By Taylor Folt
As Silver Lining Mentoring’s Data and Evaluation Manager, I am privileged to bring together the excitement of technology with the mission of the organization. There are so many positions and ways to propel the work of a nonprofit without being directly involved in the service. Working with databases is one rewarding way to do that, and SLM is no exception.
Perhaps the best way to show what this looks like is a look into a typical day for me at SLM:
8:30 am – 9:30 am: Before heading into the office, I use my quiet time at home or on the train to check up on emails. What alerts do I have from Salesforce (our primary database) that I need to keep up with as the Administrator? Perhaps I read the latest article from the Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring to learn about the latest in best practices for mentoring evaluation.
9:30 am – 12:00 pm: Catch up on project work. I may need to build some new fields into our Salesforce account to track details about our programmatic work or build reports for the development team to track their portfolio of donors.
12:00 am – 12:30 pm: Hopefully some of my colleagues are eating lunch on the couches, and I can join them to hang out and catch up while we eat.
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm: If it’s a Wednesday, I’ll use this time to sit in on a programming team meeting. This is a great chance to see what work the program coordinators are focused on right now, and for me to ponder what features in Salesforce I can enable or point them to so their tasks are streamlined. I might demo a tool that could help them in this or next week’s meeting.
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm: If it’s a Monday, I’ll be checking in with my supervisor, Alaina. We update each other on where project work is, how executive leadership has responded to a decision that impacts how we manage or collect data and other day-to-day operations at SLM.
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm: I always reserve a little bit of time each week or day to keep learning! I really enjoy listening to webinars by the National Mentoring Resource Center about current topics in the field or how-to demos by Salesforce designed for nonprofit audiences, such as “Drive Your Mission Forward with AI: Best Practices for Smarter Impact”.
3:30 pm – 4:45 pm: Much like the start of my day, I check out my inbox again and follow-up on any last items before I catch my train. If there’s a Salesforce Admin User Group meeting happening that night, I make my way there.
