On-Demand Politics: How Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) Will Transform Political Campaigns

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Introduction The strategic management of data will have a decisive impact on the 2008 elections as political campaigns begin to adopt state-of-the-art technologies and relationship management applications to manage communications and relationships with voters, donors, volunteers, and constituents. However, much of the estimated $8-12 billion that political campaigns will raise and spend during the 2008 election cycle1 could be misdirected because of inherent deficiencies in the traditional software licensing model.

In the last general election, we saw the power of the Internet as a new and effective grassroots communication vehicle for reaching out to citizens, mobilizing volunteers, and driving contributions. When it comes to information management, however, most electoral and advocacy campaigns still operate as if the Internet does not exist. They continue to pay high, up-front fees for on-premise software programs that do not scale well—up or down—and that are difficult to customize, implement, integrate and use. Moreover, they still have to deal with the headaches of installing, maintaining, and eventually tearing down large, complex, and geographically dispersed IT infrastructures.

In the upcoming election cycle, campaign managers will be able to deploy powerful new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that eliminate these problems by essentially allowing them to “rent” enterprise-class applications and IT infrastructure over the Web. These solutions—also known as on-demand applications—are affordable, scaleable, easy to use, simple to manage and administer, readily customizable, and quickly implemented.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) SaaS solutions are applications that are delivered over the Internet. This increasingly popular model is not a panacea for all of the data problems political campaigns face, but it does offer substantial advantages over traditional software. The private sector has already broadly adopted SaaS, and as political campaigns begin to realize that technology increasingly determines winners and losers, they are sure to follow suit. Agility SaaS applications allow campaigns to start small, make systematic improvements, add more subscriptions (users) as their races heat up, and drop them when the election is over. Campaigns can select those applications that meet their needs and then tune them to their individual requirements. SaaS is thus like a utility that campaigns can tap to manage their operations, allowing them to stay nimble during all phases of an election.

1 Estimate of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet

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Low, Predictable Costs A major benefit of SaaS is the stability and predictability of costs. Unlike traditional software, SaaS customers do not face high front-end expenses. There are no servers or other hardware to buy and no up-front software license costs. Instead, customers pay a periodic subscription fee based on the number of people using the application. This regular payment schedule allows campaign managers to budget effectively and offers considerable savings. According to studies by the Gartner Group, the Yankee Group, and Morgan Stanley Research, the cost of SaaS over three to five years is almost half the cost of similar client/server solutions.2 Ease and Speed of Implementation In addition to the cost advantages of the SaaS subscription model, most SaaS applications can be up and running in weeks, not months or years like traditional software projects. Even complex SaaS applications usually take only about a month to implement. A CSO study found that almost 60 percent of on-demand solutions were implemented in under three months, versus only about 16 percent of on-premise solutions.3 This rapid deployment allows project managers to keep project schedules on track—while getting quick wins and building momentum for their campaigns. Ease of Use and Administration Many SaaS applications were built on the same principles as familiar consumer Web sites, such as Amazon.com and iTunes, in order to provide a product that is easy to use and customize. Volunteers who use the Internet regularly should need only minimal training to be proficient in these Web-based applications. And since most SaaS applications are regularly and automatically updated, campaigns do not have to go through the painful exercise of updating cumbersome legacy systems in order to benefit from enhancements and new features. Security and Privacy Because security and privacy are an intrinsic part of the SaaS business model, SaaS applications actually give campaigns more control over their data. Campaigns face fewer concerns about data leaks than with traditional software, because with SaaS, the data stays in the system. Consultants and volunteers can access the necessary data, but not walk away with it.

Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) These advantages are clearly evident when it comes to managing a campaign’s relationships with voters, donors, volunteers, and other constituents through fundraising, volunteer coordination, and event management. SaaS CRM solutions allow campaigns to easily track all aspects of their relationships with individual donors, including a donor’s contributions, interests, attendance at events, interactions with campaign staff, and discussions with candidates. They not only

2 The Gartner Group, “Three Year Total Cost of Ownership for CRM Software for MSB’s,” April 2004; The Yankee Group, “Hosted vs. Premise Based Sales Solutions: TCO and Trade Offs,” 2004; Morgan Stanley Equity Research, “Breaking Ground with On-Demand CRM,” August 2, 2004 3 CSO Insights 2006, “On-Demand versus On-Premise CRM,” by Jim Dickey and Barry Trailor, page 2

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allow campaigns to display data about individual donors, but also to aggregate data into dashboards that provide a comprehensive overview of fundraising efforts. Moreover, because SaaS CRM applications are accessible via any computer with an Internet connection, and in fact over most wireless handheld devices, campaigns can readily share information among relevant staff and volunteers regardless of where they are located, including those who are on the road.

