The Sun Shines on Community Innovation: Wrapping Up the London Community Sprint and Community Breakfast at World Tour

Dates: 4-6 June, 2024

Location: London, UK

We were thrilled to gather in the Salesforce Blue Fin tower for two days of brainstorming and creating impactful solutions for our Nonprofit and Education community using Salesforce to kick off World Tour London!

World Tour London Community Sprint group photo, June 2024

Bringing together the Nonprofit & Education Community

A remarkable 79 attendees joined us in person over the 2-day Sprint, representing the Nonprofit, Housing, Education, and Salesforce ecosystems, including End Users, Administrators, Developers, Architects, etc from customer and Industry Partners from London and surrounding regions.

A special showing from our Commons Affordable Housing Sprint

Earlier this year we announced the Commons Affordable Housing Program, in which the Commons Community Team, UK Housing Team at Salesforce, and the Housing Industry Advisory Council partnered to address the longstanding need for collaboration on technology solutions among UK social housing associations.

The first Affordable Housing Sprint occurred in Newcastle in March, and while this week’s Sprint wasn’t exclusive to Housing, a number of our housing community participants joined us in London to continue projects started in Newcastle - in fact, 3 out of the 7 projects at this sprint were Housing-focused which showcases the commitment to building open source affordable housing solutions.

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.

Image Credit: Abigail Green, a group photo of the Housing ‘mega-project’ - 3 projects combined into 1 over the two days to collaborate deeper and create a self-serve portal to better serve their customers…epic work!

A special welcome from Ivar Jansen

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 Ivar Jansen (Sr. Area Vice President, Head of Sales, EMEA) who extended a warm welcome to everyone, emphasising the significance of the group and the need to unite among the wider community to develop shared solutions. Ivar also highlighted the importance of the Nonprofit community and addressed the sheer breadth and depth of our footprint across the wider Salesforce ecosystem.

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

A warm welcome from our special guest, Ivar Jansen, June 2024.

Time to dive in!

After the morning breakfast, introductions, and welcomes from the team - the group was ready to get to work on either an existing project or on a newly surfaced challenge area. Leadership from seven existing projects were eager to get going, highlighting important jobs-to-be-done, and to engage with new volunteers.

The 7 projects were described and folks went around the room and assigned their name to a group.

Check out the 7 community-led projects that participated:

1. Indicators

Indicators is a custom metadata-driven Lightning Web Component that allows you to highlight important data in with icons and colours, making it easy to focus on what matters most on a Salesforce record.

Work performed at this sprint: The indicators team showed up globally (virtually)! While team co-leader Emma Keeling led the in-person volunteers in London, co-leaders Jodie Miners and Tim Shug participated from their homes in Australia and the United States respectively. It was a true team effort!

• Installation and configuration using the documentation and picking out aspects that need improvement.
• Created a promo video with an AI voiceover, including a form for in-person Sprinters to share feedback in preparation for an upcoming public launch on the AppExchange.

Next steps:

• Adding notes for improvement, editing the documentation, and defining structure.
• Publishing the updated docs and video in preparation for AppExchange listing launch.

2. AI Prompts for Nonprofits

AI Prompts is a helpful guide to make using AI tools like ChatGPT easier for Nonprofits.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Created three sub-groups to focus on key prompt categories: 1) prompts for Salesforce Professionals, 2) prompts for End Users, and 3) prompts around accessibility. Submitted some prompts to dev org logging tests.
• Wrote initial drafts of best practice documentation and governance model for maintaining and testing prompts recipes.

Next steps:

• Ratify documents and work on plans for the future.

The AI Prompts group in action! June 2024

3. Technical Collective

The Tech Collective is a formalised way to match not-for-profits with an inexperienced admin looking to gain experience supported by a technical collective of experienced Salesforce professionals.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Created a process flow for the new admin onboarding, onboarding checklists, KPIs and how to measure feedback. Written most of the content for the website, and submitted a logo request.
• Developed the program’s website content for people to sign up and market the program.
• Created detailed onboarding resources and checklists for technical coaches, junior salesforce professionals, and charities. Created survey forms for JSP, technical experts and Charities, which will help to start measuring KPIs.

Next steps:

• Looking to publish the website, need to collate and streamline resources and documents, circulate surveys and create an org to track outcomes.

4. Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (“DLRS“ aka Dolores)

DLRS is an interface to rollup data between cross-object records where Salesforce can’t natively.

Work performed at this sprint:

• Demoed the new DLRS wizard and rewrote documentation on Calculation Modes.
• Updated documentation for release; worked in marketing plan; wrapped up Calculation mode documentation.

Next steps:

• Continue with documentation updates on the site; find someone to move the Marketing plan forward.
• Launch version 2.21 with a large public announcement
• Publish listing on AppExchange

In a Community Sprint first, all three Housing-focused projects merged to join forces to tackle a common challenge faced by many - a lack of “self-serve” options for Housing Members. The Self-Serve, Repairs, and Complaints teams combined to create an Experience cloud portal resolving all three needs. We’ve detailed the individual work streams below, and going forward teams will work alongside each other on their journey to sharing what they’ve built into the community.

5. Self-Serve Community for Housing Members

This group explored self-serve options for the Housing Community.

Work performed:

• Created a mock-up of an example self-serve landing page linking to the repairs flow that the repairs project team.
• Developed some sample branding for our housing Association that can be used in the demo org for tutorial purposes.
• Created a help guide for setting up a profile for the portal. Built out on the documentation.

Next steps:

• Maintain momentum and continue with semi-regular meetings and check-ins to build on the documentation.
• Continue collaboration with housing project teams to embed their work within the manual.

6. Housing Repairs Journey

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

Work performed at the sprint:

• Built a basic flow for repair logging and diagnosing in a developer Org. Drafted a plan to guide design/requirements gathering to support the implementation of the flow and Field Service so each Housing Association can bespoke to their own data requirements, policies, processes, and procedures.
• Aligned with the other Housing projects to integrate into a single portal.

Next steps

• Complete the requirements/design plan to guide implementation of the flow, including adding in the communications templates that we created at the Sprint.

7. 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 the sprint:

• Mapped out a support process for Housing Complaint case management.
• Linked Salesforce functionality to the SLAs for Ombudsman. Fields and page layout created. Process mapped.
• Aligned with the other Housing projects to integrate into a single portal.

Next steps

• Want to create an MVP (create case, update statuses, work to resolution, monitor milestones and close case).

A post Sprint bus ride!

After the Sprint wrapped up, we boarded a double-decker bus, and headed over to the ‘night before World Tour’ Nonprofit Reception… it was the MOST epic way to end the Sprint and get everyone ready for World Tour the following day.

The epic London bus drive over to the Nonprofit Reception to wind down the 2-day Community Sprint! June 2024.

The Nonprofit Community Showed up in Force at World Tour London!

Following the two-day sprint, the Commons team kept the Community momentum going by hosting a Networking Breakfast on the morning of World Tour London (6 June) that welcomed almost 200 (!) attendees. We had an executive welcome from Ivar Jansen (VSr. Area Vice President, Head of Sales, EMEA), Cori and Lizzy addressed the Commons program and ongoing ways to stay engaged with the community, and finally we wrapped with a special address from Amir Kabel (VP, International Equality).

There were hands-on sessions, roundtables, and Nonprofit-specific content for our community as well. The AI for Nonprofit sessions had queues around the corner - tons of interest and excitement from our community, great showing overall!

Packed room at the Commons Nonprofit Networking Breakfast at World Tour London, June 2024.

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:

• See all confirmed events (and those still being planned) in the group details of the Sprint group.

See you soon!

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