Foodbank Lifeline Foundation Malta is a non-profit organisation assisting families and individuals weekly from their four distribution centers across the island. The organisation supports those who find themselves in a crisis due to low income, illness, or homelessness, amongst others. Over the years and heavily impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, the organisation saw a significant increase in the number of families who require assistance, and their current demand exceeds 1,600* men, women, and children.

Gearing up for success

All the operations carried out by the organisation were tracked using various offline excel sheets, which took a heavy toll on efficiency and left room for manual error. Following the leadership discussions, Deloitte Digital recommended Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud to support Foodbank’s operations, with the goal to go live within 4 months from implementation. This would provide the organisation with a 360-perspective of their customers, partners and donators, various flexible automations and ad-hoc reporting.

The transformation journey

During the first weeks our team ran a series of workshops to understand the Foodbank operation and the various pain points. Using Salesforce standard and custom functionality, our primary focus was to ensure that the organisation could track the families and the referrals received. This would include details such as the assigned distribution center, type and amount of food packs they are eligible for, who referred them and their collection support history.

Further to this, the solution needed to ensure that families being referred were not taking advantage of the system, reducing the chances of a family having two active referrals at once. This was achieved through a combination of automated scenarios.

Foodbank also have an active website from which referrals and volunteer applications are submitted. Using Zapier, we set up a direct integration between the web-forms and Salesforce. Upon submission, the functionality can identify and link households and mark referrals as active or duplicate.

With this implementation, Salesforce became the single source of truth platform streamlining the data and reducing administrative tasks by approximately 40%-50% across the organization.

The next step was to provide the hub volunteers with an easy-to-use application where they could quickly identify a person, view how many food-packs can be collected, assign the number of food-packs collected, and, if necessary, create walk-in records. Ensuring the permissions for these users remained restricted, so we created a separate application and additional custom functionality. Now, through a click of a button, all the necessary information is presented to the user and data fields are available for input.

“The adoption of Salesforce in the distribution centers allowed us to completely eliminate the preparation of the weekly collection sheet and to dramatically reduce the time spent on Hub Administration, whilst, ensuring the security of information is controlled and monitored.” – Foodbank Lifeline, Manager.

Aside from client-facing operations, we also implemented features to track donations received, monetary or food packages, volunteer hub rotation assignments, and any expenses issued for operational purposes.

“The use of Salesforce means that information is instantly updated and provides access to real-time information regarding the clients’ needs to all user profiles. Hubs are now able to operate more efficiently and have the ability to manage any queries directly or through the internal collaboration tool”- Foodbank Lifeline, Manager

Making an impact

Today, Foodbank Lifeline Foundation is in the final transition phases and has adopted the platform for use in four of the eight distribution centers with the goal for the final four to go-live at the end of June 2023. The project was delivered and is currently supported pro-bono by the Salesforce team within Deloitte Digital Malta in collaboration with the Deloitte Malta Foundation as part of our commitment to giving back to the community.
 

Sources:

[*Voice of Workers Weekly, Dec 2021].
 

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