Wrapping Up the Inaugural Commons Affordable Housing Sprint in Newcastle

Dates: March 20-21, 2024

Location: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

“The excitement no longer revolves around the technology itself; rather, the possibilities of what can be achieved when we collaborate around a common toolset, with a shared objective to overcome the challenges faced by the sector.” - Affordable Housing Sprinter

Wrapping up the inaugural Commons Affordable Housing Sprint

We were thrilled to gather in Newcastle for our first-ever Commons Affordable Housing Sprint for two days of brainstorming, creating impactful solutions with a dedicated focus on Affordable Housing.

This was also a particularly exciting week as we announced the Commons Affordable Housing Program, in which the Commons Community Team and the UK Housing Team at Salesforce partnered to address the longstanding need for collaboration on technology solutions among UK social housing associations.

This special community has articulated the longstanding need for collaboration on technology solutions among UK social housing associations so the grounds were set for bringing this community together to innovate collectively.

Commons Affordable Housing Sprint team group photo, March 2024

Bringing together Housing Associations across the UK

A remarkable 77 attendees joined us in person, representing an array of folks working within the Social Housing and Salesforce ecosystems, including End Users, Administrators, Developers, Architects, etc from Housing Associations and Industry Partners from the UK and surrounding regions. This group has gathered before, but never like this - with the specific intention to come together to innovate and create open-source solutions together.

Thank you to everyone who joined and dedicated precious time away from their daily responsibilities, your commitment to sharing your skills made this event truly exceptional. Thank you for making our collective effort such a success.

Housing Associations come together to build solutions, March 2024

A special welcome from Nonprofit Leadership & Home Group Hosts

After a fantastic networking breakfast, Cori O’Brien (Director, Commons Community) kicked off the Sprint, sharing her immense gratitude for the work the community is doing to support each other in the region and spend time at the Sprint. Alongside Cori, we had Thomas Lancefield (Housing Lead EMEA) and Etienne De Klerk (Housing Solutions Team) extend a warm welcome to everyone, emphasising the significance of the group and the need to unite Housing Associations in developing shared solutions. We also received a hearty welcome from our incredible hosts at Home Group, Simon Parker and Tom Hill - who generously provided their incredible space for the event. We are immensely grateful for their hospitality.

Overall, the energy in the room was buzzing and folks were eager to get started identifying challenges and getting their hands on building solutions.

A warm welcome from our hosts from Home Group, March 2024

Nonprofit Cloud Overview

We were also grateful to have Jaclene Roshan, (Senior Director, Product Management, Nonprofit Cloud), who gave an overview of what’s inside the new Nonprofit Cloud and shared key feature sets that can support Housing, such as program and outcome management, case management and sales and service excellence.

This overview of what existing components can be leveraged to accelerate housing association solutions was the perfect segway into the rest of the day… which was getting hands-on to start identifying key challenges and focusing on which solutions to work on over the next few days.

A visit from “Sprinty” the Commons mascot (yes, a T-Rex!) at the Commons Affordable Housing Sprint, March 2024

Check out the 8 community-led projects that participated:

1. NEW: Business Rules Engine for Housing

The challenge they are trying to solve is how to use Salesforce to auto-calculate service charge amounts based on criteria.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Created Data Model for Service Charges
• Created a Flow & a Business Rules Engine to calculate estimated costs, using an example of Lift Maintenance

Next steps:

• Looking for community feedback to identify use cases
• Continue to build out solutions, for example, include more service charge line items

2. NEW: Housing Member Self-Serve

This group is looking to explore self-serve options for the Housing Community.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Defined the use cases and technology considerations for the sector and created an outline that can serve as a guide for those looking to explore.
• Created a whitepaper of self-serve options for tenants, focusing on User Journey & Technical Considerations.
• Within that User Journey, we’ve focused on two main topics, with a focus on Payments & Repairs.
• Mocked up a community template using Experience Cloud and a Chatbot process flow.

Next steps:

• Continue to build out the rest of the document and the different user journeys, UX design considerations & different Salesforce or Appexchange Products to integrate with.

