Upgrading the PT Operating System

Over the past four years, PresenTense has been growing by leaps and bounds, from an all-volunteer magazine to a international organization with three fellowship programs, ten (almost eleven!) published magazines, a Jerusalem hub, dozens of events across the US, Canada, and Israel, hundreds of volunteers, and thousands of community members.

Over time, we've added new services as needed, often picking the easiest and cheapest (i.e. free) program. But now, between Gmail, Google Docs, Wufoo, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Blip, Livestream, a Salesforce account with Vertical Response, and six different websites so far (check out our very first one), we've racked up quite an array of information.

Right now, we're working to upgrade our own operating system and better organize and position PT for its next period of growth. Thanks to the Salesforce Foundation, we have a free Enterprise account that we've been using somewhat minimally for a couple of years. We're just now getting around to maximizing its powerful capabilities and setting it up to work for us. I've been working with NPTech, a new Israeli company that helps nonprofits integrate technological solutions in their organizations, to untangle processes and figure out just how we want to track all the data we need to collect - which is a lot harder than I thought it would be. On the user end, you rarely think about the amount of time and energy that goes into setting up an easy to use, intuitive way of collecting information that can then be accessible right at your fingertips, whenever you need it.

As onerous as the task sounds, I've surprisingly enjoyed delving into the history and structure of PT. It's an opportunity to review PT as a whole, past, present, and future - to examine where we've been, account for where we're at, and envision where we're going. The foundation needs to be solid enough to organize all our current information, and also accommodate future expansion - even when we're not entirely sure what that will include several years down the road.

Right now I'm in the design phase, which we expect to take another few weeks. Once we get the design right, then we'll set it all up and fix any bugs, and open it up to staff. I plan to include more updates on how Salesforce is going - so stay tuned!