Youth Insearch adopts new ways of working to support Australia’s youth

Youth Insearch is an early intervention program that works with at-risk youth to take control of their lives and improve their wellbeing. Since its founding in 1985, Youth Insearch has helped almost 32,000 young people.

Youth Insearch is an early intervention program that works with at-risk youth to take control of their lives and improve their wellbeing. The comprehensive program is delivered through weekend workshops and community support initiatives, with an emphasis on young people helping young people.

Since its founding in 1985, Youth Insearch has helped almost 32,000 young people and continues to assist around 1,000 per year. Of these, 80% make a significant, positive change in their lives and this includes Stephen Lewin, CEO of Youth Insearch. Lewin participated in the program more than twenty years ago and spent years working in government before joining Youth Insearch in 2014.

Now CEO, Lewin is driving the growth of the program and using Salesforce to provide a better experience to participants, partners, and donors. “Salesforce helps us to have the most impact on youth in Australia that we can and to better support them through their journey with us,” said Lewin.

Simplified admin and program onboarding

Prior to implementing Salesforce, Youth Insearch had an on-premise database that kept breaking down and its small team was consumed with paperwork, data entry, and a lot of manual processes. Everything from program registration to donation processing was taking up too much time and there was always a risk that urgent forms and letters could be missed.

The adoption of Salesforce has helped to remove these pain points. Now, partners like schools and police can log onto Experience Cloud for Nonprofits and refer at-risk youth by entering their details into an online form. The details are sent automatically to a local program administrator who onboards referees and assigns them a peer group.

As part of this onboarding, referrers are invited to Experience Cloud for Nonprofits where they can complete their profile, share their story, and register for programs like the weekend workshops.

All forms are created using Form Assembly from the AppExchange and data flows through to Sales Cloud, helping to streamline administration. Youth Insearch also uses Socialsuite from the AppExchange to survey participants and measure the impact of programs. For instance, they can track how successful the programs have been in building resiliency or helping to alleviate addiction issues.

With all of this information tracked and managed in Salesforce, Youth Insearch has reduced the administration time for each program from four days to just a few hours. This adds up to savings of 560 hours per year. Youth Insearch has also saved time on risk management by using automated workflows to ensure currency of Working With Children Checks and to follow up on mental health concerns.

“By managing all of our processes in Salesforce, we’ve made it easier and faster to get youth into the program and engaged with a positive peer group. We’ve also been able to help employees to manage their workload with less stress,” said Lewin.

Salesforce helps us to have the most impact on youth in Australia that we can and to better support them through their journey with us.

Stephen Lewin

CEO, Youth Insearch

Virtual support offered to hundreds of youth

Youth Insearch’s weekend workshops and weekly support groups are core to its program, but in mid-March of 2020 it suspended these due to COVID-19 and offered virtual support instead.

“In the beginning, we had hundreds of young people who needed our support and we used Salesforce to make sure that each and every person was contacted. The outreach allowed us to provide support where it was most needed, and helped to lift our team’s morale by giving them something very specific to focus on,” said Lewin.

Youth Insearch also pivoted to offer weekly support group sessions online. The intake for these sessions was managed in Salesforce with teams using dashboards to manage registration and follow up and ensure that no one slipped through the cracks.

As a result of this effort, Youth Insearch made nearly 3,800 support calls to 448 young people and conducted almost 320 weekly support group sessions across 18 virtual support groups.

“We were lucky to have moved all our information and processes over to Salesforce when we did or we would not have been able to act so quickly and move our programs online,” said Lewin. “The engagement with these programs has been excellent as well and we’ve been able to reach new people who were too anxious to attend our face-to-face programs.”

Accelerating success

Youth Insearch has worked closely with Salesforce to streamline and pivot its operations, drawing on Admin Assist and participating in Accelerator sessions to solve specific challenges. The Reports and Dashboards Accelerator, for example, has helped Youth Insearch to streamline reporting and use dashboards to better manage KPIs. This ultimately contributed to a 40% increase in program referrals and registrations.

Additional Accelerators on campaign management and engagement have supported Youth Insearch with its adoption of the Nonprofit Success Pack to manage fundraising and donor engagement.

“All of the resources from Salesforce, including Admin Assist, the Accelerators, and Trailhead, have helped us to rapidly understand the different components of Salesforce and to develop our internal processes. We’ve also avoided many hours that we would have otherwise spent working things out ourselves,” said Lewin.

With the Nonprofit Success Pack, Youth Insearch can effectively track donations of time and money and segment lists to tailor engagement. It is currently mapping out donor journeys with plans to adopt Pardot in the future.

Youth Insearch is also currently focused on measurement and is using Einstein Analytics and Socialsuite to understand which activities or combination of activities are most beneficial for program participants.

“By using Salesforce, we can see where we have the most impact and prove our model in order to gain funding and support to expand. The timing of this is critical as the pressures resulting from COVID-19 increase the need for positive peer support programs like Youth Insearch,” said Lewin.

40 %

Increase in referrals and registrations

Accelerating success

Additional Accelerators on campaign management and engagement have supported Youth Insearch with its adoption of the Nonprofit Success Pack to manage fundraising and donor engagement.