Tyler Colby

Absolutely, um, there are a lot of vendors and in the nonprofit space that really tailor their solutions and their platforms for nonprofits. So it was a long and lengthy decision before we decided on Salesforce, and when we looked at the entire, you know, landscape of possibilities and where, where we could go, there's a few main players within the nonprofit space, specifically when we look at something like Salesforce to lead our fundraising and development. So, you know, when we looked at competitors, like every action, and Blackbaud has a number of solutions, really, it came down to the ease of which we could implement. So you know, looking at the partner network and looking at the robust support that we could get from Salesforce, and then also looking at, you know, what could we do off of this platform. So as we speak, we already talking in the middle of the covert 19 crisis and self isolating and one of the projects that came down across all of our platforms is making sure that these platforms are mobile ready so that as people are making the shift from working in an office to working from home that we don't have to go through and make sure that we're standing up these systems to make them ready wherever somebody is. And what's great about at least Salesforce as a platform is all of that was ready for us from day one. So we didn't have to go through and do a bunch of system configuration or, you know, all you know, even adjusting our page layouts for it. It was already for our users from day one, with all the security and everything else already built in. So having that box checked on day one makes crisis planning that much easier. And as we look through, you know, the rest of the other decisions, the time to get somebody from walking into Salesforce as just an admin to being proficient with the system is just a matter of years sometimes versus, you know, on some systems a matter of decades, including long periods of college training. So Salesforce really allowed us to just move a lot faster as far as getting our system ready for users. As we start to look towards our data side. It's a very similar decision to why we chose redshift. So redshift has allowed us to very quickly, you know, pull a lot of data in and we're ingesting data from all of our systems into redshift, and really using that as our central hub to do a lot of the more ELT work so that we are combining these things. We just had a significant release solving one of our main issues, which was identity resolution. So I think I mentioned this a little bit before but you know, who is who across each system. It's this problem that I believe has a lot of solutions on the for profit side, but not a lot that has been done on the nonprofit side. So until just very recently, Simply so we ingest Salesforce action kit, mobile Commons and a few other data sources. And we resolve them all down to a single ID which we call the NRDC ID. And we just had, again, a very significant release that allows us to do this. And we'll be building off of this. So our next big challenge is making sure that communication preferences are unique across all systems. So really making sure that we honor the data privacy legislation that's coming out. So GDPR and ccpa, across all these systems, and making sure that also that our constituents are being contacted the way they want to be contacted. So you know, sometimes it is because we are a large environmental nonprofit, you know, some people don't like to receive direct mail from us and they only want to receive email communications. So making sure that that message gets across all systems so that we're not accidentally sending mail and, you know, upsetting donors as well is something that we have to keep in mind. So you know, some of that tooling and some of that work we are doing and building on but he is Isn't readily available and isn't there are no out of the box solutions for it today,