Success Story with SeaTrees

Agency73 + SeaTrees: Salesforce as a tool for regenerating our ocean planet

Agency73, a Salesforce partner based in Southern California, built customized data architecture in Salesforce to help SeaTrees track inventory and advance their mission of restoring coastal ecosystems around the world.

CLIENT NAME

SeaTrees

INDUSTRY

Nonprofit

PROJECT LENGTH

3-4 Months

TEAM SIZE

TECHNOLOGIES

SeaTrees is a program of the 501(c)3 non-profit Sustainable Surf that plants, protects, and restores blue carbon coastal ecosystems around the world to reverse climate change. They develop coastal restoration projects, also known as blue carbon projects, across five ecosystem types: mangrove forests, kelp forests, seagrass meadows, coral reefs, and coastal watersheds. SeaTrees funds this work through donations from brands and individuals who are committed to reversing climate change, and creating sustainable livelihoods for local communities. They partner with local nonprofit organizations at each project location to manage the restoration and protection work being done, providing a vast array of critical benefits to both the people and environment.

Why Now

SeaTrees has gained visibility in the Salesforce ecosystem after being featured in the first video of Salesforce’s "The Ecopreneurs" series, which has garnered more than 3 million views. They’re looking to broaden the impact of their work by scaling to 100 blue carbon projects by 2030, and they realized that tracking project impact requires refined data architecture within their Salesforce org. By implementing and enhancing the team’s use of Salesforce to track project inventory, Agency73 has provided SeaTrees a solid foundation to increase their reach, generate more revenue, and advance their mission of reversing climate change.

Project Boundaries

$20,000-$40,000

The Project

Since 2022, Agency73 has been partnering with SeaTrees to more efficiently track inventory and gather insights on project impact.

SeaTrees, a program of the nonprofit Sustainable Surf, directly supports communities and scientists who protect and regenerate blue carbon coastal ecosystems. Together with their global brand partners, they’re working to restore coastal ecosystems by planting mangrove trees, restoring kelp forests, coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and conserving coastal watersheds.

Agency73’s office is just minutes from the beach in Carlsbad, California, and our co-founders are closely tied to the surfing community there. We became personally connected to Sustainable Surf/SeaTrees, and before long our connection evolved to provide technical and strategic support for their Salesforce org.

Our work together has been both process- and data-driven, including:

· Building complex data architecture in Salesforce using custom objects and flows to accurately track real-time, project-based inventory

· Creating reports (as a foundation for future dashboards) to track accomplishments and forecast inventory needs

· Cleaning data in both accounts and opportunities to support the new data structure

· Working closely with SeaTrees to drive general operational and process improvement within the framework of the new data structure

The Introduction Moment

Agency73's background is closely connected to surfing: our office is just minutes from the beach in Southern California, and our co-founders frequently spend time our in nature, including surfing. We made a personal connection with some of the team at Sustainable Surf (www.sustainablesurf.org), an organization that uses the global appeal of Surf culture to protect ocean health and reverse climate change through two core programs, ECOBOARD (ecoboard.sustainablesurf.org) and SeaTrees (www.sea-trees.org). Both Agency73 and Sustainable Surf are right at the intersection of surfing and business technology, and we instantly saw an opportunity to work together to advance SeaTrees' mission of reversing climate change. In addition to providing strategic consulting, as part of our commitment to environmental and social impact projects, Agency73 is now also an official brand partner of SeaTrees, pledging a portion of our project revenue and connecting the team to new opportunities in the region.

The Eureka Moment

As a quickly growing nonprofit, Sustainable Surf/SeaTrees approached Agency73 with a challenge. To reach their goal of 100 projects by 2030, they saw the need to create a process that integrated their tech stack and helped them manage operations more effectively at scale. They were already using Salesforce, but recognized that they needed large structural improvements toward inventory management, impact reporting, and forecasting. Agency73's Salesforce consultants, Emily Adamiec and Bryce Cason, heard their challenge and acknowledged that technology can be a powerful tool, but the business processes that lean on that technology are just as critical. We immediately saw an opportunity to audit how data is gathered from project partners, and we proposed a new process leveraging two new custom objects points: transactions and projects. Both custom objects fit into a more advanced, custom data model leveraging cleaned historical data and SeaTrees' existing Quickbooks integration.

"We were using Salesforce to manage brand partner relationships and revenue; while SeaTrees project inventory was managed manually in a Google spreadsheet. In order to reach our goal of 100 blue carbon projects by 2030, we needed a more streamlined system. Now Salesforce allows us to manage brand partners, revenue, SeaTrees projects and inventory in one place." "This integration would not have been possible without Agency73. Their team was a pleasure to work with, they took the time to understand our organization and unique needs, and they explained Salesforce to a team that's relatively new to the system."

Haley Jain Haggerstone, Partnerships Manager

TEAM

Emily Adamiec

Senior Consultant

Bryce Cason

Consultant

Scott Holmen

Consulting Team Business Leader

Story By Brightr

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