The Social Concept

Live-Blogging: Social Innovation In The Cloud #DF09

November 19, 2009

I’m sitting in my first workshop of the day, Social Innovation In The Cloud (yes, I slept through my two 7:30s, but I’ll catch the replay). This session is largely populated by non-profits who are using cloud-based applications, workflow and CRM (for fundraising).

We began with James Bullard, the director of I.T. for Transfair, the organization behind Fair Trade. They’re the folks that “manage and understand the supply chain complexity” for fair-trade goods, like coffee. Bullard’s key uses of the Force.com product was to manage all internal workflow, using it not only for sales and marketing intake workflow (new supplier, new licensee, routing to business development team) but also to take old business processes into workflows – Transfair has created over one hundred.

“It’s easy, it’s fast,” Bullard said, of workflows. “If it doesn’t work, de-activate it, make a new one.”

Rather than implementing by code, Transfair largely programmed their business processes by clicks.

Why a non-profit (or corporate) team would want to use a cloud-computing platform for business processes:

1. Shorter time-to-live (reduces time-to-live)
2. Highly secure and always-on
3. More action-oriented solution (rather than spending 90% of time talking about and defining the problem)
4. Reduces need for off-line conversations about business-critical processes that hog resources

The next part of the talk, Running A Social Enterprise In the Cloud , was presented by total non-profit bad-ass Chris Sarette , VP Business Operations, Invisible Children. To say that this organization has an amazing story is pretty correct. This is a fairly new implementation – Sarette had never even heard of Salesforce in summer 2008.

Invisible Children is using their implementation to manage donations, potential film screenings (business development), theatrical tour attendance records and all real-time data management. Regional managers receive daily copies of the dashboards.

They’re also using Salesforce Sites for their Schools For Schools program, which matches up Ugandan schools with North American and European schools to enable direct-fundraising. (Sarette highly recommended online donation processor Linvio .)

Key Benefits of Invisible Children’s Implementation

1. Huge reduction of processing fees on donations
2. Rectified loss of knowledge transfer (and donor loss) from employee/intern turnover
3. Donors (i.e. students in U.S. Schools) can see immediate, dynamic impact of their donations
4. Streamlined workflow and business intelligence

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