Year Up is a one-year intensive training program that provides low-income young adults, ages 18-24, with a combination of hands-on skill development, college credits, and corporate internships.

Year Up’s mission is to close the Opportunity Divide by providing urban young adults with the skills, experience, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through professional careers and higher education. Learn more about Year Up here.

The Re-Entry Problem

Before FormAssembly, Year Up used a combination of paper forms and web forms for both student and volunteer records. This process was inefficient, and ran a large risk of error.

“Year Up students spend six months in the classroom developing technical and professional skills, then apply those skill during a six-month internship with one of our over 250 corporate partners,” says Kelly Hardebeck, Director of Application Development. While on internship, students are responsible for completing a weekly timesheet, which includes having their manager sign the form and send it back to Year Up. Not only did the paper timesheets need to be faxed or scanned and sent to Year Up via email, but the process of reconciling the timesheets was time consuming and often involved several staff members.

Similarly, while volunteer sign up forms were available online, submissions needed to be sent via email. Once the email was received, staff needed to re-enter the data into Salesforce before contacting the potential volunteer. “We were spending a lot of time re-entering data that had already been typed into a form. We were ultimately doing the same work twice,” says Hardebeck.

The process was even complicated for prospective students: Year Up’s paper application form was eight pages long and, like the volunteer form, needed to be re-entered in Salesforce. With handwritten information that was not always legible and the re-entry process for data, the risk of error was high.

The Streamlined Solution

After evaluating different products, Year Up’s IT Department decided on FormAssembly to ease its information collection process. “The process was easy, even when building a fairly complex workflow. It did exactly what we needed. It was such an easy choice,” said Hardebeck.

Year Up migrated the internship time sheets to online forms. Now, students fill out their time sheets online, their supervisor signs off, and all the data gets sent directly into Salesforce — no paperwork involved.

Select application forms have also moved online. Hardebeck says the data is now much cleaner: “The names, birth dates, and even the addresses are accurate. There’s been a significant improvement in data quality.”

Year Up has also improved their workflow by converting their student interest forms to FormAssembly. “The interest form is the first step in Year Up’s rigorous application process,” said Hardebeck. “Because an applicant’s interest form is available in Salesforce immediately, staff can more quickly determine if an applicant meets the eligibility requirements and reach out to qualified applicants almost immediately. With FormAssembly, we’ve been able to streamline the initial piece of the admissions process. It’s been great.”

Moving Forward with FormAssembly

Year Up staff have also found FormAssembly’s support team helpful. Hardebeck says her team has called on support several times and were very pleased with both their responsiveness and the quality of their answers.

Year Up is interested in expanding what they can do with FormAssembly by exploring different integrations. Says Hardebeck: “We’re looking into where else we can use it, because we’ve had such great success.”

Huge thanks to Year Up and to Kelly Hardebeck for sharing their use cases with us! We’re proud to be of service to their mission.