Force.com is by far the best platform I’ve ever seen for modeling business processes—which are as important to nonprofits as they are to any small business
“The Perfect Job”: Building Force.com Apps for Nonprofits
The road to a dream job does not always run straight. Just ask Steve Andersen, who joined the tech-savvy Seattle nonprofit ONE/Northwest three years ago and has since helped build Force.com applications for some 20 Pacific Northwest environmental groups. Along the way, he has become a fixture in the Force.com developer community, contributing both ideas and code, and winning a Salesforce Developer Hero Award and a Salesforce.com Foundation development grant. Andersen was one of the few selected for the Summer ’06 and Force.com Code Share previews and participated in the Apex code and Visualforce preview releases.
“Force.com is by far the best platform I’ve ever seen for modeling business processes—which are as important to nonprofits as they are to any small business,” he says. “You can ‘wireframe’ what you want to do, then go quickly into production, and the discount pricing of the Salesforce Nonprofit Edition license has made Force.com a realistic option. What might have been a difficult cost-benefit decision is in fact a no-brainer.”
Andersen’s Force.com immersion was hardly apparent when he left a Minnesota college in 1992 with a biology degree and an interest, but no formal training, in computers. His technical bent eventually took him to a Seattle biotech firm, where he taught himself Microsoft Access and started writing applications, eventually moving full-time to IT. After getting laid off during the dot.com bust, he followed his heart out of the corporate sector, eventually seizing a rare job opening at ONE/Northwest. His mission: design databases to help environmental non-profits better connect with their supporters. “It was the perfect job for me,” he says.
Andersen has since overseen a score of Force.com development projects of increasing complexity. “I began developing software almost by default. That’s the career path for several of us at ONE/Northwest: if you show even a glancing interest in software development, you become the de facto technology person. But that means that when you get in over your head, there’s nobody to rescue you but yourself.” As a result, Andersen, found that the closest helping hand was usually not down the hall, but in the online community on developer.force.com.
Platform as a Service: Made-to-Order for Nonprofits
At ONE/Northwest, Andersen and his colleagues comprise a roving three-person IT department. Andersen began experimenting with Force.com development in the summer 2005, starting with six months of proof-of-concept work centered on the life blood of every nonprofit: supporter tracking.
“The groups we deal with are small—between two and 30 people. Not only do they not have their own IT resources, they are often spread out over several offices, working out of their homes, or moving around in the field. That’s a made-to-order situation for the Force.com platform-as-a-service model.” The development team is hiring a fourth Force.com consultant to meet a burgeoning demand for their services: Andersen is booked about six months out.
Moving Up the Ladder
Among Andersen’s Force.com innovations is a “ladder of engagement,” which assigns a number to different activities: a low number for, say, a quick email, a high one for a meeting with elected officials. “The idea is to notice not just the super-volunteers you see every day, but the people moving up the ladder who are often much harder to identify,” he explains. “Nonprofits need to quickly identify their rising stars.”
Andersen himself has been moving up his own ladder within the community of developers specializing in nonprofits. His contributions include a Google Group that has attracted more than 250 participants and a collaboration with the Salesforce.com Foundation’s Tucker MacLean on a Salesforce template geared for nonprofits. Andersen's work also led to a $25,000 grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation, funding an integration project that allows the Plone open source content management system to access data stored in Salesforce.
Andersen has “gone whole-hog into Apex” since the Apex preview launch in January 2006, with an emphasis on triggers for exception handling—such as assigning a default “catch-all” account to unaffiliated donors so that they are listed properly in reports. Andersen was a strong advocate for including Apex in Salesforce Enterprise Edition. Salesforce agreed and the powerful programming language is now available in the Spring ’08 release. “Salesforce.com is really good at listening to its customers. The developer.force.com team puts their best tools in the hands of the developers, asks them for feedback, and listens when they give it. That’s a recipe for a growing developer community.”
While Andersen has not invested a lot of time with the Visualforce preview, he likes what he sees. “Visualforce will be a game changer, making applications easier to build and maintain, and faster for users to learn. ONE/Northwest will definitely rewrite all our s-controls in Visualforce–it’s too compelling not to.”
For nonprofit developers just getting started, Andersen points to the Salesforce nonprofit community. “It’s the best example I know of Force.com developers sharing best practices, code, and other information. Nonprofits of all sizes are involved; I think we're a model for how a community can collectively leverage platform as a service.” The broader Salesforce.com community is helpful as well. "The Force.com developer boards proved invaluable when I was starting up with Salesforce, and again when I was learning Apex. I think it’s important not just to ask questions, but post code snippets and talk about the architecture decisions you’ve made. All of this sharing has led to good relationships with some of the Salesforce.com engineering staff—and that has proven very helpful along the way.”
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