Managing Volunteer Opportunities at Scale with Volunteers for Salesforce and WordPress

Posted by Nineta Martinovon July 28, 2020in Apex Code, Custom Development, Salesforce, Salesforce.org, Volunteers for Salesforce, Web Services

Founded 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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Share your Salesforce Data with Your Constituents

Posted by Nineta Martinovon January 3, 2018January 3, 2018in Custom Development, Non-Profit Success Pack, Reporting, Salesforce

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!

Case Study: The Value of Web Services: Enabling a Real-time, Responsive Volunteer Event Calendar for EarthCorps

Posted by Patty Simontonon February 22, 2017April 23, 2021in Case Study, Responsive Volunteers for Salesforce Calendar, Salesforce, Web Services

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/

Case Study

EarthCorps is using the Volunteers for Salesforce app to help them manage their extensive volunteer program. The Volunteers for Salesforce app enables an organization to show a calendar of events on their website. This is a useful tool to recruit volunteers, but EarthCorps felt they were not reaching all potential volunteers because their online calendar did not respond well on mobile technology. EarthCorps decided to redesign their website on WordPress and recruited DaizyLogik to help ensure they could display a responsive volunteer event calendar.

Our DaizyLogik developers knew that it would be a complex undertaking to make the existing Volunteers for Salesforce calendar mobile friendly. Additionally, it would be difficult to make it match the look and feel of the rest of the website, since WordPress has their own internal fonts and themes that do not generally match content pulled from Salesforce directly. Our team proposed a different solution: Write web services to retrieve the necessary data from Salesforce and incorporate it into the WordPress site.

Contributing to an Open Source Salesforce Managed Package

Posted by Vladimir Martinovon September 14, 2016January 5, 2023in Apex Code, Salesforce, Salesforce Managed Package

Use Case: Volunteers for Salesforce

Some Salesforce managed packages provide developers in the community the opportunity to contribute with code and features. Packages such as the Non Profit Starter Pack or Volunteers for Salesforce are open source software, which means developers can contribute to the code on GitHub (https://github.com/) resulting into new features or improvements to the software. These features are then packaged into the managed version being upgraded.

University of New Hampshire engaged Daizy Logik to develop several enhancements to Volunteers for Salesforce that were then incorporated back into the package. Based on this work we developed this step-by-step technical guide on how to successfully contribute to an open source Salesforce managed package. The process described here uses Volunteers for Salesforce as an example but could be more generally applied to any open source managed package.

Development Environment Setup

To facilitate the setup of your development environment we recommend using these freely available utilities that should be available on both Mac and PC.