Managing Volunteer Opportunities at Scale with Volunteers for Salesforce and WordPress

SHFB_Primary_Logo_RGB@2x-8Founded in 1974, Second Harvest Food Bank of Silicon Valley is one of the largest food banks in the nation, providing food to more than a quarter of a million people in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties every month – that is roughly 1-in-10 people across the region.

The organization distributes more fresh produce than almost any other food bank in the country, through a network of 310 nonprofit partners at 1,000 sites.

Technology is a crucial component for Second Harvest to be able to fulfill its mission – from tracking warehouse inventory and managing distribution activities, to allowing partner agencies to order online, and routing delivery to distribution sites at specific times.

Read more about the work DaizyLogik and Metric Media did to implement and re-launch the Second Harvest volunteer calendars using Volunteers for Salesforce and WordPress, to fulfill the food bank’s need to, “meet people where they are,” as described by Second Harvest Director of Information Technology, Elizabeth Whamond.

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Engaging Members, Building Relationships

Net Hope LogoDaizyLogik client, NetHope, a consortium of nearly 60 leading global nonprofits, empowers committed organizations to change the world through the power of technology. Its members deliver over 60 percent of all annual, international, non-governmental aid. NetHope unites with over 60 technology companies and funding partners to design, fund, implement, adapt, and scale innovative approaches to solve development, humanitarian, and conservation challenges. Together, the NetHope community strives to transform the world, building a platform of hope for those who receive aid and those who deliver it.

NetHope has been using Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack for a few years but wanted to increase the adoption of the system with its staff and take full advantage of its capabilities, in support of the organization’s fundraising and membership management efforts.

Learn more about how we approached this work and the journey of making Salesforce CRM an effective tool, central for the organization.

Salesforce CRM, the ‘PATH’ to Global Engagement

For many nonprofits fundraising is not just a means of raising critical funds, but also a way to promote the message and goals of a charity. Given enough time and capital, a charity has the potential to go global with engagement, ensuring the organization can continue support its cause; for example, funding research. What can get in the way of potential lifechanging funding? Operations that aren’t consistently streamlined. This is where Salesforce can be a powerful tool in constituent management; with more importantly, the right training.

Salesforce has earned its place as one of the most comprehensive CRM software options on the market. A popular solution for for-profit businesses, many nonprofits tend to fall into the belief that because of their specific needs, it may not be the right fit – fortunately, that’s not true! Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud is the only complete platform for nonprofits. It’s the only platform that gives you a 360-degree view of an organization’s mission, and is the only platform built with a community of over 30,000 trailblazers. Its program allows users to deepen constituent relationships, deliver better programs, and accelerate its transformation into a connected nonprofit. A great example of its possibilities was established by DaizyLogik client, PATH, and case study: Understand Your Stakeholders: A Case Study in Agile Salesforce CRM Planning; specifically with client lead, Catherine Endicott. Catherine came into the project with no prior Salesforce CRM experience, but as an experienced fundraising professional. Our team worked alongside her and the PATH team throughout the project to drive the migration of the organization fundraising data and processes from Donor Perfect Online to Salesforce CRM.

Now, two years later, Catherine has not only grown more confident in her use of Salesforce CRM but, has started helping others in the community by sharing some of the practices that our team helped put in place at PATH. Don’t just take our word for it though, please allow Catherine to explain herself in our recent customer review, below.

Adding CAPTCHA to Volunteers for Salesforce Sign Up Form

Nonprofits love when volunteers sign up and engage with the organization. When using Volunteers for Salesforce this is accomplished through the sign up form that allows sign ups to flow from the online form directly into Salesforce. It is therefore important to protect the quality of the incoming data and make sure it is humans signing up and not bots.

This article will show how to enhance the Volunteers for Salesforce Signup page with CAPTCHA using very little customization.

Please keep in mind that the Volunteers for Salesforce Sign Up page is part of the managed package Volunteers for Salesforce so in order to add the CAPTCHA some coding will be needed.

A Case Study for using FormAssembly to Manage Ticket Sales

Washington Global Health Alliance (WGHA) has been using Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack for a few years to track and manage their members and donors. The data collected in Salesforce allows WGHA to measure and report on their members’ interactions and collaboration, and ultimately on the impact of their work in the global health community.

WGHA organizes a number of member and public events throughout the year. They had used Eventbrite to manage ticket sales, and had tested Brown Paper Tickets, but were disappointed with the new price points of both platforms and policy changes, and wanted to find another solution. More importantly, they wanted a solution that would easily feed all event data into Salesforce and remove the need for double data entry. Once the information was in Salesforce, they wanted to track the participation and payments of event attendees, donors, and other stakeholders associated with the organization.

