Design Connect Create: A Small Organization Makes a Big Impact
Design Connect Create is a two-week summer day camp that was created to prepare girls for their first high school physics course. The camp reinforces basic math skills, offers hands-on labs, provides close interaction with instructors, fosters an atmosphere of collaboration and teamwork, and exposes girls to STEM careers through female role models.
THE CHALLENGE
The leaders at DCC first offered their physics summer camp in 2003 in collaboration with the nonprofit High-Tech High Heels and with support from the Texas Instrument Foundation. They continued collaborating with various nonprofits until 2014 when Design Connect Create was formed to expand the delivery of the camp to other school districts. Having run the camp for 11 years before forming their own nonprofit, the leaders of DCC understood that in order to expand, they would need an integrated system to manage and enroll their summer camp attendees. In addition to managing summer camp registrations, they also feature several guest speakers at every camp and needed a way to manage volunteer sign-ups and opportunities. Lastly, they knew they would not be able to grow their organization without a system to manage donors, grants and sponsorships. Through strong recommendations from their board, DCC engaged Urgensee to build an integrated system that would fit their growing needs.
OUR SOLUTION
Create Mobile Friendly Online Camp Registration Forms Knowing that it would be mostly high school students accessing the registration forms, we knew we needed to create a mobile friendly easy to use registration system. We leveraged the use of the Click & Pledge Event Management system to create individual registration forms for each camp session. Their Event Management package is fully mobile responsive, offers an advanced Salesforce integration and a ton of flexibility in terms of how to display the forms. Now a student can view all camp sessions directly on the DCC website, register for their preferred session and receive an automatic response informing them of their registration status. DCC staff are automatically notified and can view each camp and student record in Salesforce along with registrations, scholarship requests and wait lists for camps that have already filled up. DCC staff can also now leverage the Vertical Response Mass Email integration to communicate with their students and supporters and have access to customized reports and dashboards allowing them to gauge the success of their recruitment and outreach efforts in real time. Engage Potential Speakers via an Interactive Volunteer Sign-Up System Now that their student data is being captured in Salesforce, we needed to come up with a solution for how DCC can manage booking speakers for their camps. With their goal of having four speakers at each camp session, they needed a self-service system where volunteers can view available opportunities and register all without ever leaving the DCC website. To streamline this process, we implemented Volunteers for Salesforce and integrated it with DCC’s website. Anyone accessing their site can now navigate to the volunteers tab to view all available speaking opportunities and sign-up online. Volunteer applications show up in Salesforce in real time and DCC staff can manage all opportunities directly inside of Salesforce without ever having to open their website editor. DCC now has a manageable volunteer recruitment and registration system fully integrated with Salesforce, freeing up the staff’s time to focus on bringing more quality programming to their students. Donor Management As with any nonprofit organization, to continue to make an impact you must have a healthy fundraising base. With customization of the Nonprofit Starter Pack and implementation of the Click & Pledge Payment System, DCC is now able to manage all donations, grants and sponsorships through Salesforce. As they continue to expand, they will be able to leverage the platform to increase individual giving, build relationships with donors and to stay on top of grant deadlines and proposals.
RESULTS
In just two years, DCC has grown from offering 3 sessions in the Dallas area to now offering 7 sessions including an expansion into Houston. They’re able to use one system to manage and build relationships with students, teachers, school districts, volunteers and donors. The efficiency created and the flexibility of the system means that their staff can now focus on growing their program so that more girls are being empowered to pursue math and science careers. “We were fortunate enough to have the finances and knowledge to be able to invest at the very beginning of the nonprofit and it’s the only way that we could have grown. Dan at Urgensee lets us know what’s possible and works with any questions we throw at him. He gives us recommendations on everything related to our organization, he’s very well connected to other people in the nonprofit sector and has been a great resource.”
