Cloud for Good just posted an excellent piece on Salesforce for Global Nonprofits, and right at the top of the list of issues you may encounter is “Connectivity and Lack of Technical Infrastructure.” Let’s take a bit of a deep dive into that issue and a couple of solutions I’ve come up with.
I’ve been working with a few NGOs outside the USA that have the connectivity problems. One day the internet works, the next day— nada. Or it is so slow you want to tear out your hair and maybe your fingernails. I can lose full days of productivity because: no internet.
Before my first “retirement” trip abroad, I bought a MacBook Pro with 8GB of Ram and the fastest processor I could buy. “If the internet is slow,” I reasoned, “I want to make sure it’s the INTERNET and not my old, creaky-slow computer.” Because in many of the places I’ve worked, staff limps along with computers that somebody donated five, six years ago. “The internet is slow today,” my local colleagues say to me. And I can say, “Well, let’s check the Mac…what’s this? See how fast the pages load? See how quickly I can post to Facebook? I don’t think it is the internet this time.”
In Darjeeling, I did a bit of behavior modeling on the “internet is down” issue. Every time we lost the internet, I WALKED up to the shop that was providing our internet and asked them, usually very politely, if their network was down or not. If it wasn’t, then would they please reset our internet? I don’t know if it was my example or not, but while I was there, the good Fathers brought in the internet provider to rewire half the building to improve the infrastructure.
Intermittent internet, I’ve found, is also one of the biggest impediment to user adoption in my global NGOs. There is a steady stream of data from the field— from the health workers, from the social workers, from the folks out there on the ground. This data is vital both for the decision-makers on the local team and for the fundraisers back in the States or other First World countries. The locals need to know about the medical crises, the emergencies, the productivity of the field workers. The stateside folks need to have good data to show their supporters, potential volunteers and interested foundations.
With my Darjeeling client, Hayden Hall (http://www.haydenhalldarjeeling.org), we devised a system of Excel templates that can be filled in at any time, since they don’t depend on the internet. The templates are created with a series of reports from my favorite data manipulation tool Apsona for Salesforce. Apsona’s reporting functionality always exports the CaseSafe IDs (18 characters instead of 15), and can do that with all the objects that link together. That means that getting a report, for instance, on a custom object, Health Visits, with lookups to a parent Medical Record and then to a couple of contacts, Mother and Child, is doable.
We export all the contacts in the system using these reports about once a week or so. Then, using the template that we set up previously, with all the fields we need for the Health Visits— filled in for the fields we don’t normally need to change (but want to eyeball for possible changes— like Immunization records) and blank for the few fields that need to be entered for every health visit: Weight of the Child and the Road To Health Scores that tell us how each child is doing every month.
This gives us a template with only the critical fields to enter, not a whole page to redundantly fill up every time we do a health visit: another KEY to the user adoption piece. No need to fill and re-fill fields that just need to move from record to record, like birthdate or mother’s age range.
As soon as the functioning, chugging-along internet comes back, we have trained our local colleagues to use Apsona for Salesforce to quickly import the data.
This method, seemingly a no-brainer…why didn’t we think of it before? Because we wanted our colleagues to see how the whole structure works and also wanted to wean them from their heavy dependence on spreadsheets for their important reports? I think that may be at the root of the problem— OUR problem, as international consultants, who may find it difficult to adapt to the situation on the ground. Hard to admit, but sometimes we have trouble getting our head around the problems our global counterparts have just getting on an internet that flows from screen to screen the way ours does.
Apsona trains us to get our data squeaky clean and consistent; it just plain refuses to enter dupes and invalid picklist values. Once we have the habit of Apsona, our NGO friends and colleagues are much more willing to envision a world where “If it isn’t in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.”