Skilled volunteer uses Salesforce expertise to support nonprofit growth, so more people can achieve food security.
FeedNC creates connections to food, education and resources as a catalyst for change. The result of their mission is to create healthy, stable families who can meet their needs – and can readily call on outside resources when necessary.
We met with Lara Ingram, CEO, and Brittany Holbert, COO, to discuss the significance of their Tech Therapy support to prepare for implementation of Salesforce, which is now being completed through our Expert Link program.
Lara explained, “We were not capturing data around the people we serve in our community dining room and knew this was a missed opportunity in terms of identifying new donors and potential members in need of additional services. Our goal is to see a significant increase in volunteers, members receiving our services and donors – all from individuals who come into our dining room. We were using multiple databases for other reasons in our organization, but there was no right match for gathering this data. We had some experience with Salesforce and knew this was the right path, but we needed help to move forward.
“We received recommendations from our networks of people who would be willing to volunteer to help us, but we worried that if we went down that path we would never get to a successful endpoint. There are so many people out there who work with Salesforce and finding the right one was a challenge. I also met with a vendor who was not listening to us. He had his own ideas of what he thought was best and would not take the take to understand our operation or listen how we needed help. That’s why we chose to work with Apparo. We knew with Apparo that we would get what we needed for our program: the right volunteer to help us make a plan and then the continuity, through Expert Link, of that person helping us implement the plan.”
Brittany added, “I want to better understand who is in the building, so that we can make sure that we’re providing the right content to them. If they are someone who’s coming to eat lunch with us every single day, but they’re not doing anything else, I want to talk to them. We don’t want to miss people who need additional services or might have the capacity to volunteer or donate.”
“We’re using Salesforce, Little Green Light, Signup Genius and other technology that does not talk to each other now. So, for example, I could not know that a volunteer eats in our dining room or that they also donate.”
They were matched to Jonathan Waites of JiLaSoan through Apparo’s Tech Therapy program. Lara said, “Jonathan is really great. He is very collaborative, respectful and listens to us and our needs.” Jonathan has worked as a volunteer to help FeedNC plan for their Salesforce implementation and now, through Apparo’s Expert Link program, will conduct the actual implementation.
In closing Brittany shared, “As we look into the future, we believe this technology could be a model for others.” Lara added, “It’s hard to find the right technology, it’s hard to find the right volunteers. Working with Apparo was a huge help to us.”
