Speedforce: Giving Back at Salesforce #GivingTuesday Event

On Tuesday, December 2nd, over 15,000 nonprofits across the world celebrated #GivingTuesday with special fundraising and volunteer events. We decided to give back by hosting a unique event in Boston that we call “Speedforce.” Working in partnership with Common Impact, we brought together a group of Salesforce employees and other experts to spend an afternoon helping nonprofit organizations get more out of their Salesforce implementations. Think speed dating, but instead of awkward silences, we heard impactful exchanges of ideas and game-changing best practices!

Here’s what our nonprofit attendees had to say:

“Muneer Kazmi (@muneerkazmi) helped explain how my organization can finally email all our clients using Vertical Response, MailChimp, and Outlook through Salesforce… I strongly believe we now have the knowledge to use Salesforce properly and successfully.” – Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (@mbaenews)

“It was great to speak with Sue Barbieri (@Susanbarbieri), who gave us great advice on governance and how to extract the most information through reports… We are thankful to have had the space to talk with a Salesforce expert about how to be more efficient in our organization.” – Peace First

“The information I learned has sparked new ideas and made us aware of the potential of Salesforce.” – Gardens for Health International @gardens4health

“What I thought was a small problem, turned out to be a big one, and now that it’s fixed, I’ve saved hours (weeks) of manual work. THANK YOU.” – Chefs Collaborative @chefscollab

And they weren’t the only ones having a great time. Our volunteer consultants proved that sometimes the teachers really are the students:

“Seeing the glow on my customer’s face… it made me realize how much impact we can create by just spending 5-10 minutes with our nonprofit customers.” – Gayatri Ganesh, Salesforce Customer Success Director

“Learning their use case and perspective helped me realize the extent of the impact our products and services can have for a 20-person organization serving communities in the Greater Boston Area. It was an eye-opening experience for me.” – Jennifer Videtta (@jenvidetta), Salesforce Customer Success Manager

In the end, 90% of the NGO attendees said that what they learned at Speedforce will make a real difference for their organization. This is the stat that really matters to us. We share this focus on delivering bottom-line impact through pro bono engagement with our partner, Common Impact. Without them, this event would not have been possible, and you can be sure there will be many more collaborations between Salesforce.org and Common Impact to come. We can’t wait!

To learn more about Common Impact and Speedforce, contact Patricia Vaccaro-Coburn, [email protected]