Case study: Human services org moves to Salesforce Communities

“For us, the best proof point is that one of our platoon members could input a brand new event in just eight minutes, after less than one hour of training...There’s not a lot of extra fluff,” Brian Wilson, National Service Platoon Manager at The Mission Continues.

The Mission Continues (TMC) empowers veterans facing the challenge of adjusting to life at home to find new missions. TMC redeploys veterans in their home communities so that their legacy of action and service can continue. TMC is based around groups called Service Platoons: teams of veterans, active duty service members, guardsmen and reservists that mobilize together to solve specific challenges in their community. The Platoon Leaders manage these events, and Idealist Consulting worked with TMC to enhance their Salesforce - particularly by adding Communities - to give platoon leaders all the tools they need to be successful.

Before

As any event planner knows, events are complicated to manage. Before Salesforce, TMC was using “a whole wide variety of tools that didn’t talk to each other,” says Wilson.

A new volunteer would sign up on their website, get added to Salesforce, and then once a week the platoon leader got an automated email with that week’s signups. From there, the platoon leaders managed the signups through their individual Google sheet and communicated through their personal email account (usually Gmail or the free version of MailChimp). This gave them a lot of versatility, but no consistency, and if they needed more reporting they had to contact TMC staff. On the staff side, TMC used a Google calendar and depended on platoon leaders to populate this, but they had a variety of event platforms and it often required individual follow up to see what was going on. “We could never give an accurate count of how many events happened in the past or forecast toward the future,” says Wilson.

It was clear that a centralized system was needed.

After

TMC engaged Idealist Consulting to set up a custom event management solution through Communities. Now when someone joins a platoon they click a point on a map, which takes you to a page listing upcoming events in that area. You can also see all events happening nationwide, search by zip code or upcoming date. Once you sign up for an event, automated emails go out to remind you that your event is coming up in a day or two. Having this on a centralized system, platoon leaders can use Communities licenses and don’t have to get additional login or access granted, so it is easier to cover and help each other out.

The implementation achieves two main goals that can be taught to new platoon leaders within an hour:

1. Learn who is a volunteer in your area
2. Create an event and manage attendees

Idealist Consulting helped by coming up with new possibilities within the Salesforce platform in order to  refine TMC’s overall organizational processes. For example, TMC didn’t have the ability to know how many hours a volunteer had logged, so Idealist suggested an automated report be sent to the platoon leader. “Our process has really evolved now that they have better technology in place.”

In addition, Idealist Consulting helped TMC work through access rules. TMC didn’t want have platoon leaders to have access to the full database, but they did need to be able to create mass emails, so there was some creative troubleshooting to figure out custom solutions involving Zapier. Idealist Consulting also created some report folder permission rules so that platoon leaders can use Dashboards as a leader board to see how different platoons are doing. This was an easier process to manage through Communities than it might have been through Portals.

Easy check-in

One of TMC’s favorite features is the online check-in system for events. Users can pull up the page in a smartphone and double-tap on a name to check someone in. Instead of making volunteers wait in line, TMC can have a few people casually check people in before an event by simply milling around the crowd.

TMC has been careful about setting rules around how they are managing their data. On the website users are considered inactive members until they sign up for an event. Then at the event, they are checked in through a customized mobile event check-in process, changing their status to  “active.”

Additionally, Idealist Consulting helped to customize the buildout with colors and logos to match TMC’s brand, making the user experience more fun for both staff and volunteers.

Great internal time-saver, but also great for showing impact

The move to Salesforce and Communities has been great for volunteer and employee recruitment, but also has shown to be valuable in identifying potential donors or sponsors since they can see impact on a community in real time. Now TMC can be very accurate about what they tell potential partners about events and the impact they might have.

Salesforce has also helped TMC manage platoon teams and tag people at events as a team leader. Later, when TMC pulls reports about events, they can easily see if one individual has been a team leader five times, and give them a t-shirt or water bottle to say thank you. “It lets us track who is doing really great versus just attending, and gives us real data instead of anecdotal hunches.”

Since TMC also uses Salesforce for program management, now that the platoon data is included, TMC can see if a volunteer attendee is also a sponsor or donor, which helps the development staff to focus their time.

Great onboarding

“If I meet someone on the street who could be a great fit for TMC, two months ago I would have had to email an introduction to the platoon leader...now I can just look on my phone immediately to see what’s happening and sign them up for the next event,” says Wilson. By being able to access the events in real time, participants don’t have to go through a long application process; this inclusive and user-friendly process ultimately results in a higher level of engagement.

Solid user adoption

Everyone at TMC is loving the move to Communities for event management, and has found the transition to be fairly intuitive. To help with user adoption, TMC created desktop video trainings and did some Google Hangout sessions to show platoon leaders how to put an event in the system.

It’s an easy system for new users to learn, but there are also a lot of cool features that enable more tech-savvy users to play around with rosters and other tools.  “We’ve had a few situations where someone says ‘I wish it could do X,’ and our response has been, ‘Actually it can, we just didn’t want to overwhelm you!’ It’s great to be out in front of that,” says Wilson.

“For us, the best proof point is that one of our platoon members could input a brand new event in just eight minutes, after less than one hour of training,” says Wilson. “It’s easier than Eventbrite in a lot of ways, because we put our focus on making it as easy as possible for volunteers to sign up with a minimum of form fields to fill out. There’s not a lot of extra fluff.” TMC sees the entire event experience, starting with registration, as part of volunteer cultivation. “If your volunteer doesn’t have a good time they will never come back out, and you want them to come back.”

Metrics

At the time of writing, TMC’s instance has been active for about a month. The main improvements are that they can now see in real time how many people come out to events, and have one central place for communication if anything changes.

Next steps

From here, TMC would love to add a social media aspect so people can share when they’ve been to an event. Wilson is already signed up for  his first Salesforce admin class next month, so there’s no limit to where they might go next!