Laying a foundation for digitizing programs- building with and for the nonprofit community
While many of us in the technology sector were able to smoothly transition to working outside the office over the past few months, that was not the reality for most nonprofits. At the same time, the need for nonprofits has only grown over the past several months — food banks, workforce development programs, and community health organizations are all being tested in a whole new way as demand for their services skyrocket. And yet, the infrastructure we often take for granted, such as video conferencing, cloud collaboration, and CRM, is not what most nonprofits have — especially not for the important work of actually managing their programs. According to a Salesforce survey, around 50% of nonprofits manage their programs using pen & paper or spreadsheets. While their program data is stored all over the place, 69% of nonprofits are seeing an increased demand for transparency of their impact and funding. This disconnect already posed a huge challenge to growth and efficiency for nonprofits — a situation that has been exacerbated by the shelter-in-place orders of the past few months.
This is where it gets exciting. Earlier this spring, Salesforce.org launched a whole suite of new products for the nonprofit sector including Program Management Module (PMM), an open source package aimed at giving organizations a standard framework to start tracking programs, services, and clients. With more than 60+ nonprofits installing PMM in its first month, the need for this type of tool is clear!
We made a few very intentional choices as we designed and built out PMM:
Keep the workflows and pain points of actual nonprofits users top of mind at ALL TIMES
This product would not have been possible without the willingness of countless nonprofits and partners to collaborate with us. Whether it was walking us through their uses cases and pain points, showing us the tools they use to manage their programs today, talking through how their organization would fit into our data model, or kicking the tires of the actual tool during user feedback sessions, input from the nonprofit community shaped this product.
All of this feedback let us hone in on what the biggest pain points for nonprofits are and to make investments accordingly. For example, we heard over and over again about the pain of data entry. This led us to create the one custom component in our package, the Bulk Service Delivery Tool, aimed at making it easier for users to capture the services they deliver in one streamlined interface. The fields in this Lightning Web Component are controlled by a field set, so an Admin can easily adjust what information is being captured to suit the needs of their organization.
We don’t see this conversation with the community stopping now that Program Management Module has launched. If anything, we hope we’ll see an increase in touch points now that nonprofits have started using the product. This is one of the reasons we’re thrilled we were able to make PMM open source. We want the community to be able to customize PMM, adapt it to their needs, and build off of it. Perhaps, even more importantly, we want the door to be open to making these customizations and add-ons something that the whole nonprofit ecosystem can benefit from. We hope that by making PMM open source it will inspire innovation not only from Salesforce but also from the community — all in the name of making more impact.
Keep the data model as simple as possible so it can be a base layer for many different types of nonprofit programs
Nonprofit programs come in every size, shape, and color under the sun. Whether focused on mentoring, animal rescue, affordable housing, or environmental awareness, all nonprofits have programs that they need to track. The challenge for us was to distill all these different program types down into one data model that works as a building block toward digitizing program delivery across the sector.
Regardless of the type of program a nonprofit is running, they can benefit from having all their program information in one place so they can report on it, make decisions with it, and share it with their stakeholders. For a nonprofit, being able to see who is in your programs and what services they are receiving is a question of impact. This is the data that shows you how you are delivering on your mission. Without clean, standardized data about their programs, it is difficult for nonprofits to know exactly what impact their programs are having. This, in turn, makes it even harder to make decisions about resourcing and prioritization.
There was another powerful force in deciding to keep our solution simple and horizontal — all of the amazing ISVs working in the nonprofit program management space. By providing a simple foundation that different ISVs, who specialize in more specific aspects of program management, can build their tools on top of, we can make it easier for nonprofits to truly bring all of their program information into one place. Making PMM open source supports this vision and encourages ISVs to adopt and engage with what we have built. PMM can provide a foundation for connecting multiple ISVs and bringing all that data back into a unified view across all of a nonprofit’s programs.
If PMM can help nonprofits make smarter decisions about where to invest their often very limited resources in order to achieve more impact, we’ll have done our job. The industry as a whole will be stronger and more efficient. It will be easier for nonprofits to share data about their programs, and, ultimately, their impact, to donors and other stakeholders.
With this in mind, we landed on five custom objects connected entirely by lookup relationships. We also leveraged two standard Salesforce objects: Contact and Account. We think we struck the right balance of simple, reportable, and, yet, applicable to a wide range of use cases.
Keep the technology as out-of-the-box as possible
With a data model defined, it was time to actually build the product. Rather than going for the fanciest tech we could, we, again, tried to keep things simple. Knowing that most nonprofits don’t have in-house technical expertise and many also can’t afford to hire it very often, we wanted to build something that a nonprofit without tech expertise could get up and running with quickly.
We decided to build Program Management Module using almost entirely out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality. We took the tools that are available to Salesforce Admins and leveraged them to build a light user interface (UI) on top of the data model. By sticking to out-of-the-box Salesforce, nonprofits can more easily customize PMM to fit their needs. Without a lot of custom code to contend with, basic Salesforce Administrator skills can go a long way towards customizing PMM to fit an organization’s more specific needs.
Launching this product has been a true community effort and we hope it doesn’t stop there. What can you do? First, take a look at Program Management Module. Think about the nonprofits and causes that you are passionate about and how you can help them move into the digital era. Maybe PMM can help them out, but, even if it isn’t the right fit, nonprofits need our help now more than ever. Participate in your company’s pro bono program so a full team can work with a nonprofit to truly transform how they work, or help start a pro bono program if one doesn’t already exist.
Together with our community of nonprofits, consulting partners, and ISVs, we can realize a world where nonprofits have access to the same technology that the tech sector has. Not only that, but these tools can be used first and foremost to tackle the most pressing problems facing our communities.
