1st Nov 2012 | Charity, Salesforce
Most charities need some way of keeping track of their donors and their volunteers.
Salesforce is a database that allows all of that.
Here is a video summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r6hxqg3PgRQ
Charities have many other needs, too.
How about setting up a website advertising for new volunteers?
You can easily set up a webpage, using Salesforce, that will allow you to accept that information straight into your Salesforce database. It will take about three minutes and require no programming. If you require it to fit in with your website’s theme, you may need to pass it by your web designer to smarten it up. (That should take them five minutes.)
Supposing you want to be notified every time a new person applies through that website and set a task to remind you to check up on the applicant within a set time?
Salesforce workflows make that a snap.
Perhaps you need to keep track of all your volunteers’ CRB (criminal records bureau) checks or their driving licences or some other check?
How about a report that automatically arrives in your inbox every month telling you of the checks that are due to expire in the following month? Very easy to set up. Once set up you can forget it.
You run courses and you need to keep track of delegates, facilitators and the people who referred your delegates… who attended which course. You want to associate the feedback from the courses with the relevant facilitators. With Salesforce that is all really easy to set up.
This is all done without any servers in your office. All you need are PCs (Windows, Macs or Linux will all work) with one of the common browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or Chrome) and an internet connection.
Training is simple, too. For your users it presents as a simple website.
Simple!
The entire system is upgraded and improved three times a year, free of charge. (Each upgrade takes up to five minutes.)
It is all maintained in top quality, secure, safe, reliable data centres.
And, as a charity (or non profit), you may well qualify for 10 user licences for free. (Check out the Salesforce Foundation.)
What is not to like? (This has only just scratched the surface of what Salesforce can do.)
No wonder Salesforce is now a top database for charities. Easy, reliable, intuitive.
What is there left to do? Tailor it so it perfectly fits your organisation’s needs. Cloud Genius are experts not only in Salesforce, but also customisations that are specific to charities. We will also provide training on your bespoke environment. Click on the Salesforce logo to request more information.
What is not to love?
Click here now to contact us for more information
23rd Oct 2012 | Defeating spam, General Information, Websites
In this article I will look at how you can prevent your email addresses being harvested from your website. It continues on from Defeating the Spammers pt1
The ‘traditional’ method was to put up a graphic instead of an email address. This may have prevented spammers from harvesting emails, but it also reduced the ease of use of the site. With a link the legitimate surfer could just click to open an email. With an image of the email address the surfer would have to type the email address into his/her email app. (If you linked the image to a mail address you would be back in situation where the harvester could gain your email address.)
Fortunately there is a WordPress plugin that addresses this exact problem.
CryptX
This will find anything on your WordPress post or page that looks like an email address and create an encrypted link. It can convert it to one of several different formats: john@cloud-genius.com can become:
- John[at]cloud-genius[dot]com – which is human readable, but cannot be clicked on.
- Can be replaced with a link that goes elsewhere.
- Can be replaced with an image of the email address
Or, my favourite
- Be replaced with a link that a robot cannot follow, but a human can. The text on the page is obfuscated so that a bot cannot read it.
If you need a page to not receive the Cryptx treatment, there is a tick box on the page editing screen that allows you to turn it off.
In total, it is easy to use Cryptx does it all for you. (Warning techie bit: you do not even have to put ‘mailto:’ links on your page.)
13th Oct 2012 | General Information
We have teamed up with our partners at webhost.cloud-genius.com to get you the best offers until the end of 31 October 2012.
For any purchase over £20, simply put in the code 5NC25 to get 5% off. (They actually price their services in dollars, so you might scrape through with a smaller purchase, depending on the exchange rate.)
Can’t get much fairer than that!
We use them for our hosting, so they must be good.
26th Sep 2012 | Defeating spam, General Information, Websites
One of the most disheartening things about having a new website is spam. It can attack in several ways:
1) The email addresses on the site are ‘harvested’ by spammers. All those email recipients then receive ever-increasing levels of unwanted emails.
2) The lovely form designed to receive information from interested customers starts to receive lots of spurious messages that appear to be meaningless drivel.
3) Comments are received on the blog that are completely meaningless, irrelevant and full of strange links.
Fortunately there are ways to defeat all of these problems, or at least get them down to manageable proportions.
This week I am going to look at getting rid of email link spam:
One of the reasons it happens is that email addresses are worth money. If a spammer can send out emails to lots of people and 1% of people buy something as a result then the more emails the spammer sends the more money he or she makes. A spammer sending 10 million emails will make 10 times as much as a spammer sending 1 million emails (all other things being equal). But, you say, these emails are not selling anything, how does the spammer make money? The links and pictures in the emails are there to test whether the email address is ‘live’ before selling it on!
The best way to stop this process from happening is to have the email addresses on your website unreadable by the harvesting program. Many people do this by putting up a picture of the email address rather than a real link. This causes inconvenience to your real visitors as they can no longer click on the link to send you an email, they have to type it themselves (and will inevitably make mistakes). This results in you receiving fewer legitimate emails and, if you are selling something, making fewer sales.
How about setting up links that are unreadable to the harvesting programs but are fully readable by humans and work properly as links?
Try this one: john@cloud-genius.com
If you hover your mouse over it you will notice (normally in the bottom left of your browser) that it produces gibberish. This is what a harvesting program (‘bot’) would see. It will look something like: javascript:DeCryptX(‘kpioAdmpve.hfojvt/dpn’). Click on it [the one that looks like an email address, not the javascript!] and it will open up an email to send to me.
Clever? In the next article I will explain how you can set this up.
Defeating the Spammers pt2
9th Sep 2012 | General Information
On the Contact Us page you may notice a web form.
When you put your information in it does three things:
1) Puts the information in my Salesforce database.
2) Sends me an email telling me that there is a new person interested in my services.
3) Thanks you for kindly giving me your information.
If you are interested in Salesforce and how it can help you be more responsive to customers, fill in the form!
Here is the form.
