Meet Hello Neighbor
Hello Neighbor is a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit founded in 2017, working with refugee and immigrant families from arrival to belonging. What began with 6 staff and 4 programs has grown to 40+ full-time employees running 14 programs, spanning resettlement, employment, health, legal, English language learning, and mentorship. Today Hello Neighbor serves 750+ neighbors each month from 35+ countries, walking alongside families from their first day in the U.S. for up to five years and beyond. Roughly half of Hello Neighbor’s staff have lived migration experience themselves.
Why Salesforce, why now?
Hello Neighbor’s growth didn’t happen gradually. In 2021, their first federal resettlement contract arrived alongside the mass evacuation from Afghanistan, and a small team was suddenly supporting hundreds of new families with no enterprise systems to match. When resettlement stabilized enough to create breathing room, Hello Neighbor’s leadership made a decision: before taking on more, they needed infrastructure to do their existing work better.
The core challenges:
- Complex work with hundreds of clients, without the systems to match.
- Case managers couldn’t easily see what other programs were doing for a family, leading to duplicated outreach and families at risk of falling through the cracks.
- Grant reporting was an “all hands on deck” situation across dozens of spreadsheets, with significant staff time spent on numbers no one felt confident in.
They set three goals for a new platform: a unified record for every family they serve, shared case notes and coordination across all programs, and on-demand reporting that didn’t require pulling the whole team away from mission-critical work.
Choosing Buzzbold as a partner
Hello Neighbor’s leadership team evaluated more than a dozen Salesforce implementation organizations before making a decision. For a team running federally-funded refugee services programs alongside community-funded ones, where compliance requirements, reporting structures, and operational complexity are high, the bar for a partner was clear: find someone who genuinely understood what Hello Neighbor actually needed to build, not just what Salesforce can do.
That complexity goes beyond standard nonprofit implementations. Federal resettlement programs carry compliance and reporting requirements few Salesforce partners have worked with. Hello Neighbor needed a partner who could design for programs that span both federal and community funding simultaneously, and who could do it for a multilingual, human-services-focused team where, as their staff put it, “tech literacy is not at the forefront of what we do.”
What made the difference:
- Federal program expertise. Deep understanding of the compliance requirements and operational complexity unique to federally-funded refugee services.
- Nonprofit industry depth. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud expertise paired with genuine understanding of mission-driven, human-services organizations and how they actually operate.
- People-first implementation. Hands-on go-live support and iterative testing built lasting staff confidence and adoption, designed around the team doing the work.
- Purpose-built from the start. The implementation was designed specifically around Hello Neighbor’s programs, workflows, and reporting requirements, not adapted from a generic playbook.
When implementation wrapped, Hello Neighbor’s team was already building independently on the platform Buzzbold delivered, creating new flows and dashboards to meet emerging needs. That confidence reflects how the work was designed from day one. And when Hello Neighbor wanted ongoing expert support as the organization continues to grow, they chose Buzzbold again, this time as their managed services partner. The same team, still there.
What Hello Neighbor’s team has been able to accomplish
The goal was never just to modernize the technology. It was to free Hello Neighbor’s team to do more of what they came to do: be present with families. A unified platform means programs work together the way the mission requires, and the results show up in the work, not just the metrics.
Mission and organizational impact:
- Case managers across all 14 programs can see a family’s full story instantly, no more chasing colleagues or piecing together fragments across spreadsheets, so every interaction starts with full context.
- When a neighborhood collaborative offered household essentials bags with a one-week turnaround, Hello Neighbor identified every eligible family from a shared list, equitably and in a single day: over 70 clients considered, no one left out.
- Hello Neighbor’s development team completed the first draft of the annual impact report nearly independently, without pulling a single program staff member away from their work until it was time to review and build in stories.
Efficiency and capacity:
- Staff across the organization attributed savings of 20+ hours per week to having the right systems in place: time that goes directly back to the mission.
- Automated flows handle check requests, lease changes, and employer updates, routing to finance automatically without manual follow-up.
- Grant reports that once required several days of all-hands effort now take a few hours of program staff time.
What’s next for Hello Neighbor
Hello Neighbor’s 2026-2030 Strategic Plan is ambitious, and the Salesforce foundation they’ve built with Buzzbold is central to getting there. The platform continues to grow alongside the organization.
- Volunteer management. Hello Neighbor logs 10,000+ volunteer hours annually from 250+ volunteers. Salesforce will help programs and development fully track volunteer value, improve communication, and give volunteers visibility into their own impact.
- Partnership tracking. Hello Neighbor works with dozens of partner organizations. Unified partnership tracking in Salesforce will help them be as strong a community partner as they are a service provider.
- Workforce impact. As new arrivals stabilize, tracking not just first jobs but subsequent employment and wage growth over time becomes essential to Hello Neighbor’s workforce mission, and Salesforce is being built to support it.
- Ongoing managed services partnership. Buzzbold continues as Hello Neighbor’s Salesforce managed services partner, so the platform evolves with the organization’s needs and their team always has expert support behind them.