Harnessing Technology for Nonprofits

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Melissa Hill Dees, nonprofit Salesforce consultant and Salesforce MVP. Join us as we chat about how her TDX Hackathon team built a conference scheduling agent from scratch in 16 hours.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Melissa Hill Dees.

How to help nonprofits define goals for Salesforce

Melissa majored in computer science back when you still programmed with punched cards. However, she didn’t really start her career in tech until 2008, when the nonprofit she was working for started using Salesforce. She was hooked on how she could help these organizations use technology to do more with less, and quickly pursued an MBA in digital entrepreneurship.

One thing that came up in our conversation was the difference between how nonprofits and businesses approach Salesforce. In particular, Melissa emphasizes the importance of defining measurable goals for any tech project so you have common ground when prioritizing requests. As the capabilities of Salesforce continue to grow with Agentforce, admins need to help their organizations maintain focus.

Building an agent in 16 hours at the TDX Agentforce Hackathon

Melissa is fresh from the TDX Agentforce Hackathon, where she put together an all-women team of Salesforce MVPs called MH4. Why the name? Because everyone on the team has the same initials: Melissa Hill Dees, Michelle Hansen, Marisa Hambleton, and Melissa Hansen.

Together, they had 16 hours to make a working agent, but Melissa was the only person on the team who had built one before. However, from their experience as Dreamin’ event volunteers, they had a pretty good idea for a problem they could solve: scheduling a conference.

Finding the right-sized room for each talk when there are several concurrent speaker tracks gets complicated, especially when people are presenting more than once. It’s a problem that everyone on the team could rally around. As Melissa explains, building the agent wasn’t the hard part. It was setting up the backend to make sure it had the right information and permissions to accomplish its goal.

Why admins should get the Strategy Designer Certification

If you’re looking to learn more, Melissa highly recommends getting the Strategy Designer Certification. You can learn tons of valuable tactics, like consequence scanning, that help you align a group of people around an idea and allow everybody to feel like they have input.

Finally, Melissa emphasizes how crucial it is for admins to start learning Agentforce now, even if your organization is hesitant. “Admins have to see the big picture,” she says, “so start learning it now so you don’t have to play catch-up when everybody comes around and wants to use AI.”

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Melissa, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Certification: Strategy Designer
• MH4’s presentation at the TDX Hackathon

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Melissa on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike:
You’ve got a dream team when everyone’s name starts with MH, and you’re building a functioning AI agent in 16 hours while laughing and having fun at it. This week we’ve got Melissa Hill Dees on the pod, and the vibe is totally Agentforce, nonprofit tech, and I even talk about the future of Salesforce admins in the era of AI. And we also talk about the little thing that she built at the hackathon. It’s just a scheduling tool that is really cool for all the dream and events. But let me tell you this, if you’ve ever said, “I’m not a developer, but …”, you’re going to feel right at home. So with that, let’s get Melissa Hill Dees on the podcast. So Melissa, welcome to the podcast.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Thank you, Mike. I’m so glad to be here.

Mike:
Well, I’m glad to have you on, and we’re going to kick off … I’m going to call it a few weeks of MH4s.

Melissa Hill Dees:
I love that

Mike:
All of the MH4s because you guys were such a cool little group that got together for the hackathon at TDX, which we’re going to talk about. But before we get into that, Melissa, which spells out some of the MH4, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Oh goodness. So a little bit about myself. I found Salesforce in 2008 after becoming a stay-at-home mom for a little while and not knowing what to do with myself and trying to help small businesses improve what they were doing from a customer relationship management side. I didn’t really get very deep into Salesforce then but a couple of years later, I went to work for a nonprofit and they had Salesforce and I became the classic accidental admin. Which was ironic considering that back in the dark ages when dinosaurs still roamed the earth I had majored in computer science.

Mike:
That’s back when they were inventing dirt, because I was also back in that era too.

Melissa Hill Dees:
They were literally inventing the internet. When I went to university, we still had punch cards. You remember punch cards?

Mike:
Uh-huh.

