John Bono
“It’s important in the nonprofit world to share your experience and be open source because, for most nonprofit Salesforce administrators, it’s hard – it feels like you’re on your own a lot.”
Artist, programmer, and community advocate John Bono has found a satisfying niche at PUSH Buffalo. PUSH Buffalo is a community organization in Buffalo, New York, that is dedicated to affordable housing, local hiring opportunities, and economic and environmental justice. Because the organization has a large staff and a number of initiatives in the Buffalo community, John’s days working as web developer and interaction design specialist are busy and ever-evolving.
It wasn’t always like this. John started volunteering part time with PUSH Buffalo in 2018, offering to redesign the organization’s website. Before long, he found himself working there full time, and diving head first into Salesforce. PUSH Buffalo’s Salesforce database had been in use since 2008, but it was no longer serving the organization’s needs. John and his colleague Zainab Salah decided to work with Ashima to develop and build a new instance from the ground up, and transfer the data. As John says, “The three of us were a tour de force!”
Just when PUSH Buffalo’s Salesforce project with Database Sherpa was wrapping up, the pandemic hit. PUSH Buffalo’s organizers knew it would be a problem for some Buffalo community members to get their needs met, so the team quickly pivoted to start a Mutual Aid Hub. By collaborating with his teammates and using the skills he had just learned, John was able to help put together a case system for people to get supplies, food, computers, and all sorts of essentials that had suddenly become hard to obtain. It was challenging to figure out how the aid hub would work, and how to interface Salesforce to the website. However, within about a week, the mutual aid hub was up and running on PUSH Buffalo’s website. When it came to developing an important feature in a short time frame, creating a new Salesforce instance had prepared John and the team well.
John has taken a number of skills and insights forward from his “trial by fire” developing the new instance. Through the project, John gained experience interviewing stakeholders about what they wanted to record in the Salesforce database, and then mapping the process in LucidChart, an intelligent diagramming app. John continues to find that these diagrams are a useful way to visually represent his discussions with stakeholders, so that both the developer and the stakeholders can come to an understanding of how the process is intended to work.
John finds that he likes figuring out peoples’ problems, and trying to create solutions. When he was asked to do some freelance Salesforce development for the Grassroots Gardens community group, he jumped at the chance to share his knowledge. He has found through his work that if you genuinely believe in the cause you are working for, the details become that much more gratifying. In John’s words, “it helps when you're working with organizations you like, and you can make a difference for them.”
As a member of the Database Sherpa practice group, he enjoys participating and adding value to others. As John says, “It's important in the nonprofit world to share your experience and be open source” because, for most nonprofit Salesforce administrators, “it's hard – it feels like you're on your own a lot.” Through the practice group, John can once again express himself as a programmer, artist, and community advocate.