and navigate Quickbooks?

Do these questions sound familiar? If so, then rest assured that you are not alone. These are common problems for growing organizations. You've gotten too big to remember everything but not big enough to have lots of resources for IT projects. You have gotten big enough that the "institutional memory" needs to be written down someplace.

Lately, we've been successful in working with Salesforce.com to solve these problems for nonprofits experiencing growing pains. Salesforce is a Constituent Relationship Manager or CRM that's bigger, faster, and more complete than a standard database.

Salesforce lets you define things once and refer to them so it's all in one place. You can also define relationships between things. For example, with Salesforce a donation becomes more than a check - it is linked to the person who wrote the check and to the individual(s) who made the decision to give, and that is not always the same. It could also be connected to a mailing, a project, or an event. And speaking of events, with just a few “clicks”, Salesforce lets you track who was invited, who came, who gave and how much, and the total net.

The Salesforce.com application is free if you have fewer than ten users. And, because it lives "in the cloud", you don't have to buy servers, install software, or worry about disaster planning. The only warning is that the application may be too big for the typical "do it yourself" IT project so you may have to hire help. And, that is where NPower’s resident Salesforce guru, Bob Bailey comes in. If you would like to know more, please contact Bob@npowergdcr.org.