Palo Alto Library Foundation

With plans to rebuild and upgrade all of its libraries, the city of Palo Alto is in the midst of one of its biggest civic projects in decades. The Palo Alto Library Foundation has launched a campaign to raise $6M by the end of 2012 to fill these libraries with furniture, technology, and books.

With only two staff members at the Library Foundation, a university student was brought on to help implement a Salesforce database. This database is critical to the operations of the nonprofit and to the development efforts of their board members and community volunteers. Many issues arose during the transferring of data from their current database to Salesforce due to the university students lack of expertise in this space. With data quality issues and the need for customization in their new database, the Executive Director realized that more specialized help was needed, but she had no budget to allocate for this project.

The Executive Director heard about The Community Corps through a friend. Using TCC, she was connected to a Salesforce volunteer who was able to fix their outstanding data migration issues and customize the database. For example, one of the enhancements implemented was the ability to roll-up donations by households which was not possible in the starter pack. This single change is critical for accounting and gave the Library Foundation accurate donor recognition.

The ED was concerned about giving an unknown volunteer access to their most important and sensitive data. This was communicated to the volunteer and he was able to set up a Sandbox (testing environment replicating the real database) with dummy data to implement all the enhancements. As a final step of the project, the volunteer trained staff members on how to best utilize the new database.

An interesting aspect of the project, and a key highlight of The Community Corps, was that the ED and her volunteer were hundreds of miles apart. They set up a free Skype account and used it to communicate on a weekly basis. Shortly after the completion of the project, the ED and her volunteer met in person at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. They are now starting another Community Corps project for the Library Foundation.

Lynn of the Palo Alto Library Foundations tells the Community Corps that the project made a huge difference, making them more efficient and able to reach their goal to supply furniture, computers and books for their new libraries. "Even though our volunteer was far away from Palo Alto, California, he made a big impact here." - Lynn