Melissa Hill Dees:
So I felt like I had come full circle. But I really loved what Salesforce was doing with nonprofits and giving them the opportunity to use the best technology that was out there to make a more impact, to improve their mission. And so the more I worked in nonprofits, the more I saw that they thought differently. They didn’t think like a business, they thought like a nonprofit, and they didn’t always use Salesforce like a business, they used it like they thought a nonprofit would. So it was really interesting. I studied. I did a lot of research and went back and got my master’s in digital entrepreneurship because I really wanted to understand the best ways to help nonprofits leverage technology because they have to. That’s the only way they can do more with less. So that’s really become my passion. How do we make it simple, easy, welcome even. Everybody fusses about technology, but it can do so much that we don’t have to do, so we have time to do the things that we really want to do.

Mike:
Well, that’s a great intro. Holy cow. Could you ever have imagined back in 2008 that you would be at a hackathon building an agent?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Again, once upon a time, I could write a little Cobol or a little Fortran, but I’m sure I can’t even do that anymore. And certainly not a developer by any stretch of the imagination. And you say hackathon, I immediately think developers.

Mike:
I know.

Melissa Hill Dees:
That who goes to hackathons, right. But I had learned early on from attending the nonprofit community sprints that you didn’t have to be a developer. You didn’t have to even be a hardline admin. If you wanted to help in a sprint, you had input and you could help in so many different ways. So it made the hackathon a little less intimidating.

Mike:
Absolutely. So let’s get into that. First of all, I need you to explain the MH4s. What’s the MH4s? Am I saying it correctly?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Well, I say MH to the fourth.

Mike:
Oh, okay. Sorry. MH to the fourth.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Yeah. Because we’re exponentially awesome. And ironically, a couple of things were going on with that. One thing, ever since I’ve been involved in the ecosystem, I’ve been involved with the women in tech groups and WITness Success and all the different groups working with women in minorities. And especially when it comes to AI, I am just adamant, everywhere I speak, I tell everybody they need to get in there and help train the AI. And so I wanted almost as a social experiment to have an all female team for the hackathon. And I started thinking about what we would need on that team. And I knew we’d need a good developer. And so Michelle Hansen is who immediately came to mind. I knew we would need somebody who could write flows at the drop of a hat, do the adminning, and of course Michelle … Michelle Hansen. I’m going to get confused here. Michelle Hansen is obviously that person. She’s so good at those sorts of things.

We also needed someone that was more of an architect view. And Marisa Hambleton runs Cactusforce and does that work and so I invited her. And then I was the only one of the group that had actually built an agent before we got to hackathon.

Mike:
Oh, wow.

Melissa Hill Dees:
So it was a really exciting opportunity. And it was funny that I didn’t consciously think we need everybody named MH, initials MH. But it worked out that way. And in fact, I was going to ask Maham Hassan to be on our team as well, and she couldn’t because of the rules and regulations about folks out of the country.

Mike:
Okay.

Melissa Hill Dees:
We would’ve been MH to the fifth power. And five was all you could have. But I’m so glad I did that. It was everything I dreamed it would be. The collaboration between us. None of us have ever worked together. We’ve never been even employed by the same company, let alone in the same room to sit down together and have 16 hours to go from zero to a working agent. And I loved it. We talked and we talked and we talked. We got all the consequence scanning done and the road mapping done and everything done because we just talked and talked and talked and talked. And we didn’t have to go back and do that after we built the product. That was built into the way we thought and building the product and building the agent.

So both Melissa and Marisa and even Michelle did a little bit. We’re all like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to go to a hackathon. I’ll have to take two days out of my work.” And I really twisted their arm a little bit and I said, “We could do something really awesome.” All of us are involved in community driven events, and we talked about could we do scheduling? What could we do? And then when we got there, of course actually, that’s what we built, was a scheduler for presentations based on the rooms that they would be in based on what we had available. And literally took what … Marisa said took her and Steve about 40 hours combined to do, and the agent does it in seconds.

