The Difference Your Volunteer Time Can Make – Pro Bono with Paul Walker

Having a successful career is one thing – being able to use your skills to make a difference in the world, well that’s on a completely different level.

What if you had opportunity to do both? That’s what Salesforce employees around the world are empowered to do using their 6 days of volunteering time off (VTO).

Increasing numbers of employees are using their VTO to offer pro bono support to charities that are just getting started with Salesforce or trying to improve their use of the system, and also to charities looking for general consultation and support, whether that’s IT, Marketing, Development etc.

Paul Walker, Principal Solutions Engineer at Salesforce is a great example of an employee giving their time to make an important difference. Over the past three years Paul has worked with three UK charities, offering consultation, guidance and support to help them to maximize their use of technology.

Paul explains: “The best thing about working with charities is the genuine and sincere appreciation for the help you can give, no matter how small, or how trivial it may seem, the difference can sometimes be quite literally life changing for the people these guys work with.”

For the last few years, Paul has been supporting the Small Charities Coalition, a national umbrella and capacity-building organisation with over 7,000 members UK-wide. The organization helps small charities access the skills, tools, and information they need to get going and do what they do best. Paul assisted the organization through a merger process and looked at how they were using Salesforce and identified ways they could expand their use of Salesforce Platform.

John Barrett, Director of Operations at the organization says: “Being a small charity we don’t have the IT or CRM skills in-house so Paul has been a really useful sounding board for us over the years. Paul has advised us on our use of Salesforce but we’ve also gained the benefit of this experience in other areas of IT for example producing an ITT for a Salesforce and website development and integration project.”

Many charities are without the people and resources they need to execute their ideas or to set up processes that can help scale programs and capture data that can provide real insight. It’s at these charities where pro bono is truly valuable.

At London Youth Rowing, Paul was tasked with answering some long standing questions to ensure the organization was making the most out of their Salesforce investment.

Program Manager, Barbara Clarkson shares: “Paul has been a huge help to our organisation in terms of developing Salesforce to suit our needs. As a charity using Salesforce to document the number of young people who participate in our activities we needed someone who could think out of the box in terms of how Salesforce was used and Paul really helped us to do that with a number of projects including tracking coaching visits and data management.”

Great Job Paul – from all the team at Salesforce.org