One of my favorite quotes from Marc Benioff on the foundation of Salesforce and the Pledge One model: 

"It's easy to take the 1-1-1 pledge as a startup because you have no product, you have no money, and you have no time."

-Marc Benioff 

I'm paraphrasing his actual statement, but Marc's message to startups was clear.... build Philanthropy into the DNA of a company early on.

When we launched iDialogue, we borrowed a strategy from the book "Crossing The Chasm" and studied several industry solutions to determine which markets we could most readily serve.

There were so many use cases to choose from, it made the decision very difficult. But our Pledge 1% inner compass kept pointing to "helping others first", which resulted in developing several document templates for the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). These templates are now free to download to all Salesforce NPSP Admins.

For Salesforce Administrators at Nonprofits, the task of generating year-end tax donation receipts may seem arduous. But since the majority of new donations come from current donors, this year-end "dialogue" between nonprofits and donors can become an opportunity.

At Pacific Apps, we break this type of campaign down into a few basic steps (which our Concierge support team can help setup and configure).

1. Create a branded document room portal
2. Add a Stripe payment method component to the page layout
3. Add a document component to the page
4. Generate donation letters (see below, either on-demand or in batch)
5. Invite donors to download their donation letters AND ask them to submit a donation

The donation letters support merge tags. Free Microsoft Word templates are available for download and customization. Templates are available for one-time donations or summarizing many donations in table rows.
Generate the documents either on-demand for each Account, Opportunity, Payment or Recurring Donation. Or generate the documents in batch.

Learn more about the iDialogue Accelerator for Salesforce NPSP or watch the video below.

iDialogue 1.0 launched in 2006 as one of the first apps on the Salesforce AppExchange. At that time, iDialogue was an "enterprise portal" solution with a focus on providing self-service to Salesforce data through a secure website. A recurring pattern emerged among our early adopters. The majority of those visionary customers all implemented some sort of document management solution in their portal. Document-related experiences like generating and receiving quotes, uploading files and resumes, onboarding customers and employees, publishing product guides and manuals, and downloading invoices were common.

Now, more than 12 years later, the concept of an enterprise portal has evolved to primarily support the direct, personalized, and secure customer transactions. This transaction tier is the final stage in what I'll refer to as the "Customer Dialogue Funnel".

At the top of the funnel there are mass marketing campaigns using TV, Print, Radio, and CPM Internet ads. Eventually a more direct dialogue evolves using direct marketing solutions; such as CPC/CPA ad campaigns, landing pages, email and chat.

The third layer in the funnel represents community dialogues, where Customers are educating themselves about products, researching reviews and comments, and participating in discussion forums, the Idea Exchange, or Chatter groups.

Ultimately these dialogues result in a transactional 1:1 customer experience that involves accepting a quote, signing an agreement, renewing a subscription, submitting a payment, or any number of transactions.

A well-balanced customer experience architecture will funnel their customers through all 4 stages of the funnel. 

iDialogue is the transaction layer in this architecture.

Customer Dialogue Funnel
Mass marketing evolving to personalized, secure transactions.

Transactions tend to be document-centric, but may also include payment processing and intake forms. Much of the compliance, regulatory, and governance requirements tend to occur at the transaction layer.
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We've rebuilt iDialogue from the ground up with a document-centric focus on the Salesforce Lightning platform. The same portal builder features are included for building secure websites, portals, and landing pages. But the customer experience is built around the context of a Salesforce record for use in recording a transaction. The Salesforce record context can be an Account or Contact with a broad range of available details. Or the portal context could be specific to an Opportunity, Quote, Job Offer, or  Home Mortgage Loan. Any standard or custom object can be used in a contact dialogue.

We worked closely with the Salesforce Security Review Team to ensure our frictionless customer onboarding process, using one-time use tokens, was both convenient to customers but secure enough to host the most sensitive documents and transactions.

Messaging and comments are built-in to document portals as more customers expect a messaging app experience when interacting with organizations. The concepts of "redlining" contracts and sending email attachments back forth are progressively moving to shared, online collaboration spaces with secure messaging in the context of a document.

Many Salesforce Veterans and System Administrators will naturally ask how does iDialogue compare to other document solutions like Conga, Drawloop, Spring, Docusign and dozens of others on the AppExchange. Over time it'll become evident that document generation is just one feature in the transaction platform; as are electronic signatures and payments. Ultimately our focus on industry solutions with pre-built accelerators and AI-assisted workflows will be our greatest differentiator.

iDialogue's document generation technology certainly has had the benefit of experience, observing the best features in other solutions, and leveraging out-of-box capabilities of Lightning that were not available to competing solutions many years ago when they were pioneering the market.

The goal of CRM is to facilitate dialogues between an organization and their customers, donors, partners, employees, patients... or really any person defined by a Salesforce Contact. And the role of iDialogue is to provide a framework for the essential transactions that occur between a company and a customer.