Discover Pro Bono's Potential
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define the term “pro bono.”
- Identify ways a pro bono volunteer can help.
- Explain Salesforce.org’s model for pro bono success.
In this module, when we refer to customers, we’re referring to nonprofit and educational institution customers who are already using Salesforce to achieve their mission. Volunteers are skilled professionals who look to offer their services to a cause or program.
What Is Pro Bono?
pro bono: a Latin phrase for professional work undertaken voluntarily and without payment
Let’s imagine a situation: You work for a nonprofit organization, and you’re handling a lot. You have limited resources, staff, and time. Maybe your IT department is, well, just you. You’ve invested in Salesforce as your CRM because it helps you do more with less. For organizations like yours, achieving what’s possible with Salesforce means improving more lives and doing more good. But you suspect that you’re not yet realizing the full potential of your CRM investment.
You want to take your organization's use of Salesforce to the next level, but how do you get there?
You could do this yourself—there are webinars and Trailhead modules tailored to nonprofits and educational institutions. But what if you want someone to work closely with your team as a guide? Someone with expertise who can show you features you’re not yet using—and explain why you should use them. If that person can teach your team how to use the features, that’s even better.
Or maybe you have a customization or implementation project that would help your organization increase its impact, but you don’t have the time or know-how to tackle it. An expert can move that project from your wish list to the done category. They can amplify the power of your tech.
If you have limited resources, it can be challenging to get the expert help that you need. Back we come to pro bono, and the kind of help that experts are willing to volunteer to you and your organization.
Power Your Mission with a Skilled Volunteer
With the rise of global consciousness, connections made possible through ever-changing and increasingly accessible digital communities, and social activism, professionals more frequently want to offer their skills and knowledge to important causes. This growth creates a rich opportunity for customers like you to scale operations, raise more funds, serve more people, and deliver even more impactful programs and services.
By focusing their energies on your internal operations, technology, or strategy, the right volunteer can free you to focus more on your mission. The partnership with a skilled volunteer is the ultimate win-win: You get dedicated expertise, and volunteers get the satisfaction of contributing to an organization they believe in. We’ve seen this play out firsthand at Salesforce.
Every year, Salesforce employees log thousands of hours of pro bono work with our nonprofit and education customers to help them use our products more effectively. We created the Pro Bono Program in 2014 to bridge the gap between the limited resources that nonprofits have and the pool of volunteer resources and expertise that is available to help them take full advantage of Salesforce technology. That commitment continues with the launch of Impact Exchange, the evolution of our program and the new home for pro bono volunteering at Salesforce.
So what happens when an enthusiastic, well-trained volunteer meets a cause or organization they believe in? Let’s take a look.
Create Positive Results with Pro Bono
Since its inception, the program has connected more than 3,000 nonprofits and educational institutions with Salesforce employees on short-term pro bono projects. We quickly learned the most successful projects have a few things in common:
- A clearly defined project scope with specific goals
- A manageable amount of work, ideally 20 hours or less
- A project that isn’t time-sensitive or mission-critical
Early on, we incorporated these learnings into our Pro Bono Program and now they serve as the foundation for Impact Exchange. By focusing on providing short-term support for projects that aren't time-sensitive or mission-critical, it has yielded some outstanding results.
Through the Pro Bono Program, customers have benefited from pro bono support in a variety of ways. With the introduction of the Impact Exchange, we’ve expanded project options and management to make the processes easier than ever but success still starts with project scope. Here are three real examples of how customers have made the most of their investment in Salesforce with help from a pro bono volunteer.
Click a sample project to show more detail about the situation and the resolution that resulted from a volunteer’s involvement.
Now that you have a solid grasp of the potential benefits of working with pro bono volunteers, it’s time to move on to the next unit to learn how to assess your readiness to engage a volunteer.
And if you’re a Salesforce professional yourself and interested in volunteering to assist nonprofits and educational institutions, we have a trail for you–see the Volunteer Your Salesforce Expertise trail listed in Resources.