This project was taken on as pro-bono client work for Safe & Sound, a San Francisco based non-profit needing Salesforce user experience design and consulting to create a new experience for their volunteer management process.
Safe & Sound is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, CA with a mission to support families in need to mitigate child abuse, neglect, and trauma. With all of the help that they receive in the form of individuals that want to volunteer for the multiple community event that are thrown with the goal of strengthening families, Safe and Sound found themselves needing a Salesforce solution to manage the volunteer signup process both internally and externally.
The goal of this project was to create a fully user-centered experience for both volunteers and internal employees. Using user experience and service design methodologies, along with the use of Salesforce workflows, experience cloud, record and page layout customization, a complete experience was to be created for the entire Safe & Sound Volunteer Management experience.
The outcome of this project was the creation of an optimized user experience for both self-service volunteer scheduling and internal management of volunteers created using Salesforce out-of-the-box tools.
Safe & Sound Is a non-profit organization based In San Francisco California. Their mission Is to provide social and educational services and help to families In order to prevent child abuse and neglect In the community. Safe & Sound services that community members often volunteer for include their Children’s Playroom service, TALK Line 24/7 warm-line, holiday toy drives, community dinners and more.
As Safe & Sound is a non-profit customer of Salesforce, their organizational limits were pretty limited. After initial calls with the client to understand the scope and limitations of the project, I was able to learn about the several initiatives that they recruit volunteers for, currently being managed through google forms and excel spreadsheets.
In creating a solution to migrate this process onto Salesforce, we first had to address limitations of:
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Taking that understanding I had of the problem and our limitations, multiple conversations with the client continued in order to truly understand what their current state of volunteer management was, and what they ideally envisioned for themselves using Salesforce as their new solution.
There were aspects of this solution that were key needs for our client both internally and externally- on the internal side this was in the face of the volunteer managers and externally was the experience of the volunteers.
Alternative to the limited AppExchange package- Volunteers for Salesforce
Clear transparency into the contacts that are signing up
Automated creation of volunteer signup records
Alternative to the limited AppExchange package- Volunteers for Salesforce
External Experience Cloud portal site for Volunteers
Ability for volunteers to sign up for shifts on their own
Volunteer transparency into key information volunteers need when signing up for shifts
Database for recurring volunteers to keep up with upcoming and past shifts
On top of understanding from the needs from the client's perspective as the creators and facilitators of these many volunteer events, I wanted to also get an understanding of what real potential volunteers would need when looking for a volunteer experience to contribute to.
A survey was conducted to uncover what volunteers would want most in a signup experience. Among 13 survey participants, these were their responses:
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As there would be multiple moving parts to the solution that needed to work together, I came up with different personas for the different perspectives of the users that would be most closely interacting with the solution.
Based on the different personas, it was important for me to understand each type of user’s needs and motivations within the entire system and map these motivations, needs, and wants to their workflows.
Doing this allowed me to truly understand each perspective and begin ideation on which key features, record access, Salesforce flows and configurations that each person apart of the volunteer management process would need.
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The next step for me was to then translate these features and needs into user flows. This allowed for me to visually represent the sort of rough click path or serie of events that would need to take place in order to fulfill those jobs to bedone with the features highlighted that we previously defined.
Internal User Flows
Internally, our volunteer managers would be the main users of this new solution. Their main priorities are creating the information around volunteer events to showcase to potential volunteers, receiving and managing signups, and communicating with those confirmed volunteers. These processes needed to be incorporated in user flows that made it as easy as possible for our busy managers.
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Similarly, the volunteers main priorities of signing up for events, expressing interest in committed programs, and keeping up with multiple volunteer shifts needed to be apart of streamlined processes on the external side. Creating these user flows allowed me to envision the type of connected experience that would be ideal externally and ultimately connect to our internal flows.
The foundation of the design for both internal volunteer managers and external volunteers was the data model.
The data model here was created to mimic the limited AppExchange product, Volunteers 4 Salesforce, with added record types to accommodate Safe & Sounds specific use case.
This data model served as a foundation for holding key information and as the basis for key workflows in this process.
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After finalizing the data model, the next structure that needed to be defined was the information architecture of the external Volunteers Experience Cloud Portal.
This information architecture of the experience cloud site would allow volunteers to easily be able to view information and key details they need for each volunteer event before signing up through the site.
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Based on the user flows defined earlier as well as the data models, several workflows were needed to automate signup and application processes for volunteers.
Because of the limitations we defined early on, Salesforce flows served as important tools to mitigate some of those limitations. With Salesforce flow automation, the possibilities were endless.
These flows incorporated multiple loops, conditional logic, record creation and updates, and actions such as sending notifications to volunteer managers and sending emails to volunteers.
The creation of these flows took weeks to perfect, trial and error, and multiple de-bugging sessions.
Content for the applications and signup-forms for volunteers came from the Google forms the team were currently using.
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These flows were to be created to ease and automate processes for internal managers when It came to record management and volunteer communication.
I created these flows by incorporating multiple loops, decisions, and actions that allowed for automation of internal processes like sending mass emails or creating multiple copies of a type of record at once.
Ideation on the use of automated flows was also necessary as apart of the user experience. The client wanted an automated way to both notify volunteers when their shifts were approaching as well as deleted. In both scenarios, autolaunched flows are fired off to send volunteers real time email notifications.
