We recently helped the Innocence Project finish collective.salesforce.fundraising, an open source fundraising package designed to help non-profit organizations raise money online. The system is designed to function either as a standalone donation system or to be integrated into a larger Plone website. The Innocence Project is currently using it as a standalone donation system.
![Innocence Project Donations Site]( "Innocence Project Donations")
collective.salesforce.fundraising
The brainchild of the Innocence Project’s Jason Lantz, who developed the package with help from Groundwire and Jazkarta, this plugin adds significantly to the Salesforce.com functionality that can be tapped from the Plone content management system. The Plone CMS/Salesforce.com CRM integration capabilities previously consisted of:
- Submitting form information from a Plone form into Salesforce.com (web-to-lead forms)
- Adding a new lead to a Salesforce.com account when a new Paypal payment is made
- Making Events in your Plone site “RSVP-able” with data saved directly to Salesforce.com campaigns
- Authenticating in Plone with account information (login, password and properties) which is from Salesforce.com
- Dynamically displaying Salesforce.com data in Plone
That’s already a darn good package, but collective.salesforce.fundraising adds features that take things to a whole new level:
- The ability to take one time and recurring donations through an uncluttered, modern UI. All donations are sent directly to the payment processor (Authorize.net or Recurly), no credit card data is stored or transmitted.
- Integration with Salesforce.com campaigns. They can be created in Salesforce.com or Plone, and all changes and donations made in Plone are added to the Salesforce.com campaign.
- The ability to create campaign timelines and goals. Progress indicators in the UI show progress towards the goal and the time remaining.
- Personal fundraising, which allows users to create personal campaign pages for any campaign. Users can set a goal and promote their campaign to their friends; all donations roll up to the parent campaign in Salesforce.
- Social integration via Janrain, a social login and sharing service. This is important for personal fundraisers, since it allows login through a variety of social accounts, and sharing on multiple social networks to help spread the word about personal campaigns.
And there are many smaller features, like memorial donations, donor testimonials, fundraising “seals” providing third party analysis and endorsements, and an easy way for users to share campaigns with their social networks via “share messages” which can be tracked for effectiveness.
How Jazkarta Helped
The Innocence Project engaged Jazkarta to help with the donation and personal fundraising capabilities. This included selling tickets to events, adding campaign landing pages and personal fundraising pages, and working out some of the details of the social login process. Personal fundraising is a compelling addition to the package. The ability it provides for individuals to set themselves up as fundraisers under an umbrella project puts collective.safesforce.fundraising head and shoulders above many of the other solutions available to non-profits.
Convio Common Ground Customers Take Note
The addition of personal fundraising to collective.salesforce.fundraising comes at a particularly opportune moment. Only days after Jazkarta’s work was done, Blackbaud announced it was discontinuing Convio Common Ground, a fundraising and donor management application built on top of Salesforce.com and used by many small to mid-sized non-profits. A Plone+Salesforce.com powered fundraising site offers a great option for the 400 or so Common Ground clients that have to make a decision and migrate to a new system within the next 19 months. The Plone CMS and all of the plugins mentioned in this post are open source software with no licensing fees, and Salesforce.com is a great deal for small to mid-size non-profits. Through the Power of Us program, the Salesforce Foundation will donate 10 enterprise licenses worth $1600/month to 501(c)3 organizations, and any additional licenses are 80% off. There is also a 50% discount for in-person training and the customer portal is priced at $24/user/year.
Contact Jazkarta if you’d like more information about Plone-Salesforce powered online fundraising solutions.
