Building Salesforce Communities to Change Lives

In 1957, Earl Bakken created the first external, battery-operated pacemaker to solve the problem of reliance on plugged-in pacemakers that could become disconnected or lose power. With his invention, he revolutionized the lives of many people who depended on a pacemaker temporarily or over a long period of time. A pacemaker running on battery power gave these individuals the opportunity and confidence to go anywhere they wanted.

Supporting Charitable Contributions

Bakken founded Medtronic, a company focused on improving human welfare, to help make his pacemaker and other medical innovations more widely available. And now, every year, Medtronic gives out ten Bakken Invitation Awards that celebrate people who make charitable contributions to the world and benefit from medical technology. Jitterbit partner, Magnet 360, recently helped Medtronic create a dynamic Salesforce Chatter Community to enable the program to accept and manage the award nominations.

To build a successful community for the Bakken Invitation Award, Magnet 360 worked closely with Medtronic to design features that would engage users and nominees, while also making it easy and secure for Medtronic to accept and evaluate award nominations. Magnet 360 used custom Salesforce pages and objects to help Medtronic collect, track, and score all of the Bakken nominations.

Resounding Success

Making it easy for users to submit nominations and share photos to enhance their stories helped make the Bakken Invitation Award nomination community a huge hit. Approved stories are made available for public viewing and sharing through the Community, engaging additional users beyond the nominators and nominees. Within a month of launching, 148 stories and 79 grant applications had been received from more than 20 countries – all tracked on the global Impact Map that was created as part of the community.

The success of the Bakken Invitation Award community shows the impressive breadth of use cases for Salesforce Communities. Doing much more than just product support or sales, they can spark positive initiatives for people to come together and tackle difficult problems. Just as Jitterbit connects numerous applications and data sources, Salesforce Communities connect bright minds so everyone can achieve more and improve the world around them.

Get Started with Communities at Dreamforce

Taking on the project of building a quality Salesforce Community takes the time and expertise of many dedicated individuals. If you are attending Dreamforce this year, our friends at Magnet 360 are hosting a session titled, “Create Your Community w/ Expert Help from Salesforce Implementation Partners,” on Tuesday, September 15, from 4:00 – 4:40 at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis Hotel, room Nob Hill A-D. Eric Scheel, CTO at Magnet 360 and other Salesforce experts will be talking about building amazing Salesforce Communities. We’re really excited to hear the best practices that they have to share.

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