3. NEW: Housing Complaints

This group focused on using Salesforce to build an end-to-end complaint management system, including delivering to the ombudsman.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Discussed how to develop a high-level, consistent best practice approach to lodge complaints.
• Defined process, stages, and field requirements for the complaint management system, creating a prototype aligned to the Complaints Management Code 2024 for England.
• Created documentation.

Next steps:

• Meet again to review what we’ve achieved.
• Analyse our complaints to help determine reports/dashboards.
• Meet again in June at the London Community Sprint.

4. NEW: Housing Compliance

This group focused on creating alerts and tools around compliance in the Housing sector.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Using Annual Gas Servicing as an example, the team mapped out what the happy and unhappy compliance path considerations would be.
• Created a demo prototype using a basic housing data model that attaches Compliance Information (new object) to Properties (custom object).
• Created automation around a flow-guided management process that handles the communication with the customer, logging of repairs, and compliance inspection information.
• Created an Experience Portal example that would allow an external user to log in to fill out Inspection information.

Next steps:

• Share the prototype design with the community to get feedback.

5. NEW: Standard Data Model for Housing Associations

The team spent the afternoon discussing various data models that would be appropriate the affordable housing sector.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Created a Data Model hierarchy for Person, Assets , and Financial Accounts.
• Implemented the proof of concept, and created a list of object definitions.
• Built out and showcased an ERD for Community Feedback.

Next steps:

• Create a list of field-level definitions.
• Build POC on Developer Org to showcase the different objects and relationships.
• More detailed field-level deep dive

6. NEW: Housing Indicators Alerts

This group focused on addressing the challenge of having front-line workers not having access to key details.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Outlined a list and scoped a solution to surface alerts, flags, and indicators relating to tenants, household, and assets, including categorisation of types of indicators and created user stories for different use cases.
• Installed the Salesforce Indicator App and created a basic proof of concept using five different icon types.
• Identified key issues such as data quality, customer regulations, review periods, etc., and created indicators to start how-to documentation specific to the Affordable Housing sector.
• Reviewed the data model to allow person, household, and assets to combine so that flags and indicators can be surfaced on different objects.

Next steps:

• Publish a recipe book of Salesforce Indicators for the Affordable Housing sector.

7. NEW: Decent Homes Asset Management

This group focused on creating a system to manage the lifecycle of Decent Homes Asset Management.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Scoped the requirements for asset lifecycle management within Salesforce, and created a proof of concept, which includes, housing stock assets, a custom object for managing the lifecycle of the Asset and the Component, object responsive page layouts, record types, and a suite of reports and dashboards.
• Installed Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (DLRS) to create cross-object rollups which drove new automated complex calculations based on the Decent Homes Standard.

Next steps:

• Get further community feedback and partner with the Business Rules Engine team to look at using this solution instead of complex formula fields.

8. NEW: Housing Repairs

This group focused on identifying pain points and lack of relevant communication within the repair journey for Affordable Housing.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Outlined the pain points in a repairs journey for Affordable Housing; picked an area of focus that has tangible outcomes & could be implemented quickly (communications).
• Created a Customer Communications Journey Map, including 12 communication templates and 1 knowledge article template to be used across the repairs journey.
• Identified requirements.

Next steps:

• Source community feedback to refine and tweak templates and journey map.
• Share the templates and journeys with the community!

PHEW! That was a lot! So much innovation taking place. But it doesn’t stop here! Register or save the date for our upcoming Sprint events:

• 13 May - Join us for the third annual Salesforce Housing Day 2024
• 4-5 June - World Tour London Community Sprint - Save the Date.
• October - Commons Affordable Housing Sprint - Save the Date.

See you soon!

• Commons Community Team (Cori O’Brien, Kristiane Kindle, & Lizzy Roberts)

Groups to join in the Trailblazer Community to stay connected:

1. Salesforce Housing Sector group to ask about any of the solutions you’re seeing above!
2. Commons & Sprint group and be the first to hear about where we’ll be Sprinting next.

The Salesforce Commons and Housing Teams partner to host the Commons Affordable Housing Sprint, March 2024