SaaS CRM solutions also make the job of managing events easier. By providing a consolidated view of all aspects of campaign events, these applications can help campaigns plan everything from dinner speeches to national conventions. SaaS CRM allows campaigns to track invitations, attendance, expenses, equipment purchases, leasing, vendor contracts, and media relationships.

The Salesforce.com Advantage Salesforce.com pioneered the SaaS model and is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM). Salesforce.com provides flexible, cost-saving applications that allow political campaigns to manage projects and interactions securely, improve collaboration and information-sharing among staff, comply with regulations, and build custom applications quickly and easily.

Much of the salesforce.com advantage stems from its embrace of a multitenant architecture delivered over the Internet. Multitenancy allows each of salesforce.com’s over 29,000 customers to run its applications on the same version of software, with its own unique features stored in a meta-repository at the database level. By giving each customer the ability to customize its application rapidly and to implement it promptly, multitenancy facilitates quick time to value. By allowing seamless upgrades of each customer’s software several times a year without breaking any of its unique capabilities, multitenancy eliminates worries typically associated with legacy software. Whether a political campaign is national, state, or local—it can benefit from the enhanced performance and flexibility of a multitenant architecture.

The primary advantages of Salesforce solutions include high availability and performance, world-class security and privacy, comprehensive backup and disaster recovery, ease of use, easy customization, seamless upgrades, simplified integration, and the ability to share SaaS applications on salesforce.com’s AppExchange directory. Each of these advantages is discussed below.

High Availability and Performance Salesforce solutions are designed to handle billions of transactions quickly and reliably. For example, on October 31, 2006, salesforce.com delivered over 60 million transactions at a speed of about 269 milliseconds per transaction. Over the preceding quarter, salesforce.com delivered more than 3.7 billion transactions. In order to deliver this sort of reliability and performance, the company has invested approximately $50 million for infrastructure in its data centers. Notably, as the

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total number of transactions has increased, so has the speed of the salesforce.com service.

To make sure that its performance is transparent, salesforce.com maintains a site—http://trust.salesforce.com—that allows customers to monitor availability and the number and speed of transactions on a daily basis. No other SaaS provider offers this level of transparency.

World-Class Security and Privacy Because of the sensitive nature of a lot of election data, security is an acute concern for the political campaigns. So acute, in fact, that many campaigns dismiss SaaS solutions out of hand as too insecure to meet their needs. They reason that, because the data are stored remotely and the software is accessed over the Internet, SaaS must, by definition, be insecure. In fact, the opposite is true—SaaS offers a level of security that can be superior to traditional on-premises software. Here is why.

To be successful, SaaS providers must embrace cybersecurity as a core competence. Otherwise, no customer—not political campaigns, government agencies, financial institutions, health care firms, Fortune 500 companies, or even Mom-and-Pop shops—would trust them with their data. As a result, salesforce.com has designed its service architecture to be as secure as the online systems of leading financial services firms. Salesforce.com provides state-of-the-art security capabilities to prevent hackers and other unauthorized users from gaining access to customer data and complements these capabilities with strong physical security and backup measures.

Configured by experts and rigorously tested, the Salesforce security infrastructure includes proven, up-to-date firewall protection, intrusion detection systems, secure socket layer (SSL) encryption, and other security technologies, including proprietary security features developed specifically for salesforce.com. Salesforce.com adheres to leading security standards and undergoes annual SAS 70 (Type II) and Systrust examinations of its policies and procedures. In addition, salesforce.com implements extensive security and reliability measures in facilities where production equipment is located, including 24-hour physical security, biometric 2-factor identification systems, redundant electrical generators, and other backup equipment, to keep the servers continually up and running.

In addition to incorporating authentication controls that prevent users from viewing data without proper authorization, salesforce.com prevents the theft of personally identifiable information from its data centers. Customer data remains distributed across clustered storage arrays until an authorized user requests it. As a result, there is little risk of someone breaking into a salesforce.com data center and walking off with a hard drive containing sensitive data.

Many of the data breaches at other U.S. companies resulted from the loss of physical equipment such as computer tapes and laptops. Because salesforce.com does not ship tapes or computer disks among its data centers, there is no risk of a stolen tape falling into the wrong hands during transit. And because data in the

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SaaS model are stored securely in data centers and accessed securely over the Internet, there is no local data to be lost with a laptop.

The fact that leading financial institutions and major IT security companies are among salesforce.com’s biggest customers is further testimony to the security of salesforce.com’s Apex platform. Companies like these do not take security lightly. Indeed, global financial institutions and cybersecurity vendors are some of the world’s most demanding security customers. Their use of Salesforce solutions indicates that salesforce.com has successfully passed very high levels of security scrutiny.

