Ally skilled volunteers assisted Youth Development Initiatives with process improvement and selecting an application to safely store and teach their curriculum.
Youth Development Initiatives (YDI) provides caring adult connections and life guidance to disadvantaged adolescent youth. YDI scholars engage in an individualized development process that combines project-based learning applications with real-world learning experiences to build critical life skills, career planning, and post-secondary education preparedness. YDI depends on teachers to help with the curriculum for the programs offered to teens in Charlotte and three counties surrounding our community and came to Apparo requesting assistance with process improvement.
Darryl Bego, the President and CEO of YDI, came to Apparo seeking process improvement around how they stored and taught their CTE (Career-Technical-Education)-formatted curriculum. YDI was utilizing thumb drives to store curriculum. This process included purchasing the thumb drives, downloading curriculum to them, and distributing them to the instructors.
One year after the project was completed, we spoke to Darryl Bego to learn how the implementation of Teams had impacted YDI in a positive way.
Most importantly, Bego said since the nonprofit began using Teams, they have saved 300+ hours of staff time. “I have gotten more sleep in the last year than I have in the last 7 years previously. Peace is priceless. Teams has helped empower our staff to be more proactive. There is advocacy and advisement on the backend, because our staff can see everything in real time. Thank you to Apparo and Ally for giving us the tools we need to make a difference to the youth in our community.”
With the implementation they have also made the following strides:
- Served 12 additional clients due to more efficient organization, collaboration, and administration of data and details
- Streamlined communications through Teams
- Reduction in security risks from lost thumb drives
- Potential Increase in Revenue – Data is more readily available which allows them to more easily provide data for proposal forms
- Potential for expansion in organizational growth – they are currently looking into expanding within the Mecklenburg County area to fulfill after-school and tutoring needs
- Potential to increase donor relationships – in conjunction with new CRM that YDI is in the process of researching and implementing
YDI continues to build on the knowledge from this project and seek efficiencies to increase their capacity.
They are currently participating in this cycle of Mission Possible with a proposal for a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management system). Darryl shared; the nonprofit accessed the data they needed for the Mission Possible grant more easily because of their usage of Teams. The information was more readily available and made the whole process much easier than it would previously had been. Darryl also shared some exciting news that once they have their new CRM in place in addition to Teams, they will be able to expand to meet the needs of even more youth in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Metropolitan area.
See Snapshot in Separate Window
