After almost 30 years in the nonprofit sector, TJ Warfield created her own company, Data Geeks Lab, which provides Salesforce setup, coding, and consulting services exclusively for non-profits. Because community is part of Data Geeks Lab’s core values, TJ joined the Pledge 1%.
But when she recently audited her contributions, she realized she was way off track. While her company makes annual charitable donations equal to about 1% of gross income, her direct service hours are way over 1%. In fact, donated staff time makes up 17% of billable hours.
And TJ isn’t planning on reducing this amount anytime soon.
Why such a big commitment? For TJ, it’s about giving back, but also about building community and pushing the Salesforce non-profit tools forward. And, of course, it’s also good for her relationships with existing clients.
Almost all of TJ’s direct service hours go to providing community support for non-profits around the world who rely on Salesforce to keep their operations running.
When TJ started in the Salesforce world, non-profits were on their own to figure out how to make the platform work for them. Documentation was slim, the user groups and forums didn’t exist, and there wasn’t even a universal platform that solved the basic needs of most non-profits. That changed, though, when Salesforce.org made a major commitment to its non-profit users, and built out an ecosystem to support them.
Having access to resources and knowing how to use them are two different things though. That’s where TJ and Data Geeks Lab comes in. TJ answers questions in “The Hub,” the online forum for Salesforce non-profit users, participates in the Salesforce.org Open-Source Community Sprints, and participates in meetings for the Bay Area Non-Profit Salesforce Users Group.
Participating in the Hub forums takes up a lot of the volunteer hours donated by Data Geeks Lab. Often TJ can help a user solve their problem more quickly and thoroughly than the standard Salesforce support people can, just because she has spent years dealing with the specific kinds of problems non-profits encounter. Sometimes she’s even jumped in and worked one-on-one with a user to solve their actual problem – no charge. When she can invest just a few minutes of her time to get an organization back on track to fulfill their social mission, that’s a lot of leverage, and it provides a lot of satisfaction.
One of TJ’s most rewarding contributions is the time she spends at the Community Sprints. These events, held 3 times a year, bring together in-house Salesforce developers, non-profit and education users, and implementation partners like Data Geeks Lab to discuss issues, write documentation, discuss and spec out new functionality, and sometimes even build new features. These in-person events are hosted by Salesforce and free to attend. The same people often attend each Sprint, and it becomes almost like a family reunion.
Contributing to the community is its own reward, but also brings benefits in Data Geeks Lab’s relationship with its customers. For example, TJ lets her clients know she’ll be unavailable during the Sprints, but her customers know she’s working on making their non-profit Salesforce experience better. And when they see her in the Hub forums helping others, they get proof of her depth of knowledge with Salesforce’s offerings, which leads to deeper trust.
One of the core values of Data Geeks Lab is to “Lift as you climb,” meaning that the company sees helping others as an integral part of its own success. The Pledge 1% program has been a natural fit, even if it has been hard to stick to just giving 1%.