Mike:
Oh, wow. So tell me … You’ve teased it out. Tell me a little bit about what you built at the hackathon.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Yeah. It was great. So we started thinking about what … All of our driven events we’re all volunteers. Nobody gets paid to do those. And so it was a situation of what can an agent do for us that will save us time? And that’s one of the huge tasks. After you actually go through all the submissions for presentations and you decide which ones you want, then how in the world do you schedule them in these different rooms? The tracks are running at the same time. You’ve probably got four or five different tracks running at the same time. Somebody may be presenting more than once. You don’t want them to overlap. The rooms, depending on how big they are and what else they’re being used for. So it just seemed like a really great idea for an agent. And we decided to build it.

After we were done we thought we probably could have done this with a flow, but because we had that 16 hour time constraint, Melissa Hanson whipped out a … She said, “I can do this with code.” We’re like, “Okay. Do it. Because we want a product when we leave here and we can update it later.” So literally … And the demo that we had to make to submit for the hackathon is on my LinkedIn page and shows you how quickly it goes to, you’ve already got all that data in your Salesforce instance, you’ve got the speaker, the session, the titles the rooms, and you hit that agent and it creates a schedule for you.

Mike:
Yeah. No. I believe me more can relate to what you’re asking that agent to do as somebody that’s involved with a lot of the events and stuff that Salesforce does.

Melissa Hill Dees:
And the best thing, I think for us about the hackathon, and it was ironic because the very next day I was invited to an executive listening session. And I said, “I would’ve come to TDX just for the hackathon.” I learned so much. And I’m a very kinetic learner. I need to do it. I don’t need you just to show it to me or tell me about it. I need to do it myself. And because I had already built some, that’s why I knew that the hard part was not building the agent, the hard part was writing the code if you needed something invocable there or getting the permissions correct on the back end for the agent itself and applying all of that. So deep dive into that agent. We were learning from each other and with all of our different skill sets, we’re all MVPs, but each of us has such different skill sets. And then we could really actually create something that would work in the real world, say in less than 16 hours. To me that’s amazing.

Mike:
Oh, absolutely. You’ve done so much to encapsulate that weekend, and I’ll point people to that video on your LinkedIn page. I’m wondering if you could bottle up one moment from that weekend and share it with the world, what would it be?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Oh, goodness. The word that comes to my mind again and again and again is the collaboration with those women. And there was not arguments. And there could have been, and that would’ve been fine because it’s okay to disagree. But we didn’t. We really aligned on what we were trying to accomplish and we knew what we wanted to do. And that level of collaboration was just like I say, everything I ever imagined something like that would be,

Mike:
Yeah. Let’s transition out of that because you’ve been in the community since we’ve invented the cloud. I say that because I’ve been around since 06 so we’ve been there a while. And I started, the first question was, could you imagine an AI agent now? How do you see the Salesforce admin role evolving in an AI forward world?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Ooh, that’s very interesting. I am fascinated by AI and how we can leverage it to do things. I think I really believe even now, admins need to at least learn how to use the agent and how to build an agent. Because right now it’s relatively simple to do, but I think about 2008, Mike, what was there of Salesforce? It was one product. It was one thing. I could learn it then. There were times when I could tell you that I felt like I knew everything you need to know about Salesforce. Now, no way. With all the product acquisitions and the different clouds and the different architectures and the different information, there’s just no way possible that I can be an expert at Field Service and at Marketing Cloud and at Slack and at all those things. So I always think of admins like architects. They have to see the big picture. And with the AI I think that’s important. Start learning it now. Don’t wait. Even if your company says, “Absolutely not. We’re not going to use AI. We don’t trust it, we don’t like it, but start learning it now so you’re not trying to play catch up when everybody comes around and is using AI.”

Mike:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And to your point, I remember as an admin trying to pass my certifications and thinking, oh, but my company doesn’t use Service Cloud. I don’t know Service Cloud. And the certifications … Forced is a bad word to say, but required that I learn it. And I remember thinking to myself, but it’s good that I know it now so that when the company’s thinking about it, I’ll be ready. Or at least I’ll have a base foundation. And a lot of that is realizing where you sit between technology and strategy within an organization. So my question to you is, what’s something you wish more people understood about the intersection of being a Salesforce admin and strategy?

