Case Study: Ashby Village improves volunteer management through Salesforce
The Objective
Build a volunteer management platform for easy user adoption and growth with Volunteers for Salesforce.
The problem
In 2015, after securing a sizable grant, the Berkeley-based senior volunteer community Ashby Village was looking to improve their volunteer management system. With over 300 volunteers and users they were using a system that gave them little control over their data and made pulling reports difficult.
“We were receiving 200-300 requests a month (from members for volunteer help),” said Andy Gaines, Executive Director of Ashby Village.
The solution
After prioritizing their needs for the system, they looked to Idealist Consulting for customized help. Using Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack and Volunteers for Salesforce, Idealist Consulting geared the new platform towards making the user interface as intuitive as possible. The new platform included a back-end system for volunteers to manage their profiles and jobs, a public events calendar, and volunteer request form.
“Volunteers For Salesforce provided the volunteer management core engine,” Franklin Joyce, CRM Architect at Idealist Consulting said. “Salesforce provided the database, declarative programming tools and triggered communications. FormAssembly opened up volunteer feedback. Idealist was able to extend this great foundation with user interface and user experience enhancements.”
Out of the box design vs. Joyce’s custom user interface for Ashby Village’s volunteer signup platform.
“We also built custom daily email reminders to notify volunteers of Urgent and Upcoming open jobs that match their skill set,” Joyce said.
An example of the daily emails volunteers receive for upcoming or urgent volunteer opportunities that match their skill sets.
The results
After implementation, Ashby Village emailed all 300+ of their users steps to set up an account and begin using the system. The new platform was so compatible to their previous one that almost no training time was needed, versus previous platforms where they hosted over a dozen events to train users. Now Ashby Village feels in control of their data and happy with the amount of time they’ve saved. They are looking to a donor management component next.
In their own words
“It’s going to help get our members the services they need in an efficient way. For us, we’ll get a lot of data for strategic planning for the future. Plus, it frees up office hours because we can now focus on other areas. What would take me now half an hour, took me 3 hours before.”
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