NPower team reps the NW at Dreamforce

Last week our office was awful quiet as three of our database consultants hit the road to attend the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The conference, put on by Salesforce.com, is part networking, part traditional presentations, and part hands-on workshops aimed to improve the use of Saleforce.com and its applications. Tens of thousands of individuals made their way to the Bay Area to share their experiences, learn from their peers, and, as was the case with the NPower team, drink tons and tons of free lattes.

While Salesforce.com is a popular CRM system in the for-profit community, the nonprofit sector had a strong showing at the conference, and even had an entire section of the center devoted to special sessions that related directly to nonprofits’ use of the system. The conference had a strong Northwest showing as well – our team saw some of the regular attendees from the Seattle Salesforce.com user group that periodically meets at the NPower office and hung out with our friends from Groundwire.

Sadly, our team missed out on seeing Metallica (the venue was at capacity), but they did manage to have a worthwhile experience despite that setback. Here are some of the highlights:

• NPower Northwest client Nicholas Merriam of Building Changes presented a session on user adoption, sharing the strategies that his team used to get their staff on board with their new database and tips to prevent regression back to the days when when each program relied on its own database and a contact might need to be updated in six different places.
• Laura enjoyed the session on using Salesforce mobile for fieldwork and was interested to learn about the ability to develop mobile apps on the Salesforce platform relatively inexpensively.
• Nineta was a fan on a session that talked about “usability” – developing on the Salesforce platform from a user’s perspective to make the interface more appealing and simpler to navigate.
• V and Laura took the Salesforce.com developer certification test and passed, meaning they now get these fancy badges on their website bios!

Our team came back excited to implement what they learned to do even better work for our clients. Dreamforce was an amazing learning opportunity for them all, and a fantastic resource that more nonprofits should consider taking advantage of.

Want more Dreamforce action? Visit their website to view videos from the sessions, or search the tags #df11 (conference tag) and #dfnp11 (nonprofit conference attendees tag) on Twitter.