Courageous Sailing is a nonprofit community sailing center now in its 25th year. We recently switched database platforms to Salesforce, accomplished a basic data migration, and started using Salesforce as a simple contact and transaction database. We now need help with customization. This project is intended to help use the data we are collecting to more effectively manage relationships with our students, members and donors; to decrease staff costs by eliminating ineffective work-around solutions (spreadsheets, etc.); to improve our ability to track and convert leads; and to build fast and accurate reports for our funders.

More specifically, we are looking to Salesforce to be an integrated, relational database that supports all of our programs, and takes the place of an assortment of spreadsheets and three-ring binders. We are looking for it to help us keep track of our students, members, donors and leads and understand how they are progressing over time; and to help manage resources (boats, lessons, events, etc.). Our youth and adult programs collect and track different types of data, so our database must be customized appropriately for each and be capable of reporting on everything from demographic information to student performance to donor activity to trends in membership and lesson sales.

We fully understand that the extent of work we're asking for may not exactly fit into the estimated 50-80 hours as scoped in the Catchafire template, but will likely require more hours/ work from you, the Salesforce expert. However, we do hope that you will choose to work with us and impact our organization in a big way!

Goals for this Project:
-To set up new fields and migrate Youth Program data from Excel spreadsheets into Salesforce.
-To create a framework for registration and tracking of Youth Program participants.
-To customize objects and activities within Salesforce to help us track the activity of our supporters (members, students, donors) over time and manage our resources (boats, lessons, events, instructors, etc.).

Overall Goals:
Organizations like ours nationwide are struggling to manage their data: an off-the-shelf solution tailored to a community sailing program's unique combination of kids and adults, boats and lessons, sponsors and funders, does not exist. We want you to help us use Salesforce to create a solution for our specific needs. Doing this project will enable us to better serve our kids, as well as the members, students, sponsors and donors that support them.

In 2009 the number of people on Facebook and Twitter surpassed email use. To stay competitive, technology needs to be mobile, shareable and interactive. Salesforce, a cloud-based database service, was developed to bring that ease and transparency to databases applications. Sounds like a great idea. Let one of our Pros get you up and running and customize to fit your organization like a pair of tight blue jeans.

Professional

• At least 1 year of experience building data-driven applications including database schema design, understanding of triggers and writing code.
• Proficiency with Salesforce.

Organization

• A database to merge into Salesforce.
• Work in advance to ready for migration including merging spreadsheets and removing duplicates.
• A list of reports to be designed.
• A Salesforce account.


Note: Salesforce provides up to 10 free user licenses for nonprofits.