Comprehensive Backup and Recovery Salesforce.com uses redundancy and geographic diversity to ensure that customer data on its systems are preserved in case of failure or disaster. Its application infrastructure is fully redundant, including network paths and devices, hosts, storage arrays, and support professionals. Both its primary (West Coast U.S.) and disaster recovery (East Coast U.S.) data centers are housed in Tier IV facilities, with redundant power, fire control, management systems, and carrier access.

Customer data in the primary salesforce.com data center is stored on a carrier-class redundant array of independent disks, then copied (at the block level) to an identical array at its disaster recovery data center over a secure, optical cable link with 2.4 gigabits per second throughput. The primary array is backed up to a local tape library nightly, then cloned to the Salesforce archive system in a third, Tier IV data center.

Ease of Use Salesforce.com has invested substantial time and effort in building an intuitive user interface that makes its applications easy to use. Independent customer satisfaction surveys show that Salesforce applications enjoy a customer satisfaction rating of 94 percent.4 These easy-to-use applications not only lead to higher end-user adoption, but also reduce the amount of training required. To further enhance usability, end users can personalize their applications.

Easy Customization Because each organization is unique, salesforce.com makes it easy to modify or extend all Salesforce applications to work the way that best suits individual campaigns. For most customizations, administrators can use point-and-click configuration tools that require no programming. For more complex customizations, salesforce.com provides toolkits for all major development languages. Regardless of the level of customization a campaign needs, it can reap all the benefits of the on-demand platform, including fast, easy, safe, and automatic upgrades—with all customizations intact.

Seamless Upgrades Salesforce.com makes upgrading from one version of its software to the next effortless and virtually transparent to customers. Between 1999 and 2006, salesforce.com released 20 new versions of its software. Each release contained

4 “Salesforce.com First Half 2006 Customer Relationship Survey” conducted by CustomerSat Inc.

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enhancements based on suggestions and input from customers. These upgrades, as well as regular fixes, were implemented seamlessly with little or no disruption of service. Importantly, during an upgrade all customized applications are automatically preserved and propagated to the next release, so that there are no costly upgrades like those typically required with on-premise software.

Simplified Integration Most organizations have invested in a variety of technology solutions over many years. To continue to operate efficiently while getting full value from those investments, new applications need to fit into an organization’s existing infrastructure and integrate with other systems, including enterprise (ERP) applications, legacy systems, and desktop tools. Salesforce.com recognizes the importance of integration—in fact, its solution was the only product to receive a perfect 10 for integration in InfoWorld’s “CRM shootout.”5

With Apex Connect, salesforce.com’s comprehensive family of integration technologies built on top of salesforce.com’s application programming interface (the Apex Web Services API), application integration is faster, easier, and more cost-effective than ever. Apex Connect provides five mix-and-match paths to integration success by leveraging new technologies and a proven integration partner ecosystem. Apex Connect means the end of fragile integrations, intricate dependencies, and vendor lock-in. It also means that, as with customizations, any updates will leave an organization’s integrations intact.

Ability to Easily Add New Applications Salesforce.com’s AppExchange is the first online marketplace for SaaS business applications. It makes finding and installing new SaaS applications as easy as accessing a song or buying a book online—whether customers want to extend their CRM applications or add general business functionality ranging from handling expense management to tracking purchasing, monitoring recruiting, and beyond. Some of these applications were created by salesforce.com, but most are built by partners and individual developers who chose to take advantage of the AppExchange. There are now hundreds of applications available in the AppExchange directory. Many of these applications are free and all of them are pre-integrated with Salesforce solutions.

Just as music lovers browse iTunes to sample and access songs, political organizations can visit the AppExchange directory to choose from hundreds of SaaS applications. With just a few clicks, Salesforce administrators can install SaaS applications into a campaign’s Salesforce environment to begin delivering added functionality immediately.

Conclusion SaaS offers several advantages to political campaigns that traditional client/server software does not, providing a powerful solution for many of the strategic data needs facing campaign managers. Among the most compelling advantages of SaaS are freedom from IT infrastructure management, rapid implementation, cost 5 InfoWorld, "Four-way CRM Shootout," James R. Borck, January 7, 2005

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savings, world-class data security, flexible customization, and ease of use. These advantages can substantially reduce the risk of campaign software deployments and allow armies of fundraisers and volunteers to use the software with minimal training. Although SaaS is a relatively new concept for many political campaigns, it has an extensive track record of success in the private sector. As campaigns realize these benefits, they too will embrace the SaaS model.

Salesforce.com is the clear market and technology leader in on-demand applications. To find out more about putting salesforce.com to work for your campaign, please go to www.salesforce.com/publicsector/ or call 1-800-667-6389.

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