Impact Labs Uses Gamified Forms to Understand Community Challenges

Case Study Snapshot

At Dreamforce 2019, Salesforce.org officially announced a new social change initiative, Impact Labs. Impact Labs is a program which works to co-design innovative technology solutions that address tough social challenges. To understand what the most significant social challenges were, Impact Labs gathered feedback about the challenges and causes that most affect Salesforce.org community members. In order to collect those responses, Impact Labs built a challenge submission tool on Salesforce with live web forms on the front end to solicit important feedback and ideas. FormAssembly provided a seamless integration to Salesforce and allowed Impact Labs to gamify the process through a “Mad Libs” style set of screens.

About Impact Labs

• Provides a sustainable “platform for innovation that combines the expertise of [the] community and the Salesforce.org ecosystem”
• Addresses social issues related to nutrition, healthcare, housing, environmental concerns, and more
• Each lab session begins with an open call for challenges from the Salesforce.org Community
• Lists of challenges are refined on the bases of social impact, mission, and values
• Relevant community members and community fellows are invited to participate and contribute volunteer hours toward tackling the issues at hand
• Impact Labs then leverages Salesforce volunteers on a pro bono basis to build those solutions on the Salesforce platform

Impact Labs engages in a great deal of social listening. This process occurs alongside a broad community of Salesforce.org users as well as individuals in philanthropy, not-for-profit organizations, K-12 systems, and higher education institutions.

At Dreamforce 2019, the Impact Labs team wanted to create a visual presentation for capturing feedback on community challenges in near-real time. As a result, FormAssembly came into play.

First, the Impact Labs team, alongside a team of incredible Salesforce pro bono volunteers, including Josh Mcdaniel, Liz Skaates, Yina Chun, and Kevin Zeigler, were able to build a backend system in Salesforce. Then, they developed a process that would collect attendee responses while showcasing that information in a live setting, as the data was collected. Additionally, gamification played a big role in designing a solution that was engaging, fun, and interactive.

To create a bigger presence at Dreamforce, Impact Labs used FormAssembly’s Salesforce integration to create a public-facing form with a backend built in Salesforce.org. The result was a “Mad Libs” style game that allowed event attendees to:

• Name a social challenge or community issue
• Name a specific user group that the issue affects
• Describe the desired impact after a change is implemented

“FormAssembly was such a great addition and enhancement to our submission app. It was not only super easy to build out, but it made it super engaging and easy to use for customers,” Tyler said.

Easy-to-Build Forms
FormAssembly’s drag-and-drop form builder provided a simplified process for creating branded forms for Impact Labs to use at Dreamforce. These forms can be cloned or duplicated for use at other events.

Mobile Capabilities
Tyler said that one of the perks of using FormAssembly was that it “made it very easy to build out and deploy a form on mobile very rapidly and customize that.” The Impact Labs team used iPads to have attendees submit forms.

Integration to Salesforce
FormAssembly’s Salesforce component was a crucial aspect to the success of the project. Data collected through the forms was synced directly to the Salesforce.org instance where near real-time analysis and visualization could be performed.

The live form project at Dreamforce 2019 created such a splash that the Impact Labs team is hoping to broaden the scope of their live FormAssembly projects. These would include collecting data on the spot at Salesforce events around the world.