Finding your Salesforce Village
If you’ve spent some time learning about Salesforce or getting involved in the Salesforce community you’ll likely have heard of the fabled Salesforce Ohana or seen the #Trailblazer tag on any given platform. Salesforce is a big program, with a bigger community (who are a pretty friendly bunch). You may be wondering - what is this community anyway? How did it become such a core part of Salesforce?
During his time at Oracle in the 1990s, founder and CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, consistently cultivated a passion for philanthropy. After a sabbatical on Hawaii’s Big Island in 1997, he realized he didn’t need to sacrifice his love for business and work in order to do good.
“There’s no reason why your business, your personal philanthropy, and your corporate philanthropy can’t be integrated. On the contrary: if you can get all the wood behind one arrow, that’s how you're going to increase your impact.” - Benioff
There’s a great article you can find here on Workato that explores Salesforce as a case study for Effective Community Building that further unpacks Benioff’s model. Want a summary from Salesforce though? Watch this video.
From day one Salesforce established profitability and philanthropy as core pillars of the company’s DNA. That took shape as the 1-1-1 model, which dedicated 1% of the company’s equity, 1% of its product, and 1% of employees’ time back to the community.
From small beginnings the community has grown, and grown, and grown. Spreading out across the far reaches of the globe, and the many corners of our increasingly online world. Regardless of where you stumble upon a #Trailblazer the messaging remains the same - give back to the community. They say it takes a village to raise a child - so to does it take a village to raise a Trailblazer.
Still - with so many different pockets of the internet where can you get support for when you need it? In no particular order - here’s some of the communities that I’ve found along my journey and become involved in. Not that you need it but this is me extending you an invitation to come say ‘Hi’.
Trailhead:
Facebook:
LinkedIn:
Salesforce Groups:
Salesforce Tags:
Twitter:
Or find your favourite LinkedIn posters and they’ll probably be on Twitter
Discord:
Slack:
Reddit:
Best part? All of these are free. Together close to some 300,000 users across all of the platforms (and thats not including Twitter).
Go find your village - say hi when you get there!