Customize Salesforce to Meet Your Unique Program’s Needs with App Cloud

By: Justin Edelstein, Co-Founder, Arkus, Inc.

One of my favorite things to do on summer weekends is to attend local outdoor food markets. I love the smell of fresh beer, food and experiencing the creativity of my community on display.

At Arkus, we love working with Salesforce because it also allows for the same level of creativity and expression to allow some of the most impactful missions in the world to innovate on top of a flexible platform and fashion a new way of handling a program management task so it can scale.

One of our customers, for example, has built out a scalable solution to manage all aspects of assisting battered women in getting legal help, job training, meet with others impacted, and assist them with getting back on their feet and thriving.

Instead of a pastrami egg roll or a pork belly kimchi taco, nonprofits make what we like to call apps. Apps can be pretty simple, or complicated. They can be the kind that you can get the ingredients and recipe to and cook yourself or even “order takeout” and install in your org. Together these apps are floating out there in the innovation ethernet or as Salesforce likes to call it the App Cloud.

Still with us? Awesome…now let me share with you two apps we recently built that we will be demoing in a webinar for nonprofits on Thursday, July 14th, at 2:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am PDT.

Scholar Athletes uses Salesforce to manage their entire program. They started very small with a simple application to track their students and their attendance within their zones. To accomplish this they used an AppExchange app called Zapit from Scout to help scan in students and create attendance records. They’ve since moved into areas of direct services, management, and operations.

They have moved to a complete system of capturing outcomes across their program and have added to it in order to build in management functions including performance reviews and professional development. Operations has built apps to manage budgeting, hiring processes, and supply chain.

Sunnyside Community Services also started out small (seeing a theme here) by implementing an app to track a few of their different programs to assist with seniors. Everything that Sunnyside provides for seniors needed to be tracked for reporting purposes including meals, transportation assistance, and attendance at recreation events like bingo.

Their app makes it so that Sunnyside can measure outcomes as it relates to case management, benefits counseling, and home care services. Prior to using their app they had extremely disparate systems that didn’t allow for reporting across different programs and spent an enormous amount of time trying to gain visibility into the effectiveness of their program.

Are you a Salesforce foodie or just in the market for some special impact and innovation? First watch our webinar and then keep the following 5 things in mind:

1. Start small and build your knowledge. Don’t be afraid, there are great trailheads and guides.
2. If you need a complicated app you might want to hire an implementation partner like Arkus.
3. Check out the AppExchange – The AppExchange has a great marketplace of apps that have been tested and approved for many uses.
4. Understand the power of the platform – from workflows to triggers to journeys the Salesforce platform has so much to offer.
5. Be resourceful – before you go and build the perfect new mousetrap, find out what others have done to solve this problem. You can ask questions of over 18,000 nonprofits in the Power of Us HUB, the greatest resource ever, and maybe solve your problem by just asking the right question.