San Antonio Food Bank

Salesforce NPSP implementation

San Antonio Food Bank is a nonprofit dedicated to alleviating hunger in Southwest Texas by distributing food and grocery products, supporting partner agencies, and responding to community needs during times of crisis. Serving as a critical hub for food assistance, the organization mobilizes large‑scale volunteer efforts and fundraising initiatives to ensure families facing food insecurity have access to essential resources, particularly during periods of economic disruption and increased demand.

Challenge: Rapid growth without systems built for scale

As community need surged during the COVID‑19 pandemic, San Antonio Food Bank faced an unprecedented increase in demand—scaling from serving hundreds of families with a small volunteer base to supporting thousands of households and managing hundreds of volunteers at each distribution. The organization needed a way to rapidly expand volunteer coordination and fundraising capacity while maintaining a clear, connected view of supporters across programs.

Solution: Early investment in a Salesforce CRM

Beginning in 2018, San Antonio Food Bank began a process of digital transformation. The effort focused on two priorities, enhancing digital fundraising efforts and improving the volunteer management experience. In partnership with Heller Consulting, we developed a CRM ecosystem that placed Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) at its center.

Additional tools and functionality were then integrated including Volunteers for Salesforce to transform their volunteer tracking, FormAssembly to create custom volunteer sign up experiences, and Rallybound to allow San Antonio Food Bank’s development team to improve the online donation interface.

During the COVID-19 crisis, having the CRM and fundraising technology already in place was a godsend.

Michael Guerra

Chief Resource Officer, San Antonio Food Bank

Result: Scalable operations and stronger supporter engagement

With these systems in place, they are now able to lean on the technology to support their efforts during the fallout from COVID-19. The volunteers have found the user side helpful and easy, allowing them to sign up and move shifts in real time. With the integration of NPSP, Mr. Guerra explained that now his staff is able to connect volunteer records with donor records to get a more complete view of individuals interacting with the organization. Speaking about the data the food bank will have after waves of increased donations and volunteers, he noted, “We’ll have great information about the donor and the volunteer and see when they are one in the same.”

Calling on faith communities in San Antonio, the food bank created “A Day of Prayer and Fasting” for Good Friday through Easter Sunday. Using Rallybound, they created a fundraising landing page. Churches then created subpages complete with videos and sent those links out to their specific congregations, asking the communities to give meals they were fasting to those who are going without food due to economic hardship. The “All Faiths Fasting Friday” effort paid off, raising more than $78,000. Individuals were also easily set up on Rallybound. One entrepreneur asked for a landing page with the goal of fundraising $100,000 and quickly surpassed that, raising over $250,000.

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