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Building Communities with Salesforce Experience Sites


Building Communities with Salesforce Experience Sites

Acts Retirement-Life Communities is constantly striving to create an exceptional and unique ‘Acts Signature Experience’ for its Residents. This experience is the driving force behind the technologies employed at Acts and shapes the way CRM Science helps Acts to build and customize Salesforce to meet their needs.


[UPDATE: With the Salesforce Winter ‘21 Release, Community Cloud has been renamed as Experience Cloud. Some language in this article has been updated to reflect these changes.]


Salesforce Consulting for Enterprise Nonprofit Senior Living Communities

CRM Science began working with Acts in 2013. We’ve built many solutions on the Salesforce platform together for both internal and external use that have enhanced the resident experience.


Visualforce Senior Living Experience Site

One of our earliest projects was a Visualforce resident Experience Site portal to help residents manage requests (cases). This Experience Site served its purpose. Residents could:

  • Create requests

  • Check on the status of their request

  • Search for other residents

  • Communicate via Case Comments with senior living community staff

The Visualforce Experience Site enhanced the resident experience and brought speed and transparency to the relationship between senior living community residents and staff.

Below are screenshots of the Acts Portal 1.0 Site, launched near the beginning of our partnership with Acts Retirement-Life Communities.

Salesforce Experience Site Portal for Senior Living Residents

But we knew there could be so much more. So looking at Acts’ strategic goals, we began planning a Salesforce Experience Site. This new Experience Site would retain all the functionality of the original Site, but it would add features that would truly make it a daily part of resident’s lives and integral to life at Acts.

The Experience Site was designed to serve as so much more than a simple entry and case management tool. It was designed to be a tool for residents to:

  • Communicate with one another

  • Gain knowledge

  • Build their own communities

  • Connect with Acts employees easily

The CRM Science Salesforce consulting team leveraged Knowledge and Topics to bring residents news about their individual Acts communities as well as information about Acts as a whole. Groups are used to facilitate resident-staff communication and cross-community communication to allow residents that live in Acts communities across the country to have discussions and find others who share their interests. Finally, we’ve built out customSalesforce Lightning Components to deliver a more-inclusive customized experience to each resident.

Custom Salesforce Lightning Community Portal for Senior Living

Residents are immediately greeted with their recent activity so they can continue their conversations right where they left off. They’re also gently guided to any recommended information they should be seeing. Lastly, we created a custom Lightning banner that shows them an image of their own Acts Community.

Salesforce Community Portal with Lightning Web Component

Salesforce Lightning Web Components


Next, we’ve created a full-page Salesforce Lightning Web Component (LWC) that allows Residents to navigate to any Acts community they wish, or to groups that are specific to those Acts communities.

Using things that worked from Visualforce community portal

Using Aspects of deprecated Visualforce Site in New Portal


We were able to save time and money for Acts, as well as keep functionality, by taking the best parts of the old Visualforce Site and modifying those good parts for use in the Experience Site as well.

Custom Redirect Componenet

Custom Redirect Component for Community Portal


We’ve created a custom group navigation component and added it to the Groups page to make navigating to specific Acts Community groups much easier for the resident.

Community Portal using Salesforce

Custom Lightning Web Components for Multiple Senior Living Community Campuses

On the resident’s home community pages, we’ve done a lot of work to customize the experience. Some communities may have multiple campuses, so the custom Salesforce Lightning Web Components we’ve created can take that into account and display one or multiple campuses.


We’ve created a custom Lightning Web Component to track knowledge articles that are specific to each community and styled it to look exactly like the Standard Trending Articles component. We’ve also created components to handle displaying of iFrames, images, and other sources of dynamic information on the page.


Lightning Web Component to track knowledge articles

LWC Experience Portal


Contact CRM Science Salesforce Consultants


“Acts Retirement-Life Communities is leveraging a variety of technologies to enable its ‘ACTS Signature Experience.' We have been building real-time service management tools (request/response) on the Service Cloud and leveraging Experience Sites as an engagement container for customer profiles, preferences, interactions, and conversations. We are now beginning to leverage Einstein and Marketing Cloud to enrich and intensify the engagement experience. We have partnered with CRM Science as we leverage the evolving Salesforce.com platform to provide best of class hospitality and wellness experiences for our residents.” - Peter Kress, VP & CIO

Acts and CRM Science take Acts Resident-Life’s goal of the ‘Acts Signature Experience’ very seriously and are constantly updating, creating, and monitoring the Experience Site for feedback.

Ready to create stronger Digital Experience Sites with Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud)? Salesforce has awarded the CRM Science Salesforce Consulting team for high-quality work building resident portals and Experience Sites, and the team is up for any challenge. Contact CRM Science Salesforce consultants to get started.


Contact CRM Science Salesforce Consultants

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