I'm Steve Andersen, the CTO at Grameen Foundation and I use technology to get power into the hands of people who need it most. At Grameen we empower the poor to create a world without poverty. ONE/Northwest gets grant from Salesforce.com to integrate with Plone
The Salesforce.com Foundation announced today that a plucky band of techno-strategists up in Seattle will get a $25,000 grant to build integration between the open source Plone content management system and Salesforce.com.
We’re very thankful to the Foundation for funding this project, and really excited about what this means to the nonprofits we work with (and anyone else using Plone and Salesforce.com!). What does it mean? With Plone and Salesforce.com integrated:
- Someone who signs up for your Plone website will be automatically dropped into your Salesforce.com database
- Any data you collect (interest area, newsletter signup, etc.) on your website will be recorded in Salesforce.com
- You can use all that data, and the constituent’s email address, to drive communication through any number of email marketing services that integrate with Salesforce.com
- If you desire, you can allow your constituents to view and change the data you have in Salesforce.com
We are going to be working with Enfold Systems on this project–they are some of the smartest Plone minds out there. We’re shooting for an October release, with lots of milestones along the way. If you are interested in this project, let me know in the comments. We’re very interested in getting input from a variety of folks along the way.
We now get to integrate the leading hosted CRM solution with the leading enterprise-grade open source CMS. We’re pretty darn excited about it!
11 Comments
Doh! If only I had gone with Plone over Drupal…Jon tried to tell me…but noooo I wouldn’t listen.
Congrats Steve…I look forward to hearing how it goes.
~S
Congratulations Steve – that is great news!
I’m anxious to read/hear about the experience as you move forward.
— Mark
Thanks guys. We’ll definitely be writing about it!
Great news, you guys. Sounds like a great benefit for the NPO community. I’m impressed that the SFDC foundation was willing to fund integration with an open source platform, rather than insisting on pushing a commercial platform with which they could coordinate marketing efforts. I’m closer and closer to convinced that they really do care about supporting NPO’s, and not just for the sake of the effect it might have on their bottom line.
I’m sure you’ll keep all of us posted on progress.
The Salesforce.com foundation, and the corporate developer’s I’ve talked with, have been real supporters of open source stuff. I think they feel a real kinship because of the open API concepts. Except for Salesforce.com and a few other companies, most people doing open API work have been giving it away. Whatever the reason, they’ve been really down with open source projects.
This is awesome .. I was just searching for ‘Plone CRM’ hoping to find an all-in-one solution, but maybe this is better. Is there a project page? I’d definitely be interested in testing and developing the code for my business.
Best,
—
Dylan Oliver
Primaverity LLC
No project page yet. We’re kicking things off next week and will get something public for you to watch for progress.
Keep a good job up!