Since the WGHA team was not looking for a full-blown event management system, the DaizyLogik team recommended FormAssembly.

Learn more about this decision and how our team helped to empower WGHA’s team to use this new tool with confidence.

 

Addressing Salesforce CRM Storage Limitations – A Document-Oriented Database Inspired Approach

Most organizations start out with 1GB of storage for Salesforce CRM. This can be a challenge especially for nonprofits who would like to collect a lot of data needed to report to their funders,  collect program data or consolidate multiple aspects of their business data into Salesforce. Over time the data fills up the allotted storage and puts organizations into a bind to either purge data or purchase more storage.

Over the years we have explored different solutions that can be used as preventive measures and limit the storage used. The traditional approach is to either export and archive or aggregate and purge older records. The drawback with these solutions is that you can no longer see the details of the historical data in Salesforce.

Below we describe a different preventive approach inspired from document-oriented databases that allows organizations to keep their data and not run the risk of running out of storage.

Updating and Automating Business Processes Through Salesforce NPSP

Washington Defender Association (WDA) engaged DaizyLogik to assist with efforts to update and automate their business processes while moving to Salesforce CRM. This effort was done in concert with WDA’s initiative to redesign their outdated website and ensured a much needed integration between the two systems. WDA is a membership organization whose clients include attorneys and their staffs, all of whom expect an easy-to-use interface, a high level of access, and an equally high level of privacy to protect sensitive data.

WDA’s outdated database in Access was isolated and cumbersome to maintain. The team wanted a more flexible cloud-based solution that would give them the opportunity to integrate with the new website and enable data to flow directly into their database.

Read how the DaizyLogik team addressed this challenge.

Business Processes Change. Your Salesforce CRM Should Change With Them.

Does your Salesforce CRM feel disconnected from your business processes? Do you feel like you have to use Salesforce because is telling you to, but you end up reverting to spreadsheets and sticky notes?

As Salesforce has been gaining momentum in the nonprofit community, many nonprofits adopt and implement the powerful CRM to manage their donor engagement and programs. Through our work with nonprofits at various stages in their journey with Salesforce, we have found that while their business processes may change and evolve to meet new demands, their CRM doesn’t always keep up.

Fortunately, there are a few telltale signs that indicate that an organization is using a CRM that no longer supports their business processes. If you see your staff seeking out alternatives to Salesforce, it may be time to schedule a business process review.

Share your Salesforce Data with Your Constituents

At DaizyLogik we always strive to serve our clients through a thoughtful approach in which we take the coolest solutions we develop and make then widely available to as many organizations as possible. Nonprofits work hard to make the world a better place, and they deserve to have access to these solutions in a streamlined and cost effective way. So when our consultants see patterns emerge from client requests, our team of developers transform these ideas into useful products and services. We share a few examples here.

The Salesforce Data Story

Over the years, we’ve found that many organizations want to publicly share some of the important data they collect in Salesforce on their website. The most common ways to do this come with their own set of challenges:

  • Exporting a snapshot of the data from Salesforce, and hard-coding it in the website. This requires manual process and results in static website content.
  • Exposing Visualforce pages through sites requires custom Salesforce development which can be expensive and difficult for web developers to style in a public website.
  • Using Salesforce Communities which comes with a steep price tag.

We knew there had to be a more streamlined way to make this work. Our team wanted solutions that would not require us to reinvent the wheel every time a client asks, that does not clutter Salesforce with custom code, and that can scale to benefit multiple clients. So we built them!

The Power of a Phased Approach: Implementing the Nonprofit Success Pack in an Existing Salesforce Instance

PATH hired DaizyLogik to help them improve user buy-in within the Global Engagement division and incorporate Salesforce as a true CRM for the department.

This case study offers insights into how the DaizyLogik team led the effort to implement the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) on an existing Salesforce database for PATH by using a phased approach.

This body of work started with the output from the CRM planning phase, which we discussed in Part 1 of this Case Study (Understand Your Stakeholders: A Case Study in Agile Salesforce CRM Planning). This work included over 900 user stories that were groomed and prioritized, an existing Salesforce instance with approximately 700 active users, 1.5GB of data to be migrated from DonorPerfect into NPSP, and integration with external applications such as DonorSearch and SoapBox Engage.

Recognizing the scale of this project, our team started by defining a few phases of implementation, each with its own theme and set of goals.

Read the full case study here.