Most of the organizations we work with cannot justify sending anyone to Dreamforce, which is exactly why we are going.
A full conference pass, five nights in San Francisco, and a week of someone’s time adds up to real money. For a nonprofit running a five person operations team, or a business where the person who would go is also the person who closes the month, that math almost never works. The event still matters, though. Pricing changes get announced there. Roadmaps get shown. The gap between what a vendor is selling and what it actually takes to run tends to be visible in the hallway conversations in a way it never is in a press release.
So we are going, September 14th through 18th, and we would like to go with your questions in hand.
The Offer, Plainly
Send us what you want to know. We will spend the week trying to get you a real answer, and we will publish what we find.
We are already planning to write from the floor daily, two posts a day, one from an architecture and buyer perspective and one from the developer side. Those posts are far more useful if they are answering questions somebody actually has instead of whatever we happened to find interesting that afternoon.
There is no catch here and nothing to sign up for. Leave a comment on this post, send us a note through the consultation form, or find us on LinkedIn. You do not need to be a client. You do not need to be considering a purchase.
The Kinds of Questions That Work Best
The most useful questions are specific enough that a vague answer is obviously a vague answer. A few examples of what we mean:
Pricing and licensing. What does this actually cost at our size? Nonprofit organizations in particular tend to get quoted off a very different sheet than the one on stage, and the difference between the announced price and the real one is worth knowing before it shapes a budget.
The gap between demo and reality. Every keynote demo is a finished product running on clean data. The question worth asking is what had to be true for that demo to work, and how far your own environment is from that. We can ask people who have shipped it.
Adoption, not features. What did it take to get people to actually use this? How long did the rollout run, and who owned it? This is the question that most often separates a technology that helped from one that sat there.
What is being quietly deprecated. Conferences are built around what is new. The more useful information is frequently what is being wound down, because that is what shows up in your renewal conversation eighteen months from now.
What We Will Do With Them
Every question we can get a credible answer to will show up in the daily field notes or in the recap we publish the week after, September 22. Where we cannot get a straight answer, we will say that too. That is its own useful signal, and it happens more often than the agenda suggests.
We will not publish who asked what. If your question reveals something about your organization’s plans that you would rather not have public, say so and we will strip the context out entirely.
Why We Are Asking Nonprofits Specifically
Nonprofit technology gets treated as a discount tier of commercial technology, and it mostly is not. The constraints are different in kind, not just in degree.
You have restricted funds that cannot be moved between budget lines to cover an overage. You have a board that has to understand a purchase before it happens. You have grant reporting requirements that dictate what your data model has to be able to produce, sometimes years after the grant closes. And you frequently have one person carrying database administration alongside three other jobs, which makes “it just needs a bit of configuration” a much heavier sentence than a vendor realizes when they say it.
Very little conference content is built for that. The questions that get asked from the audience are usually asked by people with an admin team. We would like to bring a different set of questions into those rooms, and the only way to do that well is to be carrying yours.
We have written before about why centralized budgeting changes what nonprofits can actually afford to run, and the same underlying problem shows up here. The constraint is rarely the price of the software.
Send Them by September 11
We are pre-writing the first day’s posts on Friday September 11, so anything that arrives by then has the best chance of shaping the whole week. After that we will still take questions, and we will still chase them, but the schedule gets less forgiving once the event starts.
If you want the answers as they land rather than after the fact, the Iron Insights newsletter is where the daily notes get summarized.
Ready to get a straight answer to the technology question your team keeps circling? Let’s talk about what your organization actually needs through our nonprofit technology advisory work. Schedule a consultation today!
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