A former colleague chatted me yesterday with this perplexing “deal”:
SalesForce is offering non-profits free licenses to their software. But we keep on running into issues with their “governors.”
That’s really great of SF to do- and explains an uptick in “do you do SalesForce?” emails that I’ve been getting. The downside is a serious throttling to list size. SalesForce “governors” control the amount of items in targeted lists, so you can only include very small mailings. Seemed like all of the downside of having a hosted solution with none of the upside. If your experience is different, please post here, my friend’s eager to have an alternative, or fix, to the solution.
The question came up of complex segmentation for small lists. What ESPs can handle it? We determined that manually building a statistical model and scoring it then uploading to ESPs and using the “score” to simple filter the lists, is probably the only real inexpensive solution for non-profits. Note: this is not for transactional, or triggered, messages, just promotional and newsletter-oriented emails.
The alternates I suggested to him: SugarCRM, StrongMail, and a few consultancies that could help him setup the database. He and I had worked on an Epiphany installation and the license for that was too expensive for his clients, so that was out. He wasn’t interested in a per-email pricing either.
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Did you ever find a solution to this?
Comment: Peter – 12. July 2008 @ 8:01 am
Nope- friend at SF wrote to me, and I haven’t followed up (my bad!) about getting in contact with some of the developers. My suspicion is that as a freebie, it’s not as juicy as the real SF, and they probably aren’t willing to support large lists- and large being even 10K
Comment: banane – 17. July 2008 @ 11:26 am