Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Field of Dreams - Website Update

For just over year we've been focused and moving towards building an enhanced Outdoor Mindset website program engine. You might be saying, "Engine, what are you talking about engine, I thought this was about the website?" Well, let me explain a bit more. We on the board look at the website as much more than a static thing that people may come to visit, look at and move along. Our primary focus is to create and foster successful and life enhancing matches between guides and travelers and we see the website 'engine' as a way to bring this to a large group which scales well as interest and participation grows.

As you can see with our current site, we do have an 'engine' which is helping our organization accept new guides and travelers into the OM family. Our next big initiative is to enhance the 'engine' through the use of the Force.com (salesforce.com) platform which has been donated to us by salesforce.com. The new platform will allow us to streamline data gathering for guides, travelers, volunteers and those who support OM through their generous donations. The matching of guides and travelers will still take place at the hands of our experienced staff volunteers but the information will live in one place, allowing us to streamline the flow of data and to provide efficiencies in the way we run the organization.

We are in the RFP gathering phase and have quotes from some very qualified vendors who specialize in implementing salesforce.com for non-profit groups like OM. They will be assisting us with the build out and customization of the salesforce.com platform. In the coming months we'll be migrating to this new salesforce.com 'engine' and through this we expect to be delivering more to our guides and travelers on behalf of those wonderful folks who have donated funds to OM.

Thank you all for your continued support of OM.

Chris Boyd