Little Village collects great quality donations of clothes, toys and kit for babies and children up to the age of 5, and gifts these donations on to local families who are dealing with really challenging circumstances – homelessness, unemployment, low wages and domestic violence.

Families are sent their way by a network of referral partners – health visitors, children’s centres and midwives primarily, but also faith organisations, other charities and public servants.

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Ian was approached by Little Village to build a Salesforce system, handling both the referral and subsequent donation side, and their extensive network of volunteering.

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Leveraging the NPSP (Non Profit Success Pack) which includes a sophisticated Volunteering App (allowing building of sites, jobs, recurrence schedules and offering a means to insert IFRAMES into a website in order that volunteers can sign up to shifts), Ian built some custom apex code to automate the creation of gift records, repurposing the Opportunity table within Salesforce. Having all donations and gifts in a single table helps with reporting ensuring that values of goods donated and gifted can be analysed alongside donations of a financial nature.

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The project went live in January 2019 and a programme of developments including the use of eCommerce applications to enable more seamless gifting of items and providing tablets to volunteers to decentralise admin is planned for the future.