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 volunteer 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. DaizyLogik partnered with Metric Media to craft a Volunteers For Salesforce calendar that fits perfectly with the EarthCorps website and displays beautifully on mobile devices. You can view the EarthCorps volunteer events calendar here.

The Value of Web Services

For this project, DaizyLogik developed REST web services on Salesforce to enable the WordPress developers to retrieve the data and display it into the new calendar on the website. This ensured the data on the volunteer events calendar comes directly from Salesforce, in real time.

This solution has implications that extend far beyond an organization’s ability to keep their volunteer event calendar up to date. Here are some benefits:

Results are fully integrated into WordPress, maintaining the look and feel of the rest of the website.
Website displays real-time data. This is important because many organizations may not have the in-house skills needed to update a website on a regular basis. As a result, they may do a data dump from their Salesforce only once in a while, then display it on their WordPress site. This process is cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive.
The Salesforce data is fully secure. WordPress has to authenticate to retrieve the data from Salesforce.
It’s the more affordable option. The effort and cost on the Salesforce side is small, especially when compared to the process involved in developing a Salesforce page to embed into a WordPress site.
This solution enables an organization to display any Salesforce data on the WordPress website. Whether you want to list upcoming events, job openings, or share recent grant awards, this option will let you do it quickly and easily.
It’s mobile friendly. By integrating directly into responsive WordPress websites, this solution enables results to display well on mobile devices.

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.