How Salesforce was used to deliver 37,000 hot meals during the pandemic.

2020 was a tough year for many families in the UK and worldwide. With the pandemic coming into full swing, many families lost their jobs or were put on furlough, costing families either all or 20% of their salaries at a time they needed it the most.

Many key workers , particularly front line NHS staff were working unimaginable hours away from their families and many elderly were in isolation due to the needed lockdown rules at the time.

It was at this point that Al Haadi Youth decided something needed to change, and introduced the Hujjat Iftaar scheme to deliver warm & fresh cooked meals to community members in northwest London and its surrounding areas, completely free of charge.

Data collection with FormAssembly

Once the details of the scheme were finalised, the team decided they needed a data capture tool that would allow the secure collection of individuals who needed meals and how many meals they would need. We recommended getting a FormAssembly licence so that we could build powerful, secure and dynamic forms to collect this information from those who wanted to sign up.

FormAssembly provided the scheme with the following benefits:

• Data Prefill allowed applicants to reapply every week without having to repopulate the same data again and again
• Integration with Stripe & Paypal allowed applicants to make a donation directly from within the form
• Integration with Salesforce CRM allowed the data to be automatically pushed to the database for analysis

Data Analysis & Manipulation with Salesforce

Once the data had been collected via the FormAssembly form, it was automatically pushed into the Salesforce environment we set up for AHY. Using Salesforce, the team were able to:

• Run reports on how many meals were required and assign these requests to local community kitchens
• Categorise requests by territories so that these can be assigned to drivers
• Analyse which applicants were the most vulnerable so that meals can be prioritised accordingly
• Update the system with cancellations and adjustments
• Send automated emails to applicants if their request for a meal was successful or if they were put on a waiting list
• Run reports and dashboards to be able to easily assess the impact of the scheme
• Export the data to a delivery planning tool to allow for meals to be delivered in an optimised & sustainable way.

Project Wins

With the combination of the tools above, we were able to help AHY with the following:

• Recruit over 200 volunteers
• Deliver 37,000 warm meals to vulnerable members of the community
• Save the team hundreds of hours in data collection & processing