How Year Up raised staff efficiency 45% and saved 4,500 hours annually.

Year Up scales its impact and connects more young adults to successful career paths.

Time to read: 2.4 minutes
 
 
Nonprofits everywhere are facing new challenges. Staffing shortages are prevalent, and salary competition is stiff in today’s strong job market. Year Up is no different, and turned to technology to find a new way to do more with less.

Year Up is committed to ensuring equitable access to economic opportunity, education, and justice for all young adults—no matter their background, income, or zip code. Its mission is to close the Opportunity Divide by ensuring that young adults gain the skills, experiences, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through careers and higher education.

Since its founding in 2000, Year Up has served students across 30+ campuses, but it wants to have even more impact. Setting a goal of serving 10x the current number of people reached by 2030, Year Up needed efficiency at scale.

To scale up its impact, Year Up:
  • Reworked how it collected and protected data
  • Improved the admissions process, making it 31% faster
  • Facilitated a 42% reduction in administrative time by enrollment teams
  • Saved 4,500 staff hours yearly via a custom internship matching application
Here’s how Year Up is making an impact nationwide with Tableau, Salesforce Platform, and Slack.
 
 

“Salesforce is the hub in the wheel. We have many other spokes, but they all connect and start with Salesforce.”

Gary Flowers, CIO, Transformation & Technology Services
Table of Contents
 

1. Collect data securely and spot the next big trend.

To help address its data needs, Year Up collaborated with Salesforce. Together they developed RADIO, a program that gives real-time insight into the organization’s progress and attendees. Year Up can track retention, admissions, development, internships, and outcomes in one place.

By monitoring the admissions dashboard in Tableau, enrollment teams can spot key trends. For example, if an increased number of potential students started falling out near the end of enrollment.

Year Up uses Salesforce Shield to protect the information it collects from enrollees. Secured data allows it to protect the privacy of enrollees and business partners.

2. Revise the admissions process to boost enrollment speed by 31%.

To serve more people, Year Up needed a faster application progress. Students used to take 20-30 days on average to complete an application. Year Up invested in Lean Human Centered Design and developed a simplified enrollment system integrating Salesforce and TargetX online application tools.

Now, it takes just two hours from the first inquiry to a finished application. This new experience has reduced the time enrollment teams spend on administrative tasks by 42%.

Enrollment teams nationwide can communicate with each other via Slack. Sharing trends they observe or troubleshooting issues in real-time.

 
42%
 

less time on administrative tasks

3. Develop a better internship matching process to boost efficiency by 45%.

Year Up matches students who complete training with internships with corporate partners, including Salesforce who hosts more than 125 Year Up interns a year.

Previously, Year Up staff spent hours manually matching student skill sets to potential internships. That changed when Year Up and Salesforce Platform developed a custom app to match applicants.

The app uses 54 specific data points per student and 35 separate data points per internship. Providing fast, accurate matches for each internship has increased staff efficiency by 45%.

This efficiency has saved an estimated 4,500 hours a year. It’s time staff can now spend with students instead of on administrative tasks.

 
45%
 

increase in staff efficiency

 
 

hours saved per year

 

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