Pro-Bono Week: Time to Give Back Salesforce Friends
This is a re-post and was originally posted on ForceOwl's Blog.
Happy Pro-Bono Week Salesforce friends!
As a military veteran, the concept of service is especially important to me. That sense of service is what motivated me to join the military in the first place. When I transitioned to the civilian world, I wanted to make sure I could still give back when possible. Entering the Salesforce community has been fantastic for this drive; the whole community sees the value in volunteerism and service in a way I haven’t seen since my military days.
Happy Pro-Bono Services Week
It is important to recognize that this is Pro-Bono Service Week. For the Salesforce community, pro-bono services are a great way for us to give back. Nonprofits of all shapes and sizes need the services we can provide. While theNonprofit Success Pack is a good way for these organizations to get started, they can use our help customizing the process. I’ve worked on two nonprofit instances myself and can attest to how far a few hours of our help can go.
Oh and don’t forget, it feels really good to give back.
How Do You Get Involved?
Pro-Bono Services Week is celebrated by Salesforce.org and is part of their 1-1-1 model. It’s great to have the mothership’s support, but these programs seem to be designed for Salesforce employees themselves. For those of us in the community who are not Salesforce employees, resources like Catchafire or Taproot Foundation are good ways to look for volunteer opportunities.
Salesforce’s use in the world is pretty widely spread - find a cause that you believe in and ask around that community for the organizations that have an instance. Not everyone lists Salesforce projects on pro-bono websites.
Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth Is
I got started in Salesforce by volunteering my time to a non-profit: the Global War On Terror Memorial Foundation. Their mission is to build a memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC dedicated to post-9/11 military veterans. I built their first website and set up their first donor management system in Salesforce using NPSP. As a member of this generation of military veterans, I’m proud of this organization's efforts and glad I could help.
ForceOwl is still a young startup, so we don’t have an official established nonprofit program yet, but we will. In the meantime, any nonprofit that wants to hire a Salesforce Administrator using ForceOwl can email me directly and I will personally set you up with free credits to find candidates.
To all the Administrators, Developers, Analysts, and Architects out there, donate a little time. You’ll feel good about it - trust me.
Will Lutz
ForceOwl, CEO and Co-Founder
USNR, LT