Founded in 1964, Sacred Heart Community Service works closely with low-income families throughout Silicon Valley to provide food and clothing and tools for self-sufficiency. Their mission is to build a community free from poverty by creating hope, opportunity, and action — and in a tough year for everyone, they really stepped up, delivering 100,000 food boxes to 19,000 families, building home gardens, and offering relief and support for education, heating, and taxes.

Organizations like Sacred Heart do a lot to hold a community together, especially in times of crisis. They work with hundreds of people every day in many different contexts, uniting the community across the economic spectrum. But all of that coordination takes technology that hums along in the background, making sure it all works without a hitch. 

That’s why volunteer Salesforce Administrator Jay Pecot turned to Silverline to help them get the most out of their Salesforce implementation by adding Silverline’s CalendarAnything application.

Coordinating multiple programs

A typical year sees nearly 10,000 volunteers that come through Sacred Heart’s doors from all around Silicon Valley. That includes everything from 200 home gardeners helping with food insecurity to thousands of community organizers calling, texting, and going door-to-door to raise awareness around important programs like the U.S. Census.

“We have about 17 programs that address poverty today, but also work to make sure that we’re setting up a brighter future by bringing all parts of the community together. And our data systems reflect that,” said Pecot.

That’s a headache just waiting to happen.

Silverline helped Sacred Heart implement CalendarAnything, which makes it easy for volunteers to schedule timeslots themselves in an intuitive, interactive calendar. “Even with COVID-19, we still had about 4,000 volunteers this year, and they all schedule their hours themselves with CalendarAnything,” said Pecot. “We want people to feel like they’re making a difference immediately, and to make it easy for them to get involved.”

Scheduling made easy with CalendarAnything

Juggling volunteers across multiple programs can be challenging, but with CalendarAnything, Pecot can set permissions so as volunteers onboard to different areas of the organization, they can get more involved. 

The first calendar they see is to sign up for an orientation, and once they keep learning, they’re able to unlock additional slots for community service. Since Sacred Heart works with plenty of high-school-aged volunteers, they needed a solution that had guardrails but was still easy to access — and mobile-friendly.

“We needed a tool that could show calendars according to a person’s eligibility,” said Pecot. “it was super important to us, to have control over what events showed on the volunteer calendar, so that they could choose the things they were qualified for, but they could do that on their own.”

Silverline helped the team implement a calendar system that gave them control over visibility, tracking time and hours, and easy access for volunteers.

A 360-degree-view of their community impact

For many nonprofits, it can be hard to understand their community landscape. With patchwork systems and silos that separate donors, volunteers, and members, it was hard to see the impact across a database with 300,000 contacts.

Salesforce gives folks like Pecot a way to communicate with everyone, in a tool that’s easy to use for volunteers and part-time workers that make up his team. “We don’t have a ton of technical expertise,” he said. “We needed a proven solution, and one that we know would work for us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Everything we do is driven in Salesforce.”

As they work to distribute food and financial assistance to those impacted by COVID-19, they need to work fast — and with Salesforce, they can do just that. Whether they’re coordinating food drops, working with volunteers, asking for donations, or helping community members apply to government agencies for additional assistance, it’s all in one place.

Said Pecot, “We’re able to bring everyone together into a single location, which then also gives us a 360-degree view of the people that we work with and serve, and when it’s time to take action on something, we have a unified contact database.”

Bringing communities together with the power of Salesforce

Silverline was proud to help Sacred Heart bring communities together to get the assistance they need. Adding CalendarAnything to their existing Salesforce implementation streamlined their various efforts and lifted the administrative burden off of volunteers and staff members. Every piece of information they need is all in one place.

With Salesforce, Sacred Heart’s team can focus on the community instead of worrying over how to get things done. “Salesforce is the core of all of our offerings,” said Pecot. “It’s so important to be able to have a tool with visibility that’s so easy to use because 93 cents out of every dollar donated to Sacred Heart goes back to programs, and we want to keep it that way.” 

Interested in learning what CalendarAnything can help you accomplish? Reach out today to schedule a demo.