How Casas por Cristo Transformed Their Mission Trip Management

Casas por Cristo is a non-profit organisation with a mission to "open the door for local pastors and churches" to share the love of Jesus Christ through service. Operating with a simple mission of "one week, one house, one life changed", the organisation facilitates international mission trips for groups of volunteers from across the United States, coordinating home-building projects for families in Latin America.

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They use Salesforce to manage their international travel and volunteer coordination. With travel arrangements changing rapidly, the team needed a more flexible way to manage and display participant data in real time. This led them to integrate Raven Apps Grids to enhance their Salesforce environment.

While Salesforce provided a solid foundation, Casas por Cristo hit the limits of standard related lists when it came to viewing and interacting with volunteer and trip data.
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• They wanted to display more than 10 fields on related list views in Salesforce.
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• They needed to edit directly within their related lists and reduce how often they opened individual records just to make updates.
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• With international travel regulations constantly shifting, their Admins needed to make rapid, regular changes to their Trips and Trip Participants objects - something standard Salesforce editability couldn't easily support.
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• They wanted to replace their outdated custom Visualforce component without spending significant time and money on a developer rebuild.

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Casas por Cristo implemented Raven Apps Grids to replace and significantly extend the functionality of their existing related list setup across key Salesforce Custom Objects. The key enhancements included:
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1. Trip Participant Grid - A declarative tool to display all Trip Participant records related to each Trip Object. Unlike standard Salesforce related lists, the Grid interface showed more fields in a clear, unified view, giving admins full visibility into every participant on a given trip.
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2. Inline Editing for Faster Updates - The team can now update participant records directly within the grid, eliminating the need to open separate record pages for every change. Multiple records can be updated simultaneously, dramatically reducing administrative time.
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3. Declarative Admin Configurability - With international regulations constantly changing, giving Admins the power to adjust data and communicate with team leaders using no-code tools in real time has been transformative for everyone involved in the mission.
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4. Swapping Legacy Visualforce Components for Modern Solutions - Raven Apps Grids replaced the need to outsource a costly rebuild of their custom Visualforce component. The entire Grid setup for their trip management objects took around one hour - compared to weeks of development work and significant expense.

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Since implementing Grids within their Salesforce CRM, Casas por Cristo has realised both immediate and ongoing benefits.
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• Faster Record Management - Coordinators can now update multiple Trips and Participant records simultaneously from a single grid view, enabling easier communication with volunteers and team leaders.
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• Significant Time and Cost Saving - The organisation avoided a costly rebuild of a legacy Visualforce component, freeing up funds to redirect towards their core mission.
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• Reduced Data Outside Salesforce - A clearer, more functional view of participant data has led to less information being managed or stored outside of Salesforce, improving data integrity across their Org.
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• Tailored to Mission Needs - The declarative configuration of Grids is flexible, simple, and scalable enough to meet their non-profit needs without relying on constant developer support.

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The straightforward implementation and low ongoing maintenance allowed the Casas por Cristo team to get up and running quickly, with minimal need for product support — freeing them to focus on their core mission of serving communities in need and recruiting more volunteers.

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"It's such a useful and customisable solution. They were great about working with us as a non-profit to find a solution that works for us! They have great documentation that makes setting it up go pretty smoothly. The free version is super nice, and the paid version is very reasonable!"

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Their advice to other organisations considering Grids: "If you're looking for a quality solution that can keep pace with your Org changes and extend what Salesforce can do — without the time and cost of custom development - Raven Apps Grids is well worth it."