Project Open Hand extends warm welcome to Volunteers for Salesforce
- Summary:
- The San Francisco-based charity has brought order and efficiency to the process of recruiting volunteers and allocating shifts in its mission to deliver “meals with love”
On September 26, San Francisco-based charity Project Open Hand will hold a ‘Toast & Jam’ event in Oakland’s Preservation Park, in order to raise funds for its work in delivering meals to elderly and critically ill people in San Francisco and Alameda County.
This champagne brunch, featuring New Orleans-style jazz, will require an army of volunteers if it’s to be successful - and, at the time of writing, there were still plenty of opportunities to get involved, with volunteers needed to set up tables, register arriving guests and assist the event chef.
It’s not just special events like this that rely on the hard work and goodwill of volunteers. Every day of the year, Project Open Hand needs around 125 volunteers to deliver 2,500 meals to the people who use its services.
Signing up volunteers and allocating them shifts is vital - and the more efficiently those processes can run, the better, says the charity’s director of volunteer services, Sean Rosas:
There are people who give you money and people who give you time. Data about them gives us headlights that we’ve put on our organisation to see the road ahead. If you can’t see what’s ahead, you’re going to hit a lot of potholes. You’re going to make a lot more mistakes.
A year ago, it was all a bit of a challenge, he says. The charity was struggling to coordinate data relating to volunteers and donors - two groups that often overlap - across a range of legacy databases.
Thirty years of information, comprising around 250,000 individual accounts, amounted to some 10 gigabytes of data, says director of information services, Jay Owens:
But the real issue was that our databases didn’t communicate. They were standalone. And they were antiquated - not built on the cloud. All the functionality we need these days tends to only be found in systems built on the cloud.
Moving to Salesforce
With that in mind, Project Open Hand decided to migrate to Salesforce.com, with the help of Heller Consulting, a technology consulting firm that specialises in non-profit organisations. The project took around six months, running from April to October 2014.
Now, volunteers can visit Project Open Hand’s website, view events and available shifts and submit their details via a pop-up form. That data feeds directly into Volunteers for Salesforce, which in turn integrates with Salesforce NGO Connect. Setting it up wasn’t tricky, says Owens:
The functionality is pretty simple and well-documented in Volunteer for Salesforce’s set-up documentation. It’s basically a question of setting up your site, choosing the fields that you want volunteers to populate on your pop-up form, and then using custom settings to determine how contacts come into the database. Are they a new record, for example, or do they match another contact record?
The number of volunteer opportunities on a given day or for a specific event are shown on the website. When a volunteer signs up, Salesforce immediately updates that number on the site accordingly. It automatically sends an email notification to the volunteer, thanking them for their involvement and providing them with information on their shift or event, what to wear, the best way to travel there and other information.
Salesforce also enables Project Open Hand to run volunteer recruitment campaigns by email, and the charity has other plans to increase its use of Salesforce, Owens adds:
But today we’re already in a much better place. We’re using great technology and migrated all of our data into one data source. Well, I say “all our data” - we still hear about random spreadsheets, but we’re tackling these.
But what I would say is that we have more control over data and more ownership of data within our organisation. More people are seeing data and more people are using it. And we can better see the relationships that we have with individuals - volunteers who are donors, donors who are volunteers.
We still have grand ambitions, but now we have direction, too.
Disclosure - at time of writing, Salesforce is a premier partner of diginomica.