Melissa Hill Dees:
I think that Salesforce admins probably have the best view of what the strategy might be like. I think it’s important. I love the strategy designer certification.

Mike:
Tell me about that.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Yeah. If you’re an admin and you haven’t looked at that, you should because it’s less technical and more people management. And one of the things that I learned studying for that and from the design team from Adam Doti’s team was consequent scanning. I’d never done that before. And it was so fantastic to do that and be able to align a group of people around an idea. It wasn’t a threatening way. It wasn’t, I’m the boss and we have to do this. It wasn’t that I’m the admin and we have to do this. It was an opportunity for everybody to have that input. And I think that’s so important for admins. They have so many jobs and they’re not just the technical side of things. They’re the ones that get the complaints because the button didn’t work or it’s not where it would be easy to use or whatever, the report’s not pulling correctly. And it’s just so much responsibility when you do Salesforce admin and do it really well. That’s why I recommend that to everybody. I don’t even think you have to have your admin cert. I don’t think that’s a prerequisite. But it’s definitely worth doing and learning. At least do the trailhead on it.

Mike:
Yeah. No. I didn’t even know about now it’s on my list. Thank you.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Yeah.

Mike:
So you brought that up because the admins are responsible for a lot and they do often have that first line of reaction or giving some sort of an answer to a user and looking up an issue, whether that was something they found in discovery or not. But I’d love to know, when you think about best practices, is there something underrated that has maybe made a huge impact in one of the organizations that you’ve managed or worked on?

Melissa Hill Dees:
That’s a great question. There are a lot of things that are underrated. And right now what I’m encouraging … Especially if you’re a sales organization, encouraging folks to do is to use the agent summary function in sales. Working in a implementation partner, you don’t always talk to the customer when they’re in the sales process. You may not even talk to them when they’re in the delivery process, so you really don’t know them that well, but you’re going to write a customer success story. Well, how do you go back and capture three years worth of work or three years worth of interactions? And I’ve seen it done with the agent summary. And to me, that is the most impactful thing from an ROI. Do you want to pay me to spend five or six hours trying to track down information for something or do you want to pay me for writing a customer success story? So if I can get that summary at the click of a button, then I can write the success story, then I can write five success stories, six success stories, whereas I’d only be able to write one in the same timeframe if I were having to do it all manually. That’s just a huge thing, I think.

Mike:
And you always bring it up. There’s so many underrated things because there’s very powerful things in setup that sometimes get overlooked.

Melissa Hill Dees:
The design. The user design. There are a lot of ways to improve it significantly, and most people don’t take the time to do that. And you talk about user adoption, we all know that that’s the easy route to user adoption. It doesn’t matter how complicated it is on the backside, I just want to click a button. And we don’t think that way always as an admins, and we are the ones that would do that.

Mike:
No. Absolutely. You think about keeping up on technology, and you often talk about technology as a tool for social good. I’d love to know how do you keep that front and center when building in Salesforce?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Well, personally, I love the V2MOM. And you’re probably going to think this is crazy, but I use it with customers to suss out what the important aspects of any project we’re working on are. Something that we can set up a goal, make it a measurable goal, and that makes it so much easier to start fleshing out requirements and user stories and you turn it over to delivery and they’ve got metrics to build against. So thinking about with nonprofits, if you want to double your online donations this year, maybe that’s your goal. Then we build a new donation interface in Salesforce or in an experience and then create the report as well to be able to track that so that we can see did we accomplish that? And I don’t know if you make it purple and they’re like, “No. It needs to be pink.” And you say, “Well, so is Pink going to help increase the number of donations?” And if they say, “Okay. Let’s put that in the parking lot. Let’s go to phase two with that.” But they may say, “Well, it has to be pink because we’re breast cancer, and so pink is our signature color. People won’t even recognize us if you don’t do pink.” Then yes, it probably would help increase the donations. And so that’s worthwhile to include in that.

