While there's healthy discussion happening in the Nonprofit Salesforce.com Practitioners user group, an area that isn't highlighted enough is new ideas for the Nonprofit Starter Pack.  I don't mean just feature ideas for fundraising, donations, case management, etc.  I'm talking about bug reports, bug fixes, documentation, tutorials, translations, and more.

With such a great community of users and implementers, this seems like a missed opportunity.

During chats at the Nonprofit Developer Sprint in DC this week, Salesforce Foundation staff  made it clear that they welcome community support in a variety of contexts, including ideas that can make the software itself better.  Hence, the Foundation's fantastic support of events like this week's sprint.  The challenge, it seems, is that there hasn't been a path to community engagement in the form of cultivating new feature ideas, bug fixes, documentation, etc.

If you're interested in getting your hands on the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) for Salesforce, there's two standard ways to get started.  Depending on your needs, especially if you're just tinkering before building a full Salesforce implementation for your organization, one of these installs will likely be more useful to you than the other.

The most common way is through a system called Trialforce.  This is the type of Salesforce org that is created when you sign up for the Salesforce Foundation's free product donation form.  The benefit of using this version of the Nonprofit Starter Pack is that it comes pre-built with a number of items that aren't included in the managed package version of the NPSP, like record types that are specific for non-profit organizations.

This can save  you a lot of time getting up and running; however, if you're looking for a customized installation of Salesforce, you might end up spending quite a bit of time deleting customizations.

For the past 15 years, I've dabbled a bit in the world of open source software. During most of that time, I've worked within communities free of corporate structures, many of which have produced some of the best software the world has ever seen without any corporate governance.

The background explains why I'm so interested in seeing things done in a different, corporate structured way, in the Salesforce.com world this week. Starting today, the Salesforce Foundation is bringing together a small team of developers to Washington DC for code sprints on the Nonprofit Starter Pack, a set of tools that organizations can use to more effectively use the Force.com platform for fundraising, contact management, and more.  I'll be among those folks contributing ideas and code to the project, and looking forward to collaborating with my buddies in the Salesforce world.

Make no mistake about it: the Nonprofit Starter Pack is the single most important open source contribution Marc Benioff has put his company's 1/1/1 giveback model towards supporting. And, with the not-so-new-but-still-new-to-me code repository (hello to GitHub) and great leadership, the project is moving down an exciting path that I foresee disrupting the nonprofit CRM marketplace in a very positive way.

For those hit by the news from Blackbaud last week that Convio Common Ground will be discontinued in 2014, the pressing question at hand is the same that any refugee faces: where to now?

In considering options, there are three important aspects of the move to take into account: 1) which CRM platform should be my new home?; 2) how will I move and who can help?; and 3) how will that CRM platform integrate with my website?