Pro Bono Pro Josie Gillan Volunteers Skills to Support Teen Health

It’s National Pro Bono Week and Salesforce is celebrating by recognizing five outstanding Pro Bono Pros who use their Salesforce skills to drive social change. Pro Bono Week is a global celebration of the pro bono ethic that drives professionals across the world to use their talents to make a difference. Today we recognize Josie Gillan!

In the six years that Josie Gillan has been with Salesforce, she has always taken the time to volunteer, mentoring young girls in technology, creating care packages for veterans, and participating in beach cleanup days. But all this wasn’t enough for Josie, and she started looking for a new way give back. As a Director of Quality Engineering and someone who builds the Salesforce Platform, Josie sought a volunteer opportunity that allowed her to share her technical skills and gain experience as a Salesforce user. Her friend, a member on the Board of Directors for Health Connected, was all too happy to connect Josie to the perfect volunteer opportunity! Health Connected helps young people feel confident and supported to make informed decisions about their own sexual health. They serve over 6,500 people annually through their youth education programs, parent communication workshops, and training and technical assistance for education professionals.

Prior to Josie’s involvement, Health Connected kept track of program information in at least 10 different spreadsheets, which often included inconsistent data. It was hard to track all their activity let alone share their programmatic impact with funders. Josie imported all their data into Salesforce and created custom objects to track the school and educator visits. She even trained their whole staff on how to enter and update data. Having all their contact and programmatic information in one place has significantly improved Health Connected’s efficiency and communication with their funders. With their staff feeling confident, Health Connected is starting to experiment with tracking communities that are looking to improve their adolescent sexual health programming. Abi Karlin-Resnick, Health Connected’s Executive Director says, “Josie encouraged us to think big about how we could further integrate Salesforce into our organization. We LOVED working with Josie!”

For her part, Josie says, “I have loved this experience!” It helped her become a better user of Salesforce herself and helped her to see why people love Salesforce so much. Working in R&D, Josie feels it is important to ‘walk a mile in our customers’ shoes’ and she is encouraging all her fellow R&D team members to get involved too.

Thank you to Josie Gillan for demonstrating the very best of Salesforce’s culture of giving back. In honor of Josie, Salesforce.org is making a $250 donation to his charity of choice.

In FY15, 1,800 Salesforce employees logged 11,000 hours in pro bono volunteerism. If you are interested in learning more about pro bono at Salesforce visit salesforcefoundation.org/probono.