Use Salesforce and all its software power to bridge the digital divide? Absolutely.

Just ask the Triangle-based Community Empowerment Fund.

How to bridge the technology divide between the “haves” and the “have nots” has vexed technology thought leaders, executives and millions of others who seek ways to improve lives since the Internet exploded more than two decades ago.

In the Triangle, one group building bridges is the CEF, which has operations in Durham and Orange counties. In an exclusive Q&A, WRAL TechWire talks with its co-director about the secrets to the group’s success, which last week earned it a $40,000 GlaxoSmithKline Impact grant.

Its mission is bold:

“The Community Empowerment Fund offers savings opportunities, financial education, and assertive support to individuals who are seeking employment, housing, and financial freedom. The opportunities for employment and greater housing that CEF advances motivate participants to build personal assets, gain higher income, engage in a healthy community, and sustain transitions out of poverty.”

Jonathan Young has built many of the technological tools that CEF uses in its bridge-building efforts.

The first of our two-part Q&A follows:

  • What’s the message your organization is delivering?

CEF supports people experiencing homelessness or financial insecurity to gain employment, secure housing, and build savings.

CEF trains and pairs volunteer “Advocates,” many of whom are undergraduate students, to work one-on-one with Members. We are valued by Members and partners alike for our ability to meet people where they are and walk alongside each individual to achieve personal goals, with a particular focus on financial empowerment.

We are passionate about sustaining transitions out of homelessness, and combine relationship-based support with innovative matched savings accounts to help Members achieve long-term dreams.

  • How is technology enabling your organization to deliver on its commitment to the community?

CEF is powered by volunteer advocates who work one-on-one with CEF members to achieve their goals of gaining employment, securing housing, and building savings. We use technology in order to make sure our advocates have access to the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to serve Members extremely well and consistently.

Technology is also essential to how our team communicates on a daily basis, how we track program and project development, and key to how we measure, anticipate, and analyze our program data and outcomes.

We have developed an incredibly customized Salesforce system to act as a digital platform that we call Connect.

Connect is designed to serve up the programs and resources that members and advocates navigate together, while simultaneously collecting data that measures outcomes and shapes the experience of the user. So when an advocate is working through our housing goals inside of Connect, they’ll be prompted to record any changes in their housing.

Then when a member moves into their new home and updates the status, updating that circumstance in the system change the system itself! We have used the platform to deliver our 1-on-1 financial coaching program in an interactive, dynamically rendering module that advocates and members work through together.

  • What about Salesforce makes it so applicable to what your organization is trying to accomplish?

Salesforce is highly customizable, and provided us with a platform on which to create a user-friendly interface that allows us to track all of our people in one place! We use Salesforce to track our members (clients served), advocates (volunteers), partner organization resources, and donors.

As a Client Relationship Management (CRM) software that is cloud-based, we are able to use this powerful, secure database tool with hundreds of volunteers and thousands of members. Given how central our database is to our work with members, and knowing that we are working primarily through volunteer advocates, we found we needed to make our database as intuitive and easy to use as a social media platform. Salesforce has allowed us to build in reminders [and] alerts.

  • What are some of the resources you have developed?

One of the other exciting ways we have used technology at CEF has been to create a user-friendly resource database in collaboration with the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness. We had built an internal resource database that we transitioned to the Salesforce platform in a searchable, public tool called OC Connect (occonnect.info).

In the next stage of this collaboration, we are now working with the Partnership to End Homelessness to build upon this tool for coordinated entry in the homeless services system.

As a community, Orange County is moving towards a more connected and collaborative approach to homeless services, moving beyond assessment that prioritizes services for the most chronic towards a fully coordinated entry system! Towards this end, this work will update our vulnerability assessment tool (VI-SPDAT), expand assessment to serve families, and implementing a whole new suite of tools to incorporate a system entry tool, DV screening/referral, diversion best-practices, digital consent forms, anonymous or unique identification, and greater demographic/circumstantial data.

Additionally this work will ensure that the organizations are more securely identified through unique logins, and that the resource database contains the most up to date information available in our community.

Coming Next: A deeper dive into the CEF and technology