The Greater Boston Food Bank first deployed Salesforce more than ten years ago. The platform serves a broad range of GBFB’s needs, from volunteer management and fundraising to food acquisition and agency partner support. It also supports GBFB’s public affairs work and provides a platform to connect those in need with SNAP benefits and other key services. Each of these programs have come online at different times, creating a legacy of historic components, silos, and systems that are more complicated than they should be to manage.

As a key component to GBFB’s digital strategy, they engaged Craftsman Technology Group was engaged to simplify and modernize their system. Through Managed Services, we established a consultative relationship, identifying opportunities to improve the day-to-day user experience without adding unnecessary complexity to the system. Over time, several larger renovation items surfaced including upgrades to three legacy portals: Volunteer, Agency, and SNAP, and a reduction in technical debt through the refactoring and retirement of legacy code.

Craftsman’s Professional Services team was first engaged in Spring 2021 to draft a solution design for the overhaul of the Volunteer Services portal. The existing portal was built on the legacy Customer Community Portal infrastructure with Visualforce pages and was becoming increasingly difficult for volunteers to navigate on mobile devices and for staff to maintain. The team wished to continue their use of Volunteers for Salesforce but desired enhancements to simplify waitlist management and streamline communication with volunteers, as well as an updated user experience.

The Craftsman team designed and implemented an Experience Cloud site to replace the legacy portal. The lighting user interface and an integration with Calendar Anything enabled a more mobile-friendly signup experience and the use of Mogli SMS will allow the GBFB team to communicate via text with volunteers when there are last-minute updates or changes to the schedule. A Salesforce flow allowed GBFB to implement a waitlist feature where volunteers would be notified and able to sign up directly when a space became available.

The Agency Portal design work began as the Volunteer Portal deployed. A similar set of needs surfaced: upgraded systems, improved user experience, easy access to reporting, and streamlined communications. The agency team also expressed the desire for agency partners to connect and share resources with one another, building on the momentum established during Covid-response calls. Craftsman again recommended a transition to Lightning Experience Cloud, where agency partners would be able to communicate using public groups, staff could post announcements and communicate from the homepage, and partners could complete monthly reporting and easily see their compiled impact metrics. Automation simplified user activation, a process that had been extremely cumbersome in the previous environment. The use of sharing rules and custom profiles in the new Lightning Experience also allows agency users to search for agencies by type, location, language, and intake system.

Both projects also engaged Craftsman’s technical team to unwind legacy code and safely deprecate the portals once they were no longer needed, streamlining the inner workings of the system with each enhancement.

Craftsman’s Managed Services team was first engaged in Fall of 2019. In our ongoing relationship, we have defined ourselves as a partner, not just a fixer. In weekly calls, Craftsman’s Managed Services team contemplates change and paths forward alongside GBFB. We focus on identifying and proving out various solutions and selecting the one that will be simplest and the best fit for the GBFB’s needs. The solution may be a fix or data update, as with Classy implementation issues, or incremental changes, such as an overhaul to the matching gift process. The solution may instead be a larger chunk of work parceled out over a few months, as with the rebuild of the SNAP partner portal, or recognizing that a solution is more effort than it’s worth, and simply leaving something as is. Our mutual goal is fewer SOWs and thoughtful prioritization of time and schedule.

The Craftsman team is able to leverage lessons and solutions implemented across our portfolio of food insecurity organizations when crafting solutions to meet GBFB’s needs. This centralization of knowledge allows us to respond more quickly and efficiently to all our client’s needs and frees up time for enhancements.

GBFB leverages the Nonprofit Success Pack on the Salesforce platform. It uses three separate Experience Cloud Lightning Communities for the Agency, Volunteer, and SNAP portals to surface and collect key information to their constituents in a simple and accessible way. Volunteers for Salesforce underpins much of the volunteer configuration, and flows and lightning components in Lightning Experience Cloud have augmented and modernized its use.

Their supporting toolkit includes Classy as their primary online fundraising solution and Pardot for digital marketing. The advancement team leverages iWave for donor analytics and Apsona for reporting and document merge/generation. FormAssembly is used across the organization for application and intake needs, and Mogli SMS allows for text communication to constituents in this time of rapidly changing environments.

Craftsman’s work with GBFB has supported a larger shift away from custom code to declarative configuration, with the long-term goal of ensuring staff can take greater ownership without having to dig into code or retain a consultant whenever incremental improvement is needed.