TechBridge Helps Big Brothers Big Sisters Metro Atlanta Create Vision for Growth with FormAssembly

Case study snapshot

Through their partnership with Accenture, TechBridge gives an annual Technology Innovation Award that is meant to transform the way that a nonprofit recipient delivers their services through the use of technology.

When Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta was given the award, it symbolized the beginning of a year-long engagement project to improve their organization through technological upgrades. Learn more about their success in this nonprofit organization case study.

About Big Brothers Big Sisters Metro Atlanta

• Dedicated to pairing at-risk young people in the Atlanta area with mentors.
• Serves a community of half a million children in metro Atlanta.
• The organization defends education, possibility, and well-being.

About Techbridge

• Helps nonprofits deliver more effective outcomes for individuals and communities.
• Mission to break the generational cycle of poverty through innovative technology.
• Core values of commitment, innovation, collaboration, and trust.

To kick off the project, a TechBridge project manager and business analyst identified pain points within BBBS of Metro Atlanta. A major issue was their use of paper-and-pencil process for gathering and processing information regarding volunteers and workers.

“It was creating a lot of inefficiency in terms of the amount of time it took someone to apply. It was preventing Big Brothers Big Sisters from being able to look at the analytics they wanted and reaching out and following up with people. It was preventing them from providing the quality of service that they really wanted to be able to continue to provide if they wanted to grow and scale effectively,” Williams said.

Their paper form process simply wasn’t supporting the amount of growth they wanted, and without a revamp, they were likely to face the same hurdles repeatedly.

“I remember sitting in during the requirements gathering process, and there were a couple of individuals who were responsible for the communication with the applicants and they were constantly making and receiving phone calls and trying to keep up with the application process without the tools and the resources that they really needed,” Williams said. “Because they didn’t have a lot of the technology tools that they needed, their stress level of being able to do their job was fairly high and their ability to track and run analytics around their success was not where it needed to be.”

Not only did the TechBridge-FormAssembly solution smooth out and simplify the interview process, it also helped Big Brothers Big Sisters see and understand progress toward goals.

“We went in, we successfully delivered it and really created a successful project in terms of Big Brothers Big Sisters’ ability to scale, to deliver a great, high-quality service, to really get a lot more efficiency in terms of the amount of time that their staff had to spend going back and forth, a lot more analytics capabilities and reporting, so it’s definitely a big win for technology,” Williams said.

Williams estimated that the time savings potentially equaled a few hours per application and up to a full-time employee in labor.

“I know Big Brothers Big Sisters has some aggressive targets they want to hit, so they’re now going to be able to scale that out without having to hire more and more individuals to continue to manage their old process,” Williams said.

The time and resource savings that TechBridge brought to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta through FormAssembly testifies to the effectiveness of their work. On a larger scale, TechBridge and the FormAssembly-Salesforce solution gave Big Brothers Big Sisters a huge push toward their goal of growing and helping more people in the community.

“Particularly in the Atlanta area, we have an increasing number of children who need guidance and mentorship, and I know the things they care about most are being able to increase the likelihood that a child is going to be able to go to college, to have an opportunity, to graduate from high school,” Williams said. “Being able to provide them both with the technology to scale out and serve more boys and girls in the Metro Atlanta area was a huge part of our partnership with them, and also providing them the guidance around what really matters and how they can direct their efforts as an organization through data-driven decision-making.”

Though they remain a technology-agnostic organization, Williams said the FormAssembly solution is one that they like to use with multiple clients when possible.

“When we find organizations (like FormAssembly) that have a strong philanthropic initiative and also provide great technology that we use ourselves, we like to recommend them,” Williams said. “When we go in and find organizations that we work with who really have a need to be able to quickly and easily capture information through an online web form, especially if they need to feed that into something like a Salesforce database where they can begin to use that data and report on it, then FormAssembly is a great go-to for us. I’d be happy to recommend it to really anyone who has that specific need.”

Download the Case Study