How Warrior Canine Connection Turns Survey Responses Into Life-Changing Outcomes for Veterans

Warrior Canine Connection trains and places service dogs that help veterans manage PTSD, trauma-related nightmares, and other conditions. To keep improving that work, the organization needs honest, measurable feedback from trainers, breeders, and veterinarians. In this customer story, the organization needed that feedback to land directly in Salesforce, where the team could actually use it.

The problem Warrior Canine Connection was facing was participation. Paper forms and PDFs produced low response rates and fragmented data, and that gap held the organization back from focusing on their mission.

By using FormAssembly and Salesforce, Warrior Canine Connection rebuilt its feedback loop and turned nonprofit data collection in Salesforce into measurable, life-changing outcomes for veterans.

“By collecting that data — to find out that [a placement] was not as successful — we were able to change our training program to something different. Now the dogs are continuing to alert [vets] to those [PTSD] nightmares.”
— Molly Morelli, Warrior Canine Connection

About Warrior Canine Connection

Founded in 2011, Warrior Canine Connection is a nonprofit organization that operates across 15 program sites in four states. Some dogs in the program are trained by veterans inside prison facilities, creating a dual-benefit program that serves both the trainers and the eventual recipients.

The work does not end at placement. Every dog stays part of an ongoing relationship — with the veteran (referred to internally as a “graduate”), with the training team, and increasingly with a data system built to track how each dog performs over time.

The Problem With Paper and PDFs

Before FormAssembly, Warrior Canine Connection ran its graduate surveys the way most nonprofits collect data: a PDF emailed out with a request to fill it in and send it back. The completion rate hovered around 30 percent, even with staff following up by phone.

When responses did come back, a staff member had to re-enter every answer by hand into the database. Tools like SurveyMonkey created the same bottleneck: easy for the respondent, but still requiring a person in the middle to move the data somewhere useful. The result was fragmented, incomplete information that could not support the longitudinal program analysis the team needed.

How FormAssembly and Salesforce Changed the Workflow

Warrior Canine Connection runs on Salesforce — specifically the Nonprofit Success Pack — with custom objects covering every part of its programs, including training, breeding, development, and HR. Salesforce is the system of record for everything.

FormAssembly connects to that system directly. When someone submits a form, the data does not land in an inbox or a spreadsheet. It flows into the correct Salesforce record automatically through an integration that requires no code. That foundation supports workflows spanning the full lifecycle of a dog and a graduate.

Graduate impact surveys, automated every 6 months

Every working team — a veteran paired with a placed dog — receives an impact survey automatically every six months. The survey runs about 12 questions and is optimized for mobile, so participants can complete it on a phone, tablet, or computer.

If the form is not returned within seven days, an automated reminder goes out. It is configured to read like a personal email rather than a mass send, and it works.

“The reminder looks as if it’s coming from an individual. It doesn’t look as if it’s just a form email, even though I didn’t physically send it. I usually get back, ‘I’m so sorry, I completely forgot’ — and they do it.”
— Molly Morelli, Warrior Canine Connection

Responses flow into Salesforce dashboards that give Molly and her teams a real-time view of how dogs perform after placement.

Volunteer workflows

The same FormAssembly-to-Salesforce pipeline handles volunteer management. When someone applies to volunteer, a form creates their Salesforce record. The day after a shift, an automated prefilled email goes out with a FormAssembly link; the volunteer confirms their hours, and the data flows back to Salesforce for year-over-year tracking and volunteer recognition.

Longitudinal health surveys

In partnership with the International Working Dog Registry (IWDR), Warrior Canine Connection now runs annual health surveys on placed dogs. These forms use conditional logic: if a graduate answers “yes” to a question about ear infections, follow-up questions appear automatically; if they answer “no,” those questions stay hidden. The form stays focused without feeling overwhelming.

That health data does more than serve Warrior Canine Connection. It feeds a global registry used to calculate estimated breeding values across working dog populations.

Why Data Quality Matters as Much as Data Quantity

The point is simple but consequential. Unstructured data (i.e. free-text fields, handwritten notes, inconsistent yes/no answers) is hard to analyze at scale. Structured data collected through well-designed forms with dropdowns, conditional logic, and validated fields can be aggregated, compared across organizations, and used to drive decisions.

“Raw data gets turned into information, and that can drive your decisions and actions. It can definitely impact how you plan and how you can manage your programs in the future.”

— Rachel Goldhammer, Warrior Canine Connection

For Warrior Canine Connection, the data from one dog in one household contributes to breeding decisions made globally. As Goldhammer explained: “That’s not just about that individual dog, but that data goes into the entire dog’s family calculations. That data can be used globally to help make decisions.”

What This Adds Up To

Warrior Canine Connection runs roughly 72 to 75 forms through FormAssembly across every area of its programs. The automation connecting those forms to Salesforce — the prefill logic, the automated sends, the connector mappings, the reminder workflows — replaces what Molly estimates to be about three full-time employees’ worth of manual work.

This is more than a technical achievement — it is added program capacity. The staff hours no longer spent chasing survey responses and re-entering data are now hours spent on the work that matters: training dogs, matching them with veterans, and supporting both.

You Don’t Need to Be a Developer

One of the quietly important details of this story is that Molly built the entire system herself, without writing a single line of code.

“I want to stress: I am not somebody who knows how to write code. I don’t know how to do anything super technical. But I’m able to do this.”

— Molly Morelli, Warrior Canine Connection

The Salesforce Integration is a mapping interface. The conditional logic is a visual builder. The automated reminders are configured in a settings panel. For the many nonprofits without a developer on staff, that accessibility is the difference between building this kind of system and never getting started.

The Bigger Picture

Warrior Canine Connection’s story is ultimately about what happens when the operational machinery of data collection gets out of the way and lets the mission come through. In this scenario it required a consistent survey, a reliable way to get responses back, and a system that stored those responses where program staff could see and act on them. FormAssembly handled the first two. Salesforce handled the third.