Just helps not get out of scope, but to be able to focus on what they’re really trying to achieve before they get to the end of the project and then go back and say, “Well, was this a successful project? Did we build something good in Salesforce?” Well, who knows?

Mike:
You said a lot. And you actually answered my next question because I do think a lot of … I was going to ask you about an admin superpower, and I think you brought it up, which is really having that critical eye and being able to look at how easy is it to use the thing that I just built, and does it align with what we’re using it for?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Right. You have to ask why. Why is my favorite word. And the five whys, that’s part of the strategy certification too. But customers don’t … And I say customers. Whether they’re internal customers, users, or if you’re a partner and working with external customers, they don’t always know what they want it. Like children. You never say to a child, “What do you want to drink?” You say, “Would you like milk or would you like juice?” And so understanding their business and what they’re trying to accomplish I think is critical to being able to help them and then asking why. The best example I have of that, we were in Prague, my husband and my daughter and I. I was speaking at CzechDreamin a couple of years ago, and we’d been there about 24 hours and my daughter came to me and she’s like, “Mom, there’s nothing left to see in Prague.”

Mike:
Wow.

Melissa Hill Dees:
I was like, “Why would you say that?” It’s a great old city. There’s tons to see in Prague. She said, “Well, there’s nothing left in walking distance.” I was like, “Okay. So why don’t you take public transportation? You’re a huge one to use public transportation.” She’s like, “Well, I can’t read the language.” And of course know Czech is not even our alphabet. So she was really struggling with that. I said, “Okay. So why don’t you take a Lyft or an Uber?” And she said, “Because I’m out of money.” So that was what she really needed. It wasn’t that there was nothing left to see in Prague, it was that she didn’t have the money to get to the places that she wanted to go to see the things she wanted to see in Prague. But you don’t get that unless you get to the root of what it is they’re trying to accomplish.

Mike:
Yeah. Wow. It’s like reaching the end of the internet. No you didn’t. You didn’t reach the end of the internet. Boy, we covered a lot. I’d love to go back. Just one thing on agents as we close it out. And this has been lingering with me. I think maybe since I’ve got all the rest of the MH4s coming … MH to the power of four coming up. Maybe I’ll ask him this. If you could build an agent to help every admin do one thing better, what would it be?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Understand the error messages in Salesforce.

Mike:
Oh, I like that.

Melissa Hill Dees:
In fact, a partner and I have been working on this. It’s not an Agentforce agent. We started it before Agentforce came out. But again, because admins speak a different language than developers do, and they both speak different languages than users. And so what we’re working on actually looks at your metadata, tells you what the problem is and speaks to you based on your role. I do. I think that that’s the most time consuming challenge that admins face. You get that error message that says, “If this error persists, contact your Salesforce administrator.” It’s like, I am the administrator.

Mike:
I love getting that message with the administrator. That’s me. Don’t you know that’s me.

Melissa Hill Dees:
And it gives you no helpful thoughts at all. And now that there’s an agent in the help, that’s fantastic because used to, I’d be like 57 tabs later and I still didn’t have an answer to fix whatever the problem was that I was getting that error message. So yeah. That’s what I would build and I am building.

Mike:
Okay. Well look at that. I asked the question that’s already stuff’s in flight.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Right.

Mike:
Melissa, this is a wonderful conversation. You need to come on the podcast more often. Talk about nonprofit tech and equitable technology. I feel like that’s a whole other podcast.

Melissa Hill Dees:
It is. It is. And so important. So, so, so very important.

Mike:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I’ve done podcasts before, but asking why … I love your example of you didn’t see everything in Czech. You’re just out of money.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Right.

Mike:
That was great. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Melissa.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Thank you.

Mike:
Big thank you to Melissa Hill Dees for joining us and sharing her journey of nonprofit tech advocate and AI hackathon hero. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or a community member, maybe both. For more great resources, of course, head on over to admin.salesforce.com and be sure to check out that trailblazer group and let’s hope Melissa is working on building that decoding error messages agent, because I think I’ll be the first in line when that launches. Anyway, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story appeared first on Salesforce Admins.