At Craftsman, we believe in the power of networks. The organizations we work with have members, partners, affiliates, volunteers, and advocates that expand the staff’s capacity and create far reaching impact. The tools these organizations require must facilitate communication across a broad range of users, aggregate data from multiple inputs and create efficiencies for staff and non-staff alike. Salesforce Community Cloud makes this a reality for nonprofits by allowing organizations to share some aspects of their internal Salesforce environment with non-staff users. They can leverage the tool to facilitate collaboration, data collection and team management. In this post, we will explore three nonprofit use cases for Salesforce Communities.
Enable Your Partners to Self-Manage
A hunger prevention organization works with partners across the state to create a referral network for those they serve. With over 50 partner sites it can be challenging for the organization’s small central team to keep up with partner staff changes, updates to service dates and shifts in program. To solve this problem, the organization provides partner logins using Community Cloud licenses. Once logged in, partners are able to view and edit their contact and service information firsthand, making it automatically available to clients on the central organization’s website. The organization’s partners get a space where they can communicate, share resources and support one another in their work. This builds trust and familiarity for providers and improves the quality of resources available across the state.
Specific information entered by referral partners is made available to constituents on a public Community page accessible through the organization’s website and a Lightning component search tool. Website visitors can filter the search criteria to include zip code, hours of operation, and languages spoken. The component is responsive to Salesforce data updates, making the information timely and relevant to users, while simultaneously freeing up staff time.
Give Volunteer Leaders the Tools They Need
Another organization works with specially trained volunteers to lead workshops on diversity, equity and inclusion across the country. After attendees register online, the volunteer leaders need to manage their session participants, share materials, send reminders and update attendance after the session is complete. They also need to see if an attendee has registered for a workshop in the past. Finally, the organization needs leaders to collect feedback by sharing a survey link specific to each session.
The organization created a community where volunteer leaders can login to see a list of attendees for each of their sessions. Using list views they can filter by training, date, organization or location. Leaders are also able to share feedback and add notes to a contact’s record, improving engagement with that participant moving forward. Similar to the partners in the first example, volunteer leaders are able to connect with the organization and its network to share resources and access up to date information.
Because leaders are able to update attendance themselves, the organization’s central staff does not have to spend time tracking down data. They are also able to see a record of communication with the participants including any notes or session feedback. Finally, a third party form tool has allowed the organization to send a prefilled survey with the workshops’ details to all attendees. The survey automatically records responses in the organization’s Salesforce environment. This allows the organization to identify and report on issues and opportunities early on, improving the experience for both leaders and participants.
Track an Affiliate’s Progress Towards a Shared Goal
A third organization advocates for environmental sustainability and has affiliates across the globe. Each affiliate manages their day to day operations independently according to the specific needs of their team. The global organization manages central finances and needs a way to track budgets, fundraising and engagement across all of their sites. They also want to share progress towards common goals that update in real time.
The organization uses Community Cloud licenses to share budget and grant details with the sites, show key data for grant deliverables and enable the affiliates to monitor their progress. They leverage Community Cloud dashboard capabilities to aggregate the number of contacts made, pledges signed and dollars raised. Users from Seattle to Shanghai can see the most up to date information when they login to the system and the central organization knows that each location has the data they need to manage their programs effectively and efficiently.
Summary + Conclusion
These three use cases highlight just a few of the ways that Salesforce Community Cloud is used by nonprofits to engage with broad networks. The examples show that exposing select data elements in an organization’s Salesforce environment allows partners, volunteers and affiliates to take greater ownership of their engagement with the central organization, free up staff time and improve outcomes for constituents.