Bonny Hinners is  a Salesforce.com MVP and Co-leader of Bay Area Salesforce Nonprofit User Group

As nonprofits adopt Chatter, many of them see it as a great way to strengthen their communities and to collaborate with people and organizations across locations. Recently, I spoke with United Way of the Bay Area (UWBA), serving the San Francisco Bay Area; Education Pioneers, serving schools across the nation; and Battle Creek Michigan’s Woman’s Co-op in order to understand how Chatter has changed the way they communicate.

United Way of the Bay Area Uses Chatter to Collaborate with External Agencies

United Way of the Bay Area has the goal of cutting poverty in the Bay Area in half by 2020 and frequently joins forces with other agencies to provide services to those in need, “harnessing the collective power of nonprofits, government, corporations, labor and thousands of individuals to create change through giving, advocating, and volunteering,” according to their mission statement. Chatter has been instrumental in helping to harness that collective power.

For projects where UWBA brings together multiple agencies, Chatter external licenses provide a means for all of the concerned agencies to communicate with each other and with UWBA’s own internal Salesforce and Chatter licensed users.  These work groups make it easier to manage projects, share files and otherwise collaborate.

UWBA has only been using Salesforce for about one year, but deployed Chatter and encouraged its use from the beginning.  Chatter also allows them to easily collaborate with board members.  Key to the whole success of Chatter was executive buy-in, according to John Schaver, Vice President of Information Technology/Facilities, “when the CEO says ‘check my post in Chatter,’ it is full speed ahead from there.”  John estimates that 85% of their 115 internal users make use of Chatter daily.

Many of them are using Chat Messenger as well, finding it very useful for quick and easy questions or reminders.

Education Pioneers Uses Chatter to Decrease Email

Like UWBA, Education Pioneers (EP) believes that about 85% of their 56 Salesforce users make regular use of Chatter. Education Pioneers attracts, prepares and advances top leaders, managers and analysts to transform urban education, with a vision to transform education into the best led and managed sector in the US.

EP implemented Chatter to provide a means for collaboration for their virtual office and to decrease the use of email, which can be rife with problems of lost information.

Key steps to the success of their implementation included having the CEO and COO model Chatter use, providing examples of what to post, and including Chatter in their new-staff orientation and training.  They also paid attention to users and made adjustments to Chatter autofollow and email alerts to accommodate the users’ needs.

In addition, EP created a document to help staff understand the best uses for various forms of communication, including Chatter, email, phone and Skype to ensure consistency and ease among staff.  Among their Chatter guidelines:  keep it brief and take care in selecting the group with which you are sharing a post.  EP also offered specific suggestions for what sorts of personal and professional information should be posted to Chatter.

According to Sarah Doherty, Project Manager, Business Operations at Education Pioneers, Chatter has “strengthened the organization’s culture and sense of community.”  Specifically, Chatter combines the ability to collaborate on specific Salesforce data records with the opportunity to collaborate in a more general sense and in ways that encourage team spirit.  For virtual offices like EP's, Chatter even provides something of the coffee-break camaraderie without clogging staff inboxes.

Woman's Co-op Uses Chatter to Praise and Motivate Employees 

Woman’s Co-op, based in Battle Creek, Michigan, uses Chatter not only to give “shout-outs” of praise to fellow workers and to send fun messages that make the work day a little easier, but also as a means for staff, who are assisting a single individual or family in need, to share information and keep each other up to date.  With a staff of only three, Chatter may not seem like a necessity for such a small organization, but because they are not always in the office together, they find it invaluable.

Woman’s Co-op offers women in need multi-layer services from increasing education and career opportunities to providing court services.  For this reason, multiple staff members need to be able to track the same records for each client they support.  They use Salesforce Case objects to track services provided to an individual client and the Chatter Feed for each record helps staff keep each other up to date as changes occur.

Before Chatter, they frequently used sticky notes and multiple databases to a similar purpose. Salesforce and Chatter gives them more opportunities to collaborate than a paper note can and they no longer have to pull data from multiple sources for a single high-level client.  Salesforce automatically updates the Chatter Feed for Case records as the Case Owner changes and the client moves through the system and every staff member can follow those changes.  Staff members post Chatter updates in the Case Feed with information that may be pertinent to other staff working with a client.

Teresa Phillips, Executive Director of Woman’s Co-op says, “Chatter is a nice way to communicate, even for a small nonprofit, things you might want to talk about but cannot say out loud and things you do not want to forget.”

With Salesforce and Chatter, organizations can keep track of their data records and communications and easily bring new individuals into a collaborative team even from outside their staff.  While adoption may take time, encouragement from executives and clear guidance to new users can all help the effort.  In the long run, Chatter is worth the effort if it improves collaboration and team spirit among staff or provides a channel for collaboration between staff and concerned parties outside an organization. 

A special thanks to Marc Baizman for collaborating on this post.