Hi everyone! After spending over 3 decades in higher education - including 8 years in the Salesforce ecosystem - I've created my own nonprofit called CAUSE: Center for Agency, Understanding, and Student Exploration. We support high school and postsecondary students through self-discovery and interest exploration leading them to meaningful careers through peer to peer community support and offer experiential learning opportunities. I know the importance of having a solid, scalable technology foundation, especially with the right data architecture, but as a startup I am still pursuing funding opportunities. I'm wondering if there are pro bono resources available to nonprofits to support some MVP development of Nonprofit Cloud (or possibly Education Cloud) and other products? Or, even aside from tech development, other types of resources which provide general planning and management support for nonprofits? I see a lot of options out there for accelerators, investments, etc. for tech startups, but not a lot for nonprofits. Thanks for any guidance, advice, resources, etc. anyone here is willing to provide!
Hi! I’d recommend starting with a small Salesforce MVP rather than implementing everything at once.
Focus on:
- Student profiles & interests
- Career/experience tracking
- Peer/mentor engagement
- Basic reports and dashboards
Then seek Salesforce pro bono partners, nonprofit grants, and volunteer consultants for implementation and strategy support.
Create a 1-page project brief explaining CAUSE’s mission, MVP requirements, timeline, and expected impact. A specific request like “Help us build a 6–8 week Salesforce MVP” is much more likely to attract support.
