EarthCorps is a nonprofit based in Seattle, Washington, that uses the natural classroom of The Puget Sound to teach young leaders the skills they need to address the environmental challenges facing our planet today. Every year, more than 10,000 youth, business leaders, and community members connect through EarthCorps to care for public parks and trails in the region. EarthCorps’ Mission is “to build a global community of leaders through local environmental service.”

We encourage you to learn more about EarthCorps’ impact from their website: https://www.earthcorps.org/

Background

Earlier this year, we wrote about how DaizyLogik created REST web services on Salesforce to enable EarthCorps to ensure that the data on their calendar came directly from Salesforce in real time and was mobile friendly, all while matching the look and feel of their WordPress website.

You can read more about this case study here, The Value of Web Service: Enabling a Real-Time Responsive Volunteer Event Calendar for EarthCorps.

Today, we’re excited to share information about an exciting follow up project with EarthCorps that enables their team to manage their calendar in a more hands on and visual way.

Case Study

EarthCorps coordinates 850 volunteer events, field projects, and workshops each year, and they must frequently update event details, dates, and teams as circumstances change. The process of updating the details for each event involved a number of time consuming steps.

Here’s how it used to work:

1. Using the Field Calendar view, Users had the option to change the month displayed, or switch to a weekly view.
2. To update information for an event, a User would click on a project on the screen to bring them to a standard Salesforce page that included detailed information about that project or event.
3. Once a User made their changes, they needed to return to the Field Calendar view and refresh the page so it would reflect the new information.

This process was not particularly easy and team members complained that it took too much time. On top of that, users did not have a visual to reference while they were making changes to the calendar, which made it more difficult to keep track of things.

EarthCorps leadership wanted to make it easier for project teams to make updates to their events. They wanted to be able to take the visual image of an event on the Calendar and simply drag it to a new location within the same month, or to a new month, automatically updating the event’s information.

The Solution: Drag and Drop Matrix

The DaizyLogik team developed a unique and visually satisfying Drag and Drop Matrix, which for EarthCorps, displayed their events calendar.

Our director of technology and co-founder, Vladimir Martinov, wrote about his early experiments to interact with Salesforce data through Drag and Drop technology, and you can read more about this in this post.

Since we had a proof of concept, our DaizyLogik team jumped in, first developing a new view of the Calendar, which we’ll call Field Calendar 2.

The “squares” in Field Calendar 2 were designed to move. Users are now able to grab a field project and move it to anywhere else on the screen within the Field Calendar 2 view, even assigning a project to a new crew in a different month. The project data is automatically saved in Salesforce, and the calendar auto-refreshes.

To update more project details than just the crew and the dates, users can now click on a link in the given project square, and they see a pop-up window that enables them to update the project information right there instead of going into a standard Salesforce page. Results are updated in real time, and the time needed to make changes to event details was cut in half.

For our clients at EarthCorps, who display many months worth of events at a time on a number of large screens, this new calendar view enables the team to work more efficiently, and respond more quickly to the constantly changing circumstances of their community.

The real test for this new functionality will come when the EarthCorps team prepares their 2018  Calendar, but early reports are in: “It’s perfect.”   

Want to learn more? Contact us today and let’s discuss how our DaizyLogik developers can partner with your organization’s WordPress or other website developers to integrate the web services and expose data from your Salesforce instance.