Do Good Better

Phillipines Rotary Club Doing Good Better With NetSuite

The Rotary Club of Paranaque St. Andrew (RCPSA) was chartered on April 6, 2009 and was recognized as an outstanding rookie club in 2010. They are using their their NetSuite product donation to manage a RotarE-library, providing quality book donations to the local community. NetSuite's inventory, downlaodable content and customer portal capabilities will be utilized for the project.

Uncommon among product donation programs, NetSuite.org provides the extra support to help organizations use their product donation effectively through pro bono service grants and social solutions. In this case, a NetSuite employee Franco Manuel is a member of the Rotary club and will be completing a service grant for the organization.

Congratulations to one of our newest grantees and special thanks to our employees that volunteer their time to help our grantee be successful.

 NetSuite and Rotary representatives work out the project details.

Pulling Together for Japan

NetSuite has an office in Japan and we are thankful that all of our colleagues working at NetSuite K.K. are safe. This weekend, NetSuite spent some time at the ballpark with the Oakand A's celebrating Japanese Heritage Day. The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan made this event all the more important.

At the reception prior to the game, Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff, Japan Consul General Hiroshi Inomata, and Hideki Matsui's father Masao Matsui, participated in a traditional Sake Barrel Ceremony.

 

Interviewed during the game, our CEO, Zach Nelson, highlighted the efforts of NetSuite's global employees in raising money for Japan disaster relief.

 

We're particularly proud that our global employees, based in 9 countries, came together to raise over $37,000 to support the Japanese Red Cross Society.

 
 

Isn't Technology Supposed to Make the Organization Simpler?

Steve Heye, in reviewing the recent book, The Networked Nonprofit by Allison Fine and Beth Kanter, was struck by its take on simplicity. And I was struck how many NetSuite.org grantees we work with misunderstand what simplicity really is.

One of the most common challenges dealing with a donation of software is that 9 out of 10 times, life gets more complex, more expensive and more difficult during implementation. And then there are the folks that never complete implementation -- their life stays complete and expensive -- and they yell the loudest about how a piece of software is difficult or think if only they picked the other vendor, everything would be OK.

The whole point of technology is to streamline operations, make critical information immediately available and just generally make life simpler.

What's going on? Why the disconnect?

"Simplicity clarifies organizations and forces them to focus their energy on what they do best..."

This thought by Allison and Beth is at the heart of how simplicity is achieved. You don't wake up one morning, buy an ERP system and have your life become easier. You first need to clarify what you are asking your software to do.

"But I bought the software to make my business run better." Well here is the crux... what is your business? Ecommerce? Manufacturing? Fundraising? What are the core business processes that you need to automate?

And now we get to my favorite part of the quote: "forces them to focus." Simplicity is achieved by the process of forcing focus, distilling down critical business processes, clarifying what is important vs. what is just desirable.

This is the process at the heart of all successful software implementation.  

 

 

 

 

 

NetSuite.org Embraces the 'other' Social Enterprise

In the enterprise software industry, social enterprise usually referrs to connecting employees, customers and partners in real time using social media tools.

But for the past few years, NetSuite.org has built a program to help the businesses organized to address social issues - social enterprises - expand and extend their social impact by operating their businesses better.

Today we were happy to highlight the work we've been doing for the past couple years and shine a spotlight on how imporved accounting and operations software can help fast growing social enterprises "Do good, better."

Here is some of the initial coverage related to the announcement:

NetSuite Embraces The Social Enterprise, But It’s Not What You Think
NetSuite.org Enables Social Enterprises To Do Good, Better 
NetSuite Helps Kiva.Org Make Loans That Change Lives

 

Find Cloud Computing Baffling?

A recent Information Week article reported on a survey that found:

48% of IT workers didn't know the meaning of the term, while 54% of respondents that use apps like Gmail or Salesforce.com didn't recognize them as cloud-based

Our grantees generally come to us already knowing what cloud computing is and how NetSuite can improve their accounting, employee time & expense management, payroll, fundraising and other areas of operation.

As we seek to ramp up our donation program, we're thinking about the simple business needs that charities and social enterprises have and how we can show them how a cloud solution solves their challenges in a important, unique and better ways.

Most organizations, when it comes right down to it, come to us for simple reasons.

• Kiva have staff running all over the world and needed to file expense reports via web browser from whatever internet cafe they happened to be at. NetSuite's web-based interface (a feature of the cloud) solved that problem.
• The Advocacy Center, after hurricane Katrina, never wanted to have servers with critical data underwater. Choosing NetSuite to run their financials solved that problem.
• Envirofit opened an Indian subsidiary to sell tens of thousands of clean burning cook stoves. They needed to both have access and visibility to the financials of their subsidiary and have those financials separate from the main nonprofit. NetSuite OneWorld solved that problem.

