Salesforce has a lot to offer food banks, across the organization.
Case study: Alameda County Community Food Bank
Food banks are incredibly resourceful organizations. The work it takes to fulfill their missions of ending hunger typically involves a great deal of complex relationship and logistical management. Because they usually carry out their work on very thin budgets, what they accomplish is remarkable.
For those reasons, it is not surprising to see food banks end up with a dizzying web of systems and data flow. Often the tools were customized at various points in the past to meet specific needs. Over time, as needs expand and evolve, tweaks are made here and there to keep things running department by department, but the picture starts to get muddy.
— Elizabeth Whamond, Information Technology Director, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley
Technology Strategy and Partnership
For more than 35 years, Alameda County Community Food Bank (ACCFB) has passionately pursued a hunger-free community. Their vision: a community in which children, adults, and seniors of Alameda County, California do not worry about where their next meal is coming from.
The food bank wanted to create a technology plan to help them work more efficiently and effectively across the entire organization. Rather than solving each department’s technological changes in an isolated manner, they recognized that a more holistic and cross-departmental approach was needed.
The ACCFB team sought a technology partner that would help them design a technology strategy, implement that strategy in an intentional way, and support the process with change management. They also wanted to work with a partner that understands how food banks work and whose values align with theirs.
ACCFB started its journey with Heller Consulting by going through a needs assessment. The assessment allowed the Heller team to understand the food bank’s unique business processes, and then tailor technology recommendations based on that understanding.
The Heller team collaborated with ACCFB to develop a technology roadmap that aligned technology solutions with the organization’s goals. The solution included moving ACCFB from the Blackbaud CRM fundraising and customer relationship management (CRM) platform to a technology stack centered around Salesforce.
The Heller team started with an accelerated implementation of the Volunteers for Salesforce solution to help ACCFB address an immediate need to engage, manage, and track more volunteers to support increased demand for services during the global pandemic. The solution included mapping of new processes within the new system and customized forms to handle both individual and group sign-ups.
Heller Consulting implemented Salesforce NPSP, configuring it to meet ACCFB’s specific needs. The Heller team also helped ACCFB to select and integrate Neon Fundraise with NPSP to support online fundraising activities, including their Virtual Food Drive. As part of this phase of the overall project, the Heller team guided ACCFB through decisions about terminology and configuration to ensure consistency across their new Salesforce-based solutions.
Working with ACCFB, the Heller team implemented Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly called Pardot), a marketing automation tool in the Salesforce ecosystem. The solution allows ACCFB to build sophisticated and automated email campaigns, fundraising appeals, and other marketing communications.
The Heller team worked with ACCFB to implement the Salesforce Program Management Module to help streamline ACCFB’s food recovery program in which food donors (such as grocery stores that donate food) work with partner agencies (such as churches that distribute food). As a facilitator between these two entities, ACCFB matches donors with agencies, provides scheduling support, and tracks food safety compliance. The solution integrates with the Ceres food bank software system that ACCFB uses, which ties in the pounds of food distributed, giving ACCFB a complete view of their food recovery program in one place and allowing them to report on it effectively.
With Heller Consulting’s change management approach, ACCFB felt supported throughout the organization’s digital transformation. ACCFB staff members and Heller team members built a strong relationship, and Heller’s deep knowledge of ACCFB’s business processes helped get the right staff members involved at the right stages of the project.
