In our “Engineering Energizers” Q&A series, we delve into the experiences that have shaped Salesforce Engineering leaders. Meet Jevarlo Boykins, a Lead Member of the Technical Staff for Salesforce Engineering. Jevarlo supports the new Salesforce for Nonprofits Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) team under Salesforce Industry Cloud — empowering fundraisers in the nonprofit sector with innovative products to scale their impact.
Join us as we learn more about Jevarlo’s journey and how his team overcomes complex challenges in developing fundraising applications.
Why was your team launched and what is your mission?
Nonprofits are often overlooked, but are an enormous industry, employing nearly 10% of the U.S. workforce. With the 1-1-1 model and with our flagship product, Nonprofit Success Pack Salesforce has supported nonprofits for many years. To further this support, Salesforce is making an even bigger investment with Nonprofit Cloud. My team supports Nonprofit Cloud Fundraising, which, with our innovative tools and solutions, enables fundraisers to raise more funds, make a greater impact, and maximize fundraising success.
Nonprofit Cloud Fundraising represents a global paradigm shift in the fundraising landscape, embracing technology, data, and personalized approaches to empower fundraisers in the nonprofit sector.
Jevarlo explains what it’s like to work for Salesforce Engineering.
How has your team addressed scaling challenge in fundraising applications while maintaining performance and cost-effectiveness?
NPC’s main challenge is to develop solutions that can cater to customers of different sizes while keeping costs low and ensuring effective scalability. Nonprofits often operate on a limited budget, so it is crucial for our team to design applications that perform well regardless of the customer’s scale.
To overcome this challenge, the team focuses on building solutions that strike a balance between functionality and cost-effectiveness. NPC employs techniques such as resource management to ensure that applications operate efficiently within the bounds of their tenant resources. Because Salesforce’s platform supports multi-tenancy out of the box, NPC takes precautions to prevent resource requests made from one organization that would negatively impact the resources available to other tenants.
Additionally, the team adopts a mindful design approach. NPC considers factors like the volume of records and the impact it may have on system performance. For instance, when dealing with large datasets, NPC may need to optimize data retrieval and processing to maintain acceptable response times.
Lastly, we use orchestration and synchronization techniques to handle scaling effectively. By designing the system to handle batch jobs efficiently, we take into account the specific requirements of different tasks. This includes managing the sequencing of jobs, notifying customers of progress or completion, and handling exceptions that may arise during the process.
A look at the entities that comprise the Gift Commitment Change Attribution Log model.
What applications and features has your team developed to support Nonprofit Cloud Fundraising?
Our team developed three key solutions:
Donor Engagement: We provide tools to measure campaign impact and track outreach effectiveness. One significant feature is Gift Commitment Change Attribution Log. When running campaigns, fundraisers commonly encourage donors to increase their recurring donations over time. These recurring donations may be spread out over multiple campaigns, but have differing amounts of gifts given per campaign. This presents a big challenge in how to accurately track gift impact changes per donor, per change, per campaign, over time. Being better able to attribute these changes over time, fundraisers can analyze ROI for each campaign tracked.
Philanthropy & Partnerships: We’ve created tools to deliver a holistic view of donors and organizations to better engage them and build crucial relationships. We’ve accomplished this through Donor Profiles. These profiles simplify the complex process of identifying, qualifying, and managing information.
Fundraising Operations: A major operation for Fundraisers is entering and tracking gift donations. With Gift Entry, it’s easy to key in gifts quickly and accurately. This, alongside Automating Business Processes, makes it easy for admins and developers to build on top of NPC — which grows our ecosystem of solutions.
Jevarlo describes Salesforce Engineering’s culture.
What enhances developer productivity in your team’s workflow?
We use tools internally that enables my team to create cloud-based, personalized, work environments for efficient data management, collaboration, and task execution. These tools greatly enhance developer productivity in our team’s workflow by offering:
Integrated developer environment. Workspaces provides an integrated virtual environment for shipping code and handling orchestration tasks. Consequently, our team can circumvent powerful desktop machines as the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. This allows them to focus on writing code for features without the hassle of setting up and maintaining complex local environments.
Reproducibility. By hosting everything in the cloud, consistent builds are ensured across different environments. This eliminates issues caused by local configurations and leads to more efficient development and testing processes.
Seamless sharing and collaboration. Developers can easily share their entire development environment with others, enabling real-time feature testing and feedback. This removes the need for time-consuming setup calls and reduces the risk of demo failures.
Flexibility and scalability. Files can be accessed from any Internet-connected machine, allowing developers to work remotely or while traveling. Multiple instances of Workspaces can be run concurrently, enabling developers to scale and handle multiple tasks without overloading their machines.
How do you effectively collaborate with other teams?
Within our organization, collaboration with other teams and departments is a key aspect of delivering features effectively. We have regular Scrum of Scrum meetings where our Scrum leads come together to handle higher-level discussions. This encourages collaboration and breaks down hierarchical barriers.
During one of our recent standups, we identified a problem with release actions, which handle provisioning of upgrades. Some items were missing from the release list, causing potential manual provisioning issues. We reached out to a lead from a different team to discuss the problem and find a solution. The best part? All of this was done over Slack, while still in standup, collaborating with both my team and the team that helped us find the right solution.
The willingness to have conversations and help each other is remarkable, leading to effective feature delivery. This is even more crucial as my team works across many different time zones. That necessitates a blend of asynchronous communication where possible and real-time collaboration when needed. This level of collaboration allows anyone on our team to reach out and talk to anyone from another team, fostering a culture of collaboration and support.
Jevarlo shares why engineers should join Salesforce.
What are your team’s plans for using AI to support customers’ fundraising?
AI has the potential to revolutionize the fundraising team’s approach to donor engagement. By leveraging generative AI technologies, fundraisers will soon personalize outreach, build stronger relationships, and amplify their impact. One exciting use case is using AI to generate tailored gift proposals for major donors, saving time and providing a solid starting point for drafting compelling proposals.
Another exciting use case between AI and Nonprofit Cloud is to summarize program data, showcasing the organization’s outcomes and deepening the impact they can deliver.
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The post Tackling Scaling Challenges Head-On: Industry Cloud’s New Engineering Team Drives Fundraising 2.0 App Development appeared first on Salesforce Engineering Blog.