Engaging the Next Generation of Scientists, Engineers and Artists

Founded in 1983, Saturday Academy offers over 850 classes and camps, and over 100 internships for students, with focus on STEAM education and an emphasis on engaging underprivileged youth. Their vision is that all interested, pre-college students in the region have the opportunity to interact with experts and experience professional environments in ways that assist them in intellectual development and preparing for rewarding careers.

But Saturday Academy’s technology infrastructure kept getting in the way. An old Wordpress website was not just hard to manage, but offered families no way to discover and register for the exciting classes happening around them. So Saturday Academy relied on hardcoded web forms that fed data directly into an Access database. Over time, this database was overwhelmed with duplicate and erroneous data, with no way for Saturday Academy to extract reliable business intelligence.

Saturday Academy’s staff knew there was better technology out there, but they needed a partner who could help them package it into a custom solution that was affordable and sustainable for them. And they needed a data expert who could sanitize and migrate their legacy data for a fresh restart.

OMBU implemented a nonprofit Salesforce CRM to serve as the data store for all operational data: households, students, classes, registrations, internships, and donations. By building on top of Salesforce, we were able to provide Saturday Academy with enterprise business intelligence and reporting capabilities. We configured the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), so Saturday Academy could access free licenses through the generous offerings from the Salesforce Foundation.

To reach parents, students, instructors, and mentors, OMBU designed and built a fun, easy-to-use website powered by the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). Parents can set up their household information online, and register their children for any of Saturday Academy’s many classes quickly and easily, and even be granted financial aid automatically to help make the classes accessible.

Saturday Academy’s unique internship program, Apprenticeships in Science and Engineering (ASE), pairs teens with industry mentors for a summer of on-the-job learning. Hundreds of motivated students apply for the program, so we designed a process that makes a multi-step application and screening process easy for applicants, and a portal for mentors to review and rank applicants. Finally, the process has a step for Saturday Academy staff to complete approval and trigger a series of automated emails communicating to the selected interns and mentors.

While we’re proud of transforming Satturday Academy’s online presence, making everything smooth and easy for parents and students, the most transformative part of the solution is the real-time data flow between the website and the CRM, and the reporting capabilities it unleashed for Saturday Academy. Leadership can now ask questions and gain insights instantly, such as seeing the breakdown of financial aid relative to family demographics, intelligence that previously would either have taken days of data processing or have been entirely impossible.