Soldiers' Angels Scales Food Assistance Across 10 Cities in Real-Time

Soldiers' Angels, a nonprofit supporting deployed service members and Veterans, replaced manual, spreadsheet-based event check-ins with a purpose-built Salesforce platform. It has managed roughly 250 food assistance events and distributed about 1.5 million pounds of food since go-live in 2025.

Challenge

In just one year, Soldiers' Angels expanded its reach from nearly 46,000 families to over 49,000 Service Members and Veterans across 10 U.S. cities. That kind of growth is a win, and it puts real pressure on the systems built to support a smaller operation.

Soldiers' Angels had built strong food assistance programs and a loyal volunteer base, but the systems behind them hadn't scaled at the same pace. Challenges included:

Manual Check-In: Staff managed attendee check-in by hand, cross-referencing spreadsheet rows in real time as lines of Service Members and Veterans grew.

Stale Event Data: Update lags left coordinators making on-the-ground decisions without an accurate picture of who had arrived or how many slots remained.

Limited Attendee Visibility: With no way to communicate event status outward, attendees could be stuck waiting in cars lines that wrapped around entire buildings.

Aging Digital Experiences: The Agency, Client, and Corporate portals had outgrown their original design and no longer matched the scale of the programs they supported.

Constrained Growth Path: There was no clear way to scale food assistance events, or run them with the dignity the mission demands, without a purpose-built system.

Together, these gaps meant Soldiers' Angels was managing rapid growth with tools built for a smaller operation. Soldiers' Angels didn't need a bigger team to keep up. It needed a system that could grow at the same pace its programs were growing.

Solution

Coastal partnered with Soldiers' Angels through its Waves managed services model to build a foundation that provides a real-time view of every event, every city, and every day.

Real-time Event Operations: A Salesforce-native food event management application, built on Agentforce Nonprofit (formerly Nonprofit Cloud), replaces spreadsheet tracking, giving event managers live visibility into slot capacity and attendee status across all 10 cities.

Self-Service Registration: Attendees select their own time slot and become pre-verified for future events, cutting friction at every subsequent sign-up.

Mobile Check-In: A mobile-first check-in workflow, shaped directly by conversations with the volunteer team, lets volunteers manage lines from the floor instead of spreadsheets.

Redesigned Digital Experiences: The Agency, Client, and Corporate Experience Cloud sites run on Lightning Templates with native responsive design and Audiences, giving each community a personalized, low-code portal without added administrative work.

Automated Program Workflows: Core donor and volunteer processes — tracking sponsorships, scheduling recurring outreach, and managing report cycles — now run automatically instead of requiring manual coordination, freeing staff to focus on the people those programs serve.

Hardened Platform Governance: Ongoing Application Lifecycle Management, sandbox practices, and SSO and MFA across all system administrators and key users protect volunteer and service member data as the platform grows.

Together, these changes gave Soldiers’ Angels something it hadn’t had before: a real-time picture of every program, so staff could spend their time with people, not paperwork.

Clouds & Products

Agentforce Nonprofit
Experience Cloud

Results

The impacts showed up quickly, reaching every city the organization serves. Key results included:

Expanded Community Reach: The platform has facilitated distribution of roughly $3.5M worth of food (about 1.5 million pounds) reaching more than 6,000 constituents across 10 cities.

Scaled Program Operations: It has managed approximately 250 food assistance events and processed over 16,000 documents since launch.

Reduced Operational Overhead: Automating check-in and event coordination eliminated hours of manual work per event, every month, across all 10 cities, freeing the staff to focus on the people in line rather than the paperwork behind them.

Reclaimed Coordinator Time: Program tracking that used to take hours of manual coordination every week now runs on its own, giving staff more time for the volunteers and families they serve.

Reduced Data Risk: With SSO and MFA now protecting every system administrator and key user, Soldiers' Angels closed a gap that mattered — this platform holds information about the Veterans and Service Members who trust it most.

Accelerated Onboarding: Multi-tiered group affiliations and streamlined verification for trusted partners have made it faster for new Angels and agency partners to join and start volunteering.

Growth doesn't wait for the systems built to support it. The organizations that keep pace are the ones that build for where they're headed, not where they started.