The flagship program for the LoveYourBrain Foundation is the LoveYourBrain Yoga program—a free, six-week FUNdamentals series of gentle yoga, meditation, and small group discussion offered to those who have experienced a TBI and their caregivers. The FUNdamentals courses are offered at more than 30 partner studios across North America (and growing), and applicants must be screened for eligibility. To simplify this complex course registration process and reduce manual work, LoveYourBrain turned to Formstack and Salesforce.

Challenge

LoveYourBrain’s original course registration process involved a series of manual tasks. The foundation collected FUNdamentals applications via a Google form and managed the applications in a Google sheet. Team members edited the spreadsheet to insert additional information and notes. They also color-coded the spreadsheet to indicate application status. When a course became full, they updated the form to include a waitlist notification. Additionally, they manually emailed applicants (after checking the color codes) to provide status updates and feedback forms.

As application numbers began to grow, the LoveYourBrain team realized they needed a less labor-intensive way to manage course registrations.

“With recent and anticipated growth, it was apparent that LoveYourBrain needed a more robust system for collecting our student applications and sending out all our communications,” said Ramsay Pierce, Yoga Program Manager for LoveYourBrain.

Some of the key pain points they needed to alleviate included:

• Lack of validation, or screening methods, to easily determine applicant eligibility
• Scattered data that couldn’t be automatically updated based on submissions
• Difficulty tracking applicant and student status

Solution

To revamp its course registration process, LoveYourBrain sought help from Traction on Demand—North America’s largest independent Salesforce consulting and application development firm, fully dedicated to developing Salesforce solutions across any cloud and industry. Traction on Demand set up Salesforce for LoveYourBrain’s applicant tracking and connected the system to Formstack for Salesforce for data collection.

“The course registration process was time-consuming, so LoveYourBrain realized they needed to examine a system like Salesforce that would allow them to automatically take care of some of their manual tasks,” said Michael Beaty, Nonprofit Solutions Consultant for Traction on Demand.

On the Formstack side, a number of key features helped LoveYourBrain improve data collection for the FUNdamentals series:

• Conditional Logic, which uses if-then rules to show, hide, and populate form fields dynamically. This makes the forms more interactive and takes applicants down different paths depending on their answers.
• Survey-friendly form fields—such as radio buttons, checkboxes, and rating scales—which make the forms easy for applicants and students to complete.
• Multi-page forms, which help segment large application forms to make them more manageable.
• Flexible styling, which allows LoveYourBrain to add custom branding to forms.

Once the information is collected in Formstack, it goes directly into Salesforce and creates records in real-time. The Formstack-Salesforce connection brings necessary automation to the process. All the information that was previously located in a spreadsheet is now part of a dynamic set of records that are related to one another, which builds out a history of interactions and is available to be tied to workflow rules for automation purposes.

Using Formstack and Salesforce for course registrations provides LoveYourBrain with several automation benefits:

• Centralized record management where relationships are visible and easily reported on in Salesforce
• Automated email communications for class reminders, status notifications, and feedback solicitations
• Dynamic program availability status that auto-updates on the Formstack form through list views
• Automatic eligibility screening through form logic

Outcome

Through Formstack for Salesforce and Traction on Demand’s expertise in implementation, LoveYourBrain was able to reduce manual data entry and open up more time to focus on their mission. The nonprofit has extensive goals and growth planned for the FUNdamentals yoga program, and the streamlined course registration process makes it possible.

Formstack and Salesforce have had an impressive impact on LoveYourBrain. Comparing January 2017 to January 2018, the nonprofit increased the number of programs offered by 140% quarter over quarter. With the old registration process, LoveYourBrain had the capacity to offer only 7–10 programs quarterly. With the automated process, they were able to offer 24 programs in January 2018.

Additionally, LoveYourBrain served only 8 U.S. states and 1 Canadian province in 2017. In 2018, the foundation will serve 19 states and 3 Canadian provinces, for a 144% increase in reach.

Since implementing the new system, the foundation has offered 53 programs, processed nearly 1,000 enrollments, and received 200 feedback form submissions. They’ve also sent out applicable communications via 35 workflow rules that are running off program, enrollment, and feedback form objects.

The automation now available to LoveYourBrain includes Formstack’s ability to use Salesforce lookup fields for enrollment program selection, which makes the process scalable. As LoveYourBrain adds in more locations and classes, they can simply add those courses to Salesforce as records, and the form will dynamically pull in that information.

“With continued enhancements through this system, which will only further allow us to automate elements of our process, we are on track with our goals for growth to have the capacity to offer over 40 programs quarterly as we continue to expand and offer the yoga program in new locations,” Pierce said.

Additionally, collecting data in Formstack allows LoveYourBrain to perform critical data analysis. The nonprofit’s eligibility and feedback forms use valid and reliable TBI-specific scales to measure the key outcomes and understand the impact of the yoga program.

“We are able to report through these pre- and post-assessments that individuals who are participating in our program are experiencing an improved quality of life after brain injury,” Pierce said.

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Want to learn more? Watch this webinar to hear directly from LoveYourBrain and Traction on Demand.