Prepared for Heller Consulting
Resources for Food Banks
Today, food banks are facing unprecedented demand. Having a comprehensive CRM ecosystem is critical to meet the dramatic increase in volunteers, donors, and beneficiaries.
When COVID-19 hit, food banks saw a near-immediate surge in demand for services. For many, the demand hasn't slowed, and their technology has failed to keep pace with the emerging needs of their constituents.
Download our guide today to learn how your food bank can optimize your current CRM, meet today’s demand for services, and prepare your technology foundation for the future.
“Our program data is held together with spit and tape.”
- A food bank client describes their systems to Team Heller
How food banks are using Salesforce
Salesforce has a lot to offer food banks, across the organization.
For example:
- For programs, tracking geography, demographic information from children to seniors, and agency partner data can supercharge activity across programs.
- For volunteer management, tracking volunteer opportunities, schedules, and participation can help scale volunteer support up or down as demand for services changes.
- For fundraising departments, access to a more complete view of constituents, including their volunteer activities, can transform communications and ultimately raise more money for the organization.
Food banks are incredibly resourceful organizations. The work it takes to fulfill their missions of ending hunger typically involves a great deal of complex relationship and logistical management. Because they usually carry out their work on very thin budgets, what they accomplish is remarkable. For those reasons, it is not surprising to see food banks end up with a dizzying web of systems and data flow. Often the tools were customized at various points in the past to meet specific needs. Over time, as needs expand and evolve, tweaks are made here and there to keep things running department by department, but the picture starts to get muddy.
“Working with Heller to define our roadmap made it clear to the organization that we needed to change how we were thinking about our constituent data."
—Elizabeth Whamond, Information Technology Director, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley
How to settle fights between programs and fundraising at your food bank
Gaining buy in for new CRM technology across multiple departments challenges even the nimblest organizations. For food banks, the needs and interests of program staff and the fundraising department require careful consideration, especially in cases where not everyone agrees on the best path forward. Balance the needs of each department by considering the factors that favor change or that make change more difficult within each.