The cloud has  compelling revolutionary advantages and does really change the game. But as we talk to organizations that aren't familiar with NetSuite, we are finding that a clear understanding of how our software solves their problems is actually the best way of educating them on the benefits of the cloud.

Those 54% of respondents that didn't recognize Google Docs as a cloud solution, I'm sure could explain how Google docs solved their business problems.

Inadequate Nonprofit Technology: Destiny or Choice?

The recent John Hopkins study, "The Nonprofit Technology Gap –Myth or Reality" provides an interesting read and an even more interesting question to ponder. It's clear that nonprofits feel they don't have a handle on the technology they need to fulfill their missions, but the it's a far more interesting question to ponder why they feel that way.

Technology is increasingly affordable and accessible suggesting that this is not a supply side problem, but more a problem with how nonprofits are approaching the supply of technology available to them.

The study's primary conclusions were:

1. The majority of nonprofits are relying on a range of current information technologies for both administrative functions and program and service delivery.
2. However, most nonprofits are not content with the extent to which they have integrated technologies into program and service delivery and recognize that they could be doing more.
3. Lack of funding, time, and expertise are the major barriers preventing nonprofits from harnessing the full potential of information technologies.

The study finds that 98% of surveyed nonprofits find IT critical or important to their accounting and finance operations;  94% find IT critical or important to tracking clients, customers and patrons. They are using the technology, they know it's critical, but something is holding them back.

Sixty-four percent of surveyed organizations agree that IT is underutilized in their organizations and almost half are unsatisfied with their use of technology. I tend to think about the typical nonprofit Quickbooks user in this context -- they try to track clients, donors and other information with a spreadsheet and money with Quickbooks. Sometimes they want to connect money with constituents(donors & donations, for example) and find out Quickbooks can't help them.

Other times they want to slice and dice their books based on what a funder, board member or program manager wants to see and they find out their technology limits them.

The moral of the story is often:

1. If they had more money they could buy a solution (better technology or a consultant).
2. If they had more time, they could learn enough about their existing technology to solve their own problems.
3. Of if they had more expertise, they could use their existing technology or know what alternative technologies could solve their problems.

At NetSuite.org, we work hard to provide as much help as we can in this situation:

• We can make sophisticated technology for accounting, finance, ERP, fundraising, ecommerce, and CRM affordable through product donations -- they don't need more money.
• We offer canned solutions to the problems nonprofits face. Do Good Better Fundraising offers a straight forward way to do nonprofit accounting and fundraising, reducing some of the time requirements -- though any new technology ALWAYS takes time to learn.
• We connect our grantees with pro bono service grants that make expertise available to our grantees. Though pro bono service grants should be looked at more as a way to help grantees build their own expertise rather than a substitute for needing expertise.

Social Entrepreneurs & Taking it to the Next Level

NPR has  great series on Social Entrepreneurs that focuses on giving the public a basic introduction to the people and ideas behind the social entrepreneurship movement.

Listening to the series I'm stuck by how the field is starting to stratify and professionalize. It use to be that all social entrepreneurs got put into a single bucket -- the guys using business ideas to change the world. Now intermediaries (Ashoka, Sea Change Capital Partners and many more) are emerging, funders are investing in field building (Skoll), and we're starting to differentiate between the aspiring entrepreneurs, the working entrepreneurs and the scaling entrepreneurs.

This is great for NetSuite.org because we are really effective as supporting a scaling entrepreneur. A donation of business operations software (accounting, ERP, CRM, project management, inventory, ecommerce) only supports increased social impact when an organization has the capacity to successfully implement the software AND can articulate standard business processes that they want to automate.

As the industry starts to identify the social entrepreneurs that are getting ready to scale, we can donate the technology and offer the pro bono service grants that can help accelerate growth and scale their social impact.

To find out more about our product donations, visit http://www.netsuite.org/enterprise-guidelines.shtml.

 

Email Marketing with your NetSuite.org Donation

Since NetSuite.org works with a wide variety of grantees from the very small to the very large, we offer tips on how different types of organizations can effectively use NetSuite tools. Every NetSuite.org donation comes with 120,000 emails per year, allowing organizations to communicate with donors, run email solicitations and virtually any other email marketing activity you might want to undertake. 

