2Life Communities

The Challenge 

For an organization like 2Life, which serves a wide range of audiences—residents, prospective residents, adult children and caregivers, volunteers, donors, staff, and partners—managing data across multiple platforms had become a significant operational challenge. Information was siloed across systems, requiring duplicate manual entry and limiting the ability to engage consistently with individuals across their lifecycle. 

Our Approach 

The integration between Drupal (their website's Content Management System) and Salesforce (the Customer Relationship Management database) was a critical first step in addressing 2Life’s challenge. By synching data between the two systems, 2Life could move toward a single source of truth and ensure that every contact, household, opportunity, and campaign is accurately captured, accessible, and up to date across departments.

Key outcomes of the Drupal-Salesforce integration included:

• Bi-directional data synchronization for contacts, households, opportunities, and campaigns in Salesforce, creating a unified view of each individual across touchpoints.
• Inquiry forms for multiple housing programs (affordable, market-rate, and moderate-income) built to pre-fill data for returning users and route them into appropriate application paths.
• Event registration forms for both prospective residents/families and fundraising events, connected to specific Salesforce campaigns to streamline tracking and follow-up.
• Data hygiene improvements, with strategies to prevent duplication and reconcile overlapping roles, for example someone who is both a volunteer and a prospective resident.
• Flexible form design that supports quality user experiences while maintaining data integrity within the integrated system.

With Drupal-Salesforce integration in place, 2Life can now:

• Engage individuals in more personalized, timely, and relevant ways.
• Track a person’s full journey from inquiry to move-in, from volunteering to donating without manually stitching their engagements together.
• Enable automation and reporting that supports smarter outreach and internal decision-making.
• Reduce administrative burden on staff and improve consistency across campuses.

The integration laid the technical foundation for all future digital transformation efforts, ensuring that the data powering 2Life’s growing digital ecosystem is accurate, accessible, and actionable. 

Challenges & Opportunities: Building Portals  

Creating digital portals for both volunteers and residents at 2Life Communities was an exercise in empathy, trust, careful change management, and, of course, technology. These tools needed to reflect and respect the lived experiences of the people they were built for: older adults navigating major life transitions, and volunteers deeply committed to service, often with limited time and varying levels of tech comfort.

The challenges were multi-dimensional:

• Operational complexity: From housing inquiries to volunteer hours, resident care coordination to event participation, much of 2Life’s day-to-day engagement relied on manual processes that varied across campuses. Staff were spending valuable time on repetitive administrative tasks, often duplicating data across systems with little integration.
• Limited digital infrastructure: Historically donor-focused, 2Life had never fully invested in digital tools for resident or volunteer engagement. There were no unified KPIs for communication, no CRM integration with the website, and no portal functionality beyond a few web forms.
• Audience diversity: 2Life serves a wide spectrum of users: residents from different cultural backgrounds, adult children of residents who help make housing decisions, staff with different technical roles, and volunteers who range from one-time group visitors to recurring individuals with highly specialized skills.
• Technology access and adoption: Current residents are older adults, some with limited access to devices or internet, and some sharing email addresses or relying on public computer labs. Comfort with digital tools ranges from tech-savvy to tech-averse, with some hesitation around using a portal for things they’re used to doing in-person.  

At the same time, the project presented key opportunities to modernize and deepen engagement:

• The portals would give users new, self-service ways to complete common tasks, such as submitting maintenance requests, signing up for events, tracking volunteer hours on their own terms and timelines, increasing satisfaction and reducing staff burden.
• By offering tools to connect people to events, resources, and each other, the portals strengthen a sense of belonging for both residents and volunteers, which is particularly important after the isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Automating workflows like event registration, encounter tracking, and volunteer onboarding would free up staff time to focus on more high-impact work.
• With integrated systems, 2Life could collect clean, consistent data that would improve reporting, highlight trends, and support better decision-making.
• With new communities like the market-rate OPUS residences opening soon, 2Life needed scalable systems to handle growing expectations, more complex journeys, and more tech-savvy residents.

These challenges and opportunities shaped every decision in how the Volunteer Portal and Resident Portal were designed and built. Each tool had to balance ease of use with functionality, and digital ambition with empathy for the end user.

Volunteer Portal: Key Features & Audience Segmentation

The volunteer portal was designed as a comprehensive hub to manage and nurture volunteers, recognizing the nuances of this audience:

• Segmenting volunteers into active vs. prospective and individual vs. group volunteers helped 2Life tailor experiences and communication. Groups often involve a point person coordinating, while individuals may have recurring engagements requiring personalized attention.
• Volunteers’ language skills, availability, interests, and affiliations are tracked to match opportunities with the right people and ensure meaningful engagement.
• The portal enables volunteers to:
  • Create and update profiles with detailed info (skills, language, availability, 2Life campus preference)
  • Track and submit hours and encounters with residents via a custom Salesforce object, replacing clunky spreadsheets and forms
  • Access volunteer opportunities and a library of resources  

The volunteer portal marks a significant shift from manual volunteer management to a streamlined, data-informed system that supports recruitment, retention, and recognition of 2Life’s volunteer community.  

Resident Portal: Discovery Insights & Goals

The resident portal was envisioned as a digital extension of 2Life’s commitment to empower residents with autonomy and connection.  Designing the portal meant creating a tool that reflected the lives, needs, and preferences of the people who would use it most. The mission was to give residents another option to more easily find information and get what they needed, not to replace existing systems that may be more optimal for some residents.  

To ensure the portal was grounded in the realities of 2Life’s communities, we led a resident-centered discovery phase that included surveys of current and future residents.

This research helped our team:

• Understand technology access across campuses (devices, email, comfort level)
• Identify the most common tasks residents wanted to complete online
• Explore what concerns residents had about a new digital platform
• Ensure specific accessibility needs and language preferences were considered early in the design

Resident portal goals included:  

• Providing residents with self-service options to do things online that previously required phone calls, paper forms, or in-person interactions, such as: ubmitting maintenance requests; Viewing and RSVPing for events; and Finding contact info for staff like Resident Services Coordinators or Case Managers.
• Helping new residents onboard—especially important as 2Life grows—by providing digital access to campus-specific resources, calendars, and directories.
• Laying the foundation for community building through thoughtful features like opt-in directories and resident spotlights.
• Respecting privacy while enabling helpful connections, such as allowing residents to see others on their campus (if opted in) or learn more about programs and services.

The portal is also built to support future features and integrations, such as:

• Yardi (for financials and leasing) once it launches across campuses;
• Feedback collection and resident satisfaction surveys; and
• Campus-specific messaging and resource hubs.

By anchoring the portal design in direct resident input, 2Life has ensured that its digital tools align with its mission of aging in community by supporting independence, dignity, and human connection through thoughtful technology.