These flows were created using time-triggers that referenced the volunteer shift's begin date and time, and sent notifications to the volunteers email whenever we're a week or a day before shifts.
It was very important to get each of these workflows working seamlessly, as they would be the interface for much of the automated experience for both managers and volunteers.
For both the volunteer facing flows of signing up for a volunteer event and applying to be a recurring volunteer, the client was previously using Google forms, which weren’t dynamic and didn't contain any type of logic or branching to make filling it out an easier and more tailored experience. The process through Google Forms was very siloed and manual.
So when translating these over to Salesforce flows, it was important to not only capture that information volunteer managers needed but to also create these conditions, if-then statements, and loops that would grab record data and complete actions on the backend such as record creation, formula updating, and data validation.
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Ideating on the design for the Experience Cloud site for volunteers was extremely important as this would be the window into volunteer events and signups for those interested in supporting Safe & Sound's mission. It was important to create a site that was both familiar and easy to navigate in order to increase volunteer signups.These were some of the aspects to the site that were considered:
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An important aspect of designing the experience cloud site was for me to stick to the images, branding, and organizational tone that closely matched Safe & Sound's main site. This would allow volunteers to easily identify the familiar experience that the organization's main website gives.
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Recurring volunteers given the appropriate license type to log into the experience cloud portal, needed a designed page for them to access and keep up with their multiple volunteer hour records.
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User flows meant to be volunteer facing were added to their relevant pages with the goal of allowing volunteers to access flows and record information simultaneously.
As important as it was to design a optimal experience for volunteers externally, it was equally as important to design a robust and automated experience for internal managers intaking and processing these volunteers and their interest in giving back to the community.
Some important internal aspects that allowed for seamless interaction between volunteers externally and those internally are as follows...
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Page layouts internally needed to highlight the important details relating to each volunteer event record and its child records. This includes the addition of activity history so that automated confirmation emails and tasks can be logged to their corresponding records.
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To aid in the automated and intertwined experience between external volunteer sign up and internal handling of each signup, in-app notifications were configured to lead volunteer managers to the exact record of the volunteer hour created through the external site.
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List views for the organization of Safe & Sound's different volunteer events were created for internal use as well as to be faced externally on the Experience Cloud site pages that show volunteers lists of upcoming events to sign up for.
During this design process, there were several meetings with the client to go over designs and processes.Towards the end, there were final user acceptance testing sessions with volunteer managers so that they could fully go through the volunteer signup and management process themselves and provide feedback for design changes.
I broke up user tasks and the acceptance criteria by the roles defined previously. This served as a template for the User Acceptance Testing and understanding what aspects of the solution are to the client's liking. Below are examples of a few of those tables.
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The final end-to-end solution here moves like a circle where volunteer managers are creating and managing the records to face on the external site for one time and recurring volunteers to see and take action on.
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The internal volunteer management experience was created with the focus on ease of use, automation, and with the connection to volunteers on the external site in mind.
The new data model and corresponding page layout allows for managers to easily keep track of volunteer events and the signups associated with them.
Volunteer managers can now create and update volunteer event records and their many child objects. This was made possible by the intricate model setup I created in the ideation phase. As we know in Salesforce, a user's experience is only as good as the cleanliness and ease of navigating the robust relationships of their most important data.
From the different jobs and their shifts associated with each event, to the different signups for each shift, internal users have one single source of truth for all of their data.
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Understanding who their volunteers are is now easier than ever with the ability to create and automatically relate each volunteer’s contact record to their signups.
Now, volunteer managers would have a historical view of who’s volunteered in the past and the full context around what their past interactions with Safe & Sound have looked like.
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The external volunteer experience was designed to be a haven of information and actions that allow for those wanting to contribute to Safe & Sound's mission to have full transparency and access to do so.
The site is a window into Safe & Sound's internal volunteer management process and connects volunteer applications and signups automatically to those managing them.
Another important aspect of the user experience on the external site, was to allow for those Interested In both signing up for one time events and taking on more committed volunteer positions to express that Interest through applications and sign up forms.
On these pages, relevant Information and key Salesforce flows were placed to allow potential volunteers to easily assess and communicate their Interest.
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Once interested committed volunteers are approved, they would have authenticated access to the Experience Cloud Site.
This page was made possible by setting it up to only be visible to users who have logged in with a username and password. This access would now allow for these volunteers to view their past and upcoming shifts, log their time, and have a way to directly communicate around their volunteer hour record.
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As we know in design, the work is never truly 'done'. I plan on continuing m own volunteer journey with Safe & Sound by helping them with the adoption of this new solution.
I've provided the clients with extensive documentation around all of what was designed from the data model to the different Salesforce flows, and writing out their purpose, use, and value to help aid in that internal user adoption.
I also plan to assist the team with creating reports and dashboards to monitor key performance metrics as new volunteer data comes in. And as they receive information around program popularity and volunteer activity, they will be able to make informed decisions on their volunteer programs.
As their implementation parter aided them in their initial Salesforce application set up, I will be meeting with them so they can also fully understand the new end-to-end volunteer management solution I've built. This will allow the partners to understand the new data model, permissions, and setup that will also possibly affect new applications moving forward.
Overall, I plan to stay connected with client and iterating on parts of the design as needed given ongoing feedback
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