Though a powerful solution, small organizations often prefer to send their email newsletters through solutions like MailChimp because of their simple point and click  and "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) interfaces. NetSuite supports this approach by making it really easy to export lists of constituents which then can be uploaded into MailChimp. There are down sides, however:

• You can't track unsubscribe information - with NetSuite's email marketing, this is automatically tracked and stored with the constituent record.
• You can't connect a specific donation to a specific email - the native email marketing capability can allow you to see which email triggered the donor's donation and calculate the ROI of every campaign.
• You have to pay for a different solution when you already have one donated to you.

So how should a small organization approach sending marketing email through NetSuite? 

1. Get/ Create a couple of HTML email templates (MailChimp has some nice ones - http://www.mailchimp.com/resources). Edit them in any HTML editor (Kompozer works and is free).
2. Run your HTML through tools like Premailer to test how well your html will be handled by email clients and/or Inline Styler to convert your HTML into the optimal format for email marketing.

This takes a little HTML skill and a few tools outside of NetSuite, but is achievable for any organization that has someone basically comfortable with HTML.

Technology Trends in the Nonprofit & Philanthropic Sector

Long time nonprofit technology consultant Deborah Elizabeth Finn has a good post on Technology trends in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector.

I particularly like the post because nowhere in it does she use the word "cloud." Cloud technology is just a way for organizations to run better - the parts real people care about are not the "cloud" but how the cloud supports what you want to actually do.

I also like it because she links to NetSuite's Hairball Institute for Business campaign, which seems to resonate with the charities I talk too that are trying to do things like get their time sheet data combined with their grants management data and into their financial system so they can correctly allocate expenses to the right programs and grants.

She identifies three trends that are key to evaluating cloud based solutions for nonprofits.

6. When you buy software, you’re paying for the privilege of being a beta tester.  Whenever possible, you will be better off letting some other organization be the beta tester.

We're all adults, we can just accept that all software comes bugs. The key is making sure the utility of the software counterbalances it's challenges.  In the case of donated NetSuite software, you might not be paying to be a beta tester, but there will be a bug experienced here and there. The difference is how a vendor can make this process as painless for the customer as possible:

Hot, Fast Fixes. Cloud solutions allow vendors to push out fixes to software overnight without customer intervention. This leads to quicker fixes and a far better experience for the customer. Ask your vendor how many fixes they pushed out to their live customers last week - big cloud vendors like NetSuite push out changes all the time. 

Real Support. Can you talk to someone to get a clarification or identify a problem & get it fixed? That's why we include support with our grants.

 

7. The line between building and buying a technology solution will get more fuzzy.  

This is a trend that I think nonprofits don't really understand. Most modern cloud solutions make available multiple layers of configuration and customization to customers and partners. Though most nonprofits may not code solutions to their problems (they should leave that to vendors & consultants), there are a wide range of "fixes" to your unique problems that can be done with "clicks not code." At NetSuite, we are a leader in this movement with our SuiteFlex platform & especially our new workflow tool.

 

 8. The benefits of an integrated suite of applications will be significantly decreased if the suite isn’t interoperable with key applications provided by other developers.

There is truth here, but organizations have to be very careful. We often run into charities that MUST integrate with Blackbaud Raisers Edge. They just can't imagine a single system could handle their financials & fundraising. Dig a little deeper and they actually don't use 80-90% of Raisers Edge functionality - meaning the integrated suite can meet their needs. Why again is the integration a MUST?

At the same time,  we've run into organizations with very valid reasons Raisers Edge is a MUST - they don't want to retrain staff, pay for data migration, they use Raisers Edge best of breed features. In those cases, most modern solutions can easily integrate with key applications - but there is always a price tag - the question is whether an organization can afford to build, maintain and/or manage integrations. Did you know NetSuite integrates with Salesforce, Raisers Edge and more? 

New 1099-MISC Rules: How NetSuite Helps

The Nonprofit Times highlights the impact of the new 2012 IRS rules for filing 1099-MISC forms for nonprofits.

Basically nonprofits face a couple of challenges:

1. Filing significantly more 1099s. Nonprofits must now file a 1099 not only for independent contractors, but for any vendor that they spent $600 or more with.
2. Nonprofits that don't collect the right information up front will have a nighmare tracking down tax ID numbers and related information at year end.

Often a nonprofit will incur a fee from their bookkeeper for each 1099 prepared and whith the new rules, this can be cost prohibitive.

Software like NetSuite can help to streamlining line process and make rule changes like this much less problematic. We made a few changes to the NetSuite.org Fundraising Solution to address these new requirements:

1. We've made the various vendor record fields required for producing a 1099 manditory. As always, if your organization doesn't need these restrictions you can easily turn them off.
2. NetSuite already has a built in 1099-MISC report that allows you to prepare your 1099 forms with a single print run.

Often, having the right software in place can be the difference between compliance changes like this being a nuisance and being a disaster.