How I Spent My Honeymoon Week: Combining Passion and Purpose with Salesforce

On February 28th, 2023, my then-boyfriend and I finally tied the knot in our civil partnership ceremony. As a newlywed, I have also been looking forward to spending quality time with my now-husband, making unforgettable memories, and starting our life together. However, we were both swamped with many other tasks. Rinus and I are active members of the Scots International Church in Rotterdam. In particular, Rinus is now one of the people in charge of putting together the list of volunteers for the weekly church service.

So, when we in our honeymoon week, I had an idea: why not combine my passion and purpose with my leisure time, and work on a Salesforce project that could benefit my community? Luckily, my partner was also supportive of the idea, and we decided to spend our honeymoon week creating a simple solution for a volunteer roster in my church.

The problem we wanted to solve was a common one: how to manage the scheduling and communication of volunteers for various tasks and events, such as ushering, greeting, or serving refreshments. Our church had been using a paper-based system that was prone to errors, delays, and miscommunication. We wanted to create a digital platform that could streamline the process, increase transparency, and save time for both the volunteers and the organizers.

The simple data model includes the following:

Contact object. I renamed the object to Volunteer. It stores the record of the volunteers.

Custom object: Church_Roster__c. This object will keep records of duty roster for every week. Every record stored the date and roster team - Hospitality, Welcoming, Children Club, Messy Church and Collection.

Junction object: Volunteer_Roster__c. For many-to-many relationship between Volunteer (Contact) and Church_Roster__c.

And there comes the most fun part: automation! I create a flow to cater these tasks:

Add new roster.

When the user selects the team (eg: Hospitality) and roster date, formula text will create a text variable to be used as Church Roster Name.

Several validation.

If the date selected is not on Sunday, a text will display to notify you to select a date on Sunday.

Screen flow is used to create the roster and add the volunteer. If the roster already exists, the flow will find the existing roster record.

The flow will also take into consideration if the volunteer has already been assigned to another roster team in the same week. For example, in the clip below, screen flow notifies user that my name has been assigned to another team. Therefore, it cannot be assigned again.

Email notification

Finally, when the volunteer is assigned to the duty, an email will be sent out to notify the volunteer.

In conclusion, I am excited about the potential impact of this volunteer roster app and I hope that this pilot project will inspire the church to adopt digital transformation in other areas as well. If you're interested in learning more about this project, feel free to reach out to me or leave a comment below. I'd be happy to share my experience and insights.