Force for change
Serving those who change the world for good.
About Us
At Force for Change, the mission is simple. We help nonprofit organizations use the Salesforce platform to meet their goals and needs, freeing up time and capital for them to further their missions. We want to ensure that our partners feel confident enough in the system and in themselves to use our engagement as a pillar upon which digital transformation can be built. We will NEVER charge a nonprofit organization for our services, regardless of the extent of our engagement.
Our Team
Alec Dorner
Founder & Salesforce Architect
Brandon Sharas
Salesforce Developer
Vince Cardamone
Salesforce Developer
Tyler Sell
Salesforce Administrator
Linda O'Brien
Implementation Specialist
Michael Carbone
Implementation Specialist
Our Partners
Bridge Communities
Bridge Communities serves homeless families in DuPage County with mentoring, housing, and supportive services. They currently use Salesforce for many facets of their operations. For instance, they track information about the apartments they own and manage, the residents of those apartments, their community partners and mentors who support program residents, and engagement in services, classes and events for their program residents.
We are supporting Bridge Communities in a number of initiatives to help them achieve their goals of:
- Streamlining intake of program candidates through development of a multilingual intake portal
- Providing reporting and operational tools to their partners to provide useful insights and better collaboration opportunities through development of a partner portal
- Providing a secure, user-friendly platform for program residents to communicate with staff and submit sensitive information such as pay stubs, and identification documents through development of a resident portal
Tanzania Development Support
Tanzania Development Support supports community-identified educational improvements for youth, especially girls, in the Mara region as a way to escape poverty. They do this by:
Providing full scholarships for girls in the Mara region to attend a private boarding school
- Supporting extracurricular clubs at the primary and secondary school levels and engage students in the practical application of classroom theory, as well as build life skills
- Providing a community center and library that offers thousands of books and a reliable internet connection
We are supporting Tanzania Development Support in a number of initiatives including cleaning up and migrating data from a legacy system and integrating Salesforce with Quickbooks and PayPal to help manage donations.
Rural Virtual Academy
The Rural Virtual Academy is a non-profit, PreK-12 public school that is comprised of two segments; a tuition-free virtual school open to all Wisconsin residents and a consortium of 60+ Wisconsin school districts. The RVA is focused on being the virtual school option with the highest quality educators and programs while having the largest variety of curriculum choices tailored to the way each student learns best, i.e., project-based, reading-based, gamification, or live daily instruction which is assigned based on the assessed level of competency, not by age or grade. The RVA provides digital curriculum, special education services, and other specialized programming to the 60+ school districts in its consortium of schools. Services that the small rural school districts would struggle financially to provide without the partnership.
With so many services being offered to both its own full-time students and its consortium of school districts, the RVA needed a more robust data and reporting system than the typical school district software contains. They also needed the ability to streamline processes, services, and communication in order to serve larger populations of students and districts as the school continued to grow. This involved creating a curriculum ordering and enrollment system that would automate fulfilling curriculum orders while providing communication during the summer months when human support is stretched to its limits. After a long, expensive development period with a company that billed themselves as PreK-12 Salesforce experts, they were left with a system that didn't work and were frustrated and disheartened with Salesforce as a whole.
We are supporting the RVA by overhauling the entire system bringing it up to best practices and future-proofing it so that future development will be successful. We are also providing guidance and mentorship to the RVA so that they can learn and grow to love the Salesforce platform. In the future, we hope to help the RVA to bring additional data they currently manage with spreadsheets into Salesforce. RVA reports being incredibly grateful for our services, confident that they can deploy Salesforce within their organization, and optimistic about their future in Salesforce for the first time since they began the development process over a year and half ago.
Testimonials
When our public, non-profit, virtual school needed better systems for data reporting and automation to help improve the service we provide to our families, we researched many CRMs and Salesforce seemed to be the most robust.
We met with a Salesforce Rep who recommended a development team to discuss our needs. The development team's salesperson sold Salesforce as an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop, data program that we would be able to manage ourselves after the development company completed its development. However, after we signed a three-year contract and paid the entire large sum of money upfront for their development services, the messaging changed from "Salesforce is easy to manage" to there was "no way we could manage this system ourselves" and then offered a very expensive per-hour rate for any work after the development period. The development time in total went 4 months over and, because we had no time to test with a small number of families first, we missed the window to use the system when we needed it most.
Fast forward through 6 frustrating months of trying to update our system ourselves to work the way we had asked them to make it, we felt we were ready to start using Salesforce. In an act of caution, we posted a message on a Salesforce Trailhead message board asking for any advice on how to deploy the changes we made in testing to the production copy of our Salesforce.
This is where things started to go from bleak to hopeful. Alec Dorner, of Force for Change, saw my post and immediately responded that he and his organization help non-profits like ours.
A few days after that reply to our post, we met via Zoom. Immediately after speaking with Alec, we knew that we were talking with someone who really knew Salesforce. He instilled confidence in our team that we were finally in good hands. He then looked through our Salesforce Org and found hundreds of errors made our system inefficient, and even prone to failure in some circumstances. Alec swiftly remedied the errors. Our school went from being completely lost to being up and running in just a couple of weeks from start to finish. We can't thank Alec and his team enough. We also can't believe how lucky we were to have someone as capable, honest, and caring as Alec and his organization to help us in our hour of need.
Force for Change understands that by helping non-profits like us succeed in Salesforce they amplify the good that the organizations they serve can perform.
Athena Podolak
Director of Marketing, Rural Virtual Academy
