How Coalition Life is building custom nonprofit software on top of Salesforce with Zite

Coalition Life is a nonprofit organization headquartered in the St. Louis metro area. The organization coordinates a complex web of volunteer shifts, donor relationships, outreach campaigns, and community engagement events.

Like many small-to-midsize nonprofits, Coalition Life operates with limited budgets and lean staff. When Cameron McCarty, Director of Marketing & Community Engagement, began exploring Zite, he saw an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how his organization builds and pays for internal tools.

Before Zite, Coalition Life faced a familiar nonprofit dilemma: off-the-shelf SaaS products that were either too expensive, too rigid, or both. The organization relied on a patchwork of tools for volunteer tracking, donor management, event coordination, and outreach — each siloed from the others. Connecting them meant paying three times as much or spending weeks on custom integrations.

Key pain points included:

• Volunteer tracking software costing $500+/month that still couldn't be customized to Coalition Life's specific workflows
• Field staff manually entering data into spreadsheets, then CSV-importing into Salesforce on a weekly basis — creating lag and data integrity issues
• Siloed systems that couldn't share data without expensive upgrades or year-long SaaS contracts
• No affordable way to build internal tools that matched the organization's actual processes rather than forcing staff to adapt to generic software

Cameron started experimenting with Zite early in 2025, initially building personal tools to test out the product. That first project demonstrated the platform's potential. Within months, he had moved from novelty projects to mission-critical internal tools that replaced paid SaaS products entirely.

Salesforce-connected volunteer management

Using Zite's environment variables and the Salesforce REST API, Cameron built a custom volunteer management platform that pulls volunteer profiles, tracks shift attendance, monitors engagement metrics, and powers a gamified rewards system — all with live read/write access to Salesforce. Staff across the organization can now update records directly through a clean Zite interface, eliminating the weekly CSV import cycle.

Phone banking & donor outreach CRM

In a single session, Cameron built a fully functional phone banking app that integrates MailChimp's marketing API with Salesforce donor records. The app provides a unified call-flow interface for outbound campaigns — complete with real-time note-taking, contact updates, and campaign member tracking — replacing what would have been a standalone SaaS product.

Real-time field data collection

Coalition Life's field staff previously relied on external forms to fill out what amounted to spreadsheets in the field, which were then batch-imported to Salesforce. Cameron is building a Zite-based MVP that lets staff update Salesforce records in real time from the field, eliminating data lag and reducing errors from manual imports.

Training video library

With over 10 years of training footage archived in Box, Coalition Life uses this content for monthly volunteer training. Cameron is exploring integrating Box's API through Zite to build a training-oriented interface — replacing the generic file-and-folder structure of Box with a purpose-built experience for browsing and reviewing training videos.

Large-scale letter writing orchestration

Cameron built the entire portal from the passenger seat on a four-hour drive to an outreach event. Coalition Life writes over 2,000 handwritten thank-you cards per month, and coordinators were prepping Google Sheets, splitting static lists by zip code, and distributing them to volunteer teams across multiple cities. Duplicates slipped through. Volunteers with no context wrote the same generic message to everyone.

The Zite tool connects to Salesforce in real time, pulls each supporter's giving records, volunteer hours, events attended, and interaction history, then uses AI Fields to generate a unique suggested letter per supporter. Volunteers log in from any location on a secure connection, claim one card at a time, and mark it complete while the system locks the record across all sites. Thirty-five volunteers now produce 2,000+ cards per month on scattered schedules with zero staff prep, and volunteers said the AI-suggested content cut through writer's block and made each card feel like it came from someone who knew the supporter.

Coordinators track output by volunteer, location, and date through a built-in analytics view. Volunteers work from Coalition Life offices or from home. The claim-and-lock system prevents duplicates whether two volunteers sit in the same room or work from separate cities on different days.

Bulk lead sheet OCR & processing

Coalition Life collects handwritten contact information at events, sign-up tables, and community gatherings. Processing those sheets into Salesforce took hours of reading bad handwriting and manual data entry — a bottleneck that burned staff time for minimal return. Cameron built a bulk OCR tool that converts stacks of scanned lead sheets into editable Salesforce records. Staff upload images, and the tool reads each sheet for name, email, phone, and address, populates a form for each lead, and validates entries against existing CRM data. A human reviewer confirms each record at speed, and the tool organizes all leads by event and status.

Coalition Life's experience with Zite has delivered measurable impact across several dimensions:

• Cost savings — eliminated $1,500+/month in SaaS subscriptions for volunteer tracking alone, with additional savings from consolidating donor outreach and event management tools
• Speed to deploy — production-ready apps built in hours instead of weeks or months. The phone banking CRM was functional in a single sitting
• Data unification — Salesforce, MailChimp, and Box data accessible through unified Zite interfaces, breaking down silos that previously required expensive middleware
• Staff adoption — non-technical staff can interact with Salesforce data through intuitive, purpose-built Zite apps — no training on Salesforce's native UI required
• Operational efficiency — real-time field data entry replaces weekly batch imports, reducing data lag from days to seconds

Cameron's experience highlights a broader truth about the nonprofit technology landscape: organizations with limited budgets and specific workflows are underserved by generic SaaS platforms. Zite's natural-language app building approach lets non-developers create exactly the tools they need without committing to expensive annual contracts or waiting on development backlogs.

For Coalition Life, the value proposition is straightforward. Cameron describes a platform where you can describe what you need in plain language, provide your API credentials, and have a working tool in minutes. The gamification features, the Salesforce integration, the donor dashboards — all of these would have required separate vendors, separate contracts, and separate training. With Zite, they're custom-built modules in a single ecosystem.

Cameron continues to expand Coalition Life's use of Zite, with plans to build additional tools for event coordination, outreach operations, and enhanced donor analytics. He's also begun introducing the platform to fellow marketing and development contractors in the nonprofit space, many of whom are exploring Zite for their own client work.