Non-Profit Uses Google Sites and ScreenSteps to Forward Their Mission

Judi Sohn is the Vice-President of Operations at the Colorectal Cancer Coalition (C3), a nonprofit, nonpartisan, advocacy organization that fights colorectal cancer through research and policy advocacy. C3 has a staff of seven who are passionate about doing all they can to improve colorectal cancer awareness and treatment. Judi herself lost her father to colorectal cancer in 1999 so her work at C3 isn’t just a job. It’s a mission.

C3 deals with many of the same issues that any small organization deals with. They have limited workers so everyone has to wear a lot of hats. They have no option but to make efficient use of their time and their financial resources since both are limited.

C3 uses a variety of technologies to work more efficiently, including Salesforce.com, Google Apps, WordPress and Box.net. Some of these apps, like Salesforce, are donated to them as a non-profit. Judi is the technology guru at her organization, so when anyone has a question about how to integrate everything they turn to her.

We use a variety of web application services, Google Apps, Salesforce, Box and I’m not in the same office as my co-workers. So I was getting a lot of emails and instant messages saying ‘How do I..?’ Telling them that ’Here’s the help link for this app and here’s the help link for that app’ just wasn’t working. Particularly with our primary CRM, which is Salesforce, the help files are not designed for a non-profit organization so I was manually creating my own. I was taking screenshots. I was opening a Word file and I was copying and pasting and writing the text. It was a chore and it was taking forever.

She was trying to create help documents that looked exactly like what ScreenSteps creates. She was just doing it the hard way. Then she started using ScreenSteps and things got faster. A lot faster.

The best part about ScreenSteps is that it does what it does and it gets out of the way. All that my co-workers know is that I am being so responsive. They are saying, “Wow, you are churning these lessons out fast.” I was doing this before using ScreenSteps but I was doing it in a very slow, manual process where they would ask me a question and two days later I would give them the link. Now they are asking me a question and 10 minutes later I am giving them a link. I am using the screen capture utility as I do the task myself, taking pictures along the way, adding some text, uploading and I am done.

When Judi first started using ScreenSteps she was exporting all of her lessons as HTML and then FTPing them to her website. This was faster than what she had done before but the FTP upload was still a bit tedious. Then ScreenSteps announced support for Google Sites.

Google Sites became a matter of delivery. It was the easiest way to create these documents and then give my co-workers a link where they don’t have to maintain a separate login and I don’t have to do any additional manual work.

Judi has used ScreenSteps and Google Sites to create a visual knowledge base for her co-workers. She doesn’t answer her co-workers’ questions anymore. She sends them links to the help files on her Google Site.

Before ScreenSteps I wasn’t as consistent. If I was really in a rush I would just answer the question instead of documenting the process which doesn’t really serve any purpose because two days later someone else will ask the same question and I have to repeat it or the same person will come back to me because they forgot the answer.

Now, anytime anyone asks me any type of question I never give them a straight answer anymore. I create a help document and I send it to them. My co-workers are getting to the point that they don’t even ask me “How do I..?” anymore. They say, “Can you create a document that will show me how to…?” because they know that is what I am going to do.

Google Sites lets Judi easily organize her content.

I just call Google Sites our intranet and have directories organized by the applications we use. I publish to a subdirectory off of the application the document is about. Then when my co-workers pull up the whole site they get a directory of all of the applications we use. It’s basically a table of contents with all of the questions that are answered grouped by application.

C3 isn’t doing anything differently than they did before. They are just doing it better and faster and that frees up more time for them to spend focusing on their real mission, fighting colorectal cancer, not fighting technology.

It’s my job to make adopting and integrating the technology easy and ScreenSteps with Google Sites helps me do that job.

Particularly in the non-profit Salesforce community it is a phenomenal tool because the Salesforce documentation is so not written for us. All of us who support folks in a non-profit Salesforce environment have to have a tool like this because we don’t have access to the built-in help materials. We have to create it ourselves.

As an added benefit, what used to be a painful process is now more enjoyable.

What used to take me a day of dread when I got around to it, is now “Ooh fun! I get to create a lesson.” In a way that only a geek can appreciate it is actually fun.