Breakthrough New York Manages Student Lifecycle with Salesforce

Our client Breakthrough New York prepares motivated low-income students for college graduation with a transformative program that includes a 10-year commitment from sixth grade through college. How do they maintain high-quality student support and program operations over this extensive lifecycle?

We were excited to hear Breakthrough New York share the story of how they recruit, manage applications, provide student support, and track progress effectively. Their recent full adoption of Salesforce has helped them increase their efficiency in numerous ways.

Amy Cruz, Chief Operations Officer at Breakthrough New York, remarks, “When I started at the organization, one of the apparent needs of our team was being able to use time more efficiently and productively on the quality of support that our students and our families needed. Once I observed the team in action, for me that meant: not spending our time on Google Sheets, not spending our time creating and recreating