Adventures in LlamaSite
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Last week’s adventure was an opportunity to explore how LlamaSite might be able to help a group very near and dear to my heart: Dreamin event organizers! You’ve probably heard of a few of these Dreamin events?
Here’s hoping they are all in person and safe for everyone to attend in 2022!
The granddaddy of all Dreamin events is Midwest Dreamin! Eric Dreshfield, the founder of the Midwest Dreamin, volunteered as a beta tester for LlamaSite several months ago. Eric shared some information about LlamaSite with his Midwest Dreamin team and, another rockstar in the Salesforce ecosystem, Nick Lindberg thought there might be an opportunity to simplify and automate volunteer management for Midwest Dreamin using LlamaSite. Nick and I sat down together and explored some possibilities.
Volunteers for Salesforce is a free product that is native to Salesforce. It does not come with an external interface for volunteers to manage themselves. It does provide code to insert into a website but it is not mobile responsive. If you have the funds available, you can purchase Partner Plus Experience Cloud licenses for each volunteer and build out Experience Cloud. For a once a year event, that seems cost prohibitive. Plus, Volunteers for Salesforce does not have a simple way for volunteers to sign up for more than one shift at a time.
HandsOn Connect is a paid product that is native to Salesforce. It has a mobile responsive, templated, external interface for volunteers to manage themselves or you can purchase Customer Experience Cloud licenses for volunteers and use it there. HandsOn Connect is very robust and flexible and was built with enterprise level organizations and distributed models in mind. Based on the need for simplicity, HandsOn Connect is probably overkill in this situation.
At this point, Nick mentioned that he had been tracking his volunteer information on a spreadsheet. We agreed that the base level requirements were: 1. Ease of use for the volunteers, particularly in being able to sign up for more than one shift at a time; and, 2. Simplicity. I suggested we use his spreadsheet to see how simple we could actually make this process for volunteers. Within a few minutes, we had a working prototype.
- First, we used Nick’s spreadsheet to create a custom object in Salesforce and simultaneously import its data.
2. We created a listview on the newly created object that displayed the fields we want external volunteers to see.
3. In LlamaSite, we created a Listing Block to display the information for the volunteers.
And, voila, we now have a high level prototype for volunteers to sign up for shifts. It looks like a simple spreadsheet on the volunteer user interface. But, behind the scenes, LlamaSite is pulling the Role, Location, Day, Starting/End Time from the Salesforce instance. And when the volunteer clicks “Save Changes”, LlamaSite sends the volunteer Name, Email, and Phone# back to Salesforce.
Nick’s team will take a look at this prototype and discuss its benefits for Midwest Dreamin. What Nick and I did here only took a few minutes. You can begin to see how powerful a tool LlamaSite really is. And the discussion will continue. Perhaps it’s easier for a volunteer to create a quick login with their name and email address and just tick a box to register for each shift? Maybe the team wants to create these volunteers as leads in the Salesforce instance when they sign up for a shift? There are so many possibilities based on the specific needs of an organization. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Could LlamaSite simplify a use case for you? Reach out to and let’s schedule a chat!
