Big Brothers Big Sisters pivoted to virtual mentoring during COVID, launching a community portal in five weeks to keep 100,000 youth matched with adult volunteers connected. The organization, which serves mostly Black and Indigenous children, used Salesforce to reduce paperwork and let match specialists focus on relationships instead of data entry.
Questions this video answers
March 27, 2022
More than 70%
Decision/accelerate in the beginning of April; portal rolled out by the end of May.
Over 100,000 children every year.
Chapters
In communities across the country. The name Big Brothers Big Sisters is a trusted resource.
We serve more than 70% of our youth being black indigenous children of color.
We take an adult volunteer which we call a Big and we match them with a little to kind of inspire and defend the potential of that youth.
COVID 19 presented an unprecedented challenge to our mission for an organization that believes in the power of one to one relationships and connection and being there and supporting each other in person. Overnight we we had to pivot and figure out how we could stand squarely in our mission focused on relationships.
The beginning of April we had said here are the things we need to accomplish with the customer community portal and we need to move that up and get this going as quickly as possible. By the end of May, we are able to roll out a customer community portal for all of our matches to use for virtual communication where our match support specialists could weigh in and help the bigs if they needed help. The bigs would be able to communicate with the parent guardians.
That has been beyond impactful. I think probably more when Bigs and littles were meeting in person. To still have that connection, to still have that bond, to still have that access, that support system, I don't think we'll ever be able to quantify what that means for our Bigs and our littles right now.
The mission of Big Brothers Big sisters isn't just about mentoring. It's about connection in the community. It's about being a resource for our families and the young people we serve. By having an innovative platform like Salesforce Customer360, our agency leaders have been able to become more agile and and less consumed by data entry. They can spend more time creating life changing mentoring relationships.
Having a platform that was so flexible and so quickly able to adapt to our needs was a huge benefit to the network. I mean, in many ways I've called it kind of a life raft for the organization.
Without Salesforce and the partnership that we have, we wouldn't be able to do that work and we wouldn't be able to change the lives of over 100,000 children every year.
