I love GiveCamp. Even as I’m in the midst of seriously packed schedule, closing on a new home, getting ready to list our current residence, and treading water to make it all work, GiveCamp is always one of my favorite events of the the year.
In two weeks, we’ll gather some of the best talent in Pittsburgh and deliver Salesforce projects for area non-profits through the effort of these dedicated volunteers. This year we received requests from 5 different organizations and the local Pittsburgh community answered the bell in a big way as we have the most Salesforce volunteers ever!
This is also our most ambitious GiveCamp in terms of projects; we’ll be completing 3 new Salesforce Implementations, while bringing new programs and business units onto the platform for 2 other nonprofit orgs. With our initial discovery calls & non-profit homework assignments handed out; now comes the final preparations as we organize our teams and finalize solution designs heading into GiveCamp weekend.
It’s an insane schedule, starting at 6PM on Friday and ending at 3PM on Sunday, our teams will deliver about 70-80 hours of consulting effort on each project, representing a total value of ~$65000 contributed to our local non-profit community in a weekend. It can be intense and overwhelming, but our volunteer teams know they are changing the way services are delivered to our most needy populations around Western Pennsylvania, which keeps us coming back year after year.
The Projects
Brashear Association
The Brashear Association serves people in poverty – from those facing temporary challenges to families living in chronic, multi-generational poverty and works to move them toward self-sufficiency. The organization has a rich history, founded in 1917 to honor the renowned, self-taught scientist John A. Brashear and celebrate his humanitarianism, it has been providing programs in the Pittsburgh area for over 100 years.
Today the Brashear Association uses spreadsheets and Donor Perfect to manage their programs and development, which GiveCamp will be replacing with a new Salesforce NPSP build. We’ll build a richly featured Program Management application to give Brashear an understanding of their constituents and the programs they access, while moving all of their development processes on to the platform as well. Our largest effort this year, some of our top volunteers will be helping Brashear develop the infrastructure to support their next 100 years of programming.
Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank
The GPCFB provides food and programming to help combat hunger in the Pittsburgh area. The organization has been adopting and implementing Salesforce since 2017, but has several high impact projects for GiveCamp 2019.
A mix of Form Assembly, a complex screen flow, Service Cloud health check, and workflow automation around the volunteer experience; this may be the most technically challenging project of the lot, but we are ready to answer the call!
Wilkinsburg Community Ministry
Since 1968, WCM has provided such essential basic necessities as food, clothing and energy assistance to Wilkinsburg residents. They serve approximately 5,000 residents per year, including senior citizens, citizens with disabilities, at-risk youth and families who are economically challenged, underemployed or facing emergency.
The WCM provides a tremendous amount of services with limited staff that are hampered by the web of Google Docs & Sheets they use to manage their efforts. At GiveCamp this year, we’ll begin the process of migrating their development program to Salesforce while setting the stage to incorporate more business processes in future years.
Trash to Thrash
Trash to Thrash collects used, slightly abused, and sometimes new skateboard parts donated from local skaters and skate shops. We take those parts and make complete skateboard decks that we give to the youth to skate on after teaching them the fundamentals of skating at community sponsored Skate Jams and workshops.
Trash to Thrash is currently using spreadsheets to manage their projects and events but are in need a better tool to manage their inventory, events, and contacts. The GiveCamp team is going to deliver a new Salesforce instance, including rollups to track available inventory, a screen flow to assemble inventory into a build plan, and training on how to use Salesforce Mobile for entering inventory, event check-ins, and more!
Garfield-Bloomfield Corporation
The Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation (BGC) exists to improve the quality of life for all in Garfield and surrounding neighborhoods through active community engagement. Last year the GiveCamp team helped launch BGC on the Salesforce platform and it’s been such a success they are back to bring their development team onto the org!
This year our Salesforce volunteers will be building out a robust solution to support BGC’s fundraising efforts, as well as configuring their instance to allow for better understanding how their constituents interact with the BGC and their various programs.
I hope this post is inspiring to all of you – GiveCamp is a nationwide movement and one you can be a part of in your local community. I am happy to have a call with anyone interested in starting their own GiveCamp effort, reach out and lets multiply our impact! Email me at tom.hoffman@trailblazercgl.com.