Scaling Impact: How Salesforce Transformed Take a Hike’s Operations

• Program operations relied on Excel spreadsheets and Outlook, making it difficult to maintain consistency across the organization as people were working in different ways. 
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• Information was stored across individual team members, creating a bottleneck and was potentially going to lead the team to lose historical data.
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• Growth from a single coordinator to multiple staff members led to inconsistencies in processes due to not having one centralized system.
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• Contact details for every program were stored in people’s individual devices, laptops and not held centrally to help the team be quick in responding to things.

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• Tracking program activities, including time spent in nature, life skills training, and volunteer engagement was not possible, the team wanted real time data.
  
  
• The team wanted a structured way to measure and report on educational partnerships was a missed opportunity for the amazing team working with so many partners.
  
  
• Fundraisers lacked direct access to impact data, making donor engagement and reporting more difficult than needed - The team wanted access to raise more funds!
  
  
• Quantifying program activities was a challenge; tracking how many days youth spent in nature, the number of life skills activities, and volunteering efforts were previously managed through scattered spreadsheets, making reporting unreliable.
  
  
• Lacking a central tracking system for volunteer participation made it difficult to measure engagement and plan future involvement. This was a missed opportunity for an incredible team dedicated to scaling their programs and maximizing volunteer impact.
  
  
• Inconsistent tracking of meetings and communications with education partners made it challenging to monitor the evolution and impact of partnerships. A missed opportunity for a team deeply invested in building strong, lasting relationships.
  
  
• Fundraisers struggled with data accessibility, often relying on manual requests to retrieve impact figures, which slowed down donor communications and fundraising efforts, which meant lots of individual data requests were sent to  the Program Operations team.

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• Opening new programs involved managing multiple stakeholders without a structured pipeline.
  
  
• New partnerships were being managed by one person and with no system to track new program partnerships, contacts, and progress It made it more challenging to work collaboratively. 
  
  
• Growth planning relied on a Word document instead of a scalable, reportable system.
  
  "We had a ton of information locked in spreadsheets and individual staff members’ heads. As we grew, there was no central place to track progress, measure impact, or standardize our approach. We needed a system that could support our mission at scale as we are so passionate about helping more youths every year, we needed a system that could keep up with our teams vision and energy!" - Emily Fergusson

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• The team didn't have one place to get data driven answers.
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• Data was in multiple places which meant it was time consuming to gather data to look at everything easily.

• Manual requests were made to the team which meant that a lot of time was used on manual data reporting.
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• The team wanted to be able to have data at their fingertips, and be empowered by their data, and to use it to make data driven decisions.

• Over 165 educational partnerships are now tracked in Salesforce, replacing disconnected spreadsheets.
  
  
• Historical program data, previously stored in emails and staff notes, is now centralized and accessible.
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  "For the first time in 25 years, we’re systematically tracking our community partnerships, allowing us to strengthen relationships and sustain long-term engagement."

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• Salesforce now tracks program volunteers, capturing their interests, contributions, and engagement levels.
• Volunteer hours are logged for reporting and grant applications, strengthening funding opportunities.
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"We can now recognize and steward volunteers effectively, ensuring their contributions are acknowledged and aligned with our mission."

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• Growth leaders can track partnerships at various stages, allowing better planning and board reporting to help the organization scale. 
• The transition from a manual process to an automated pipeline saves significant administrative time. 
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"What was once an unstructured process in Word documents is now a streamlined system that allows us to scale with confidence."

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• The fundraising team’s requests for data can see real-time impacts, stats and reports in a few clicks rather than manual searches for each request.
• Able to access reports much quicker with all data in one place.
  
  

• The teams now have all data in one place for the organization to benefit from.
• The data will enable the team to make data driven decisions, which will empower the team to go on and do so much more!

"For the first time in 25 years, we’re able to see all our impacts and data in one place, which enables us to understand our impact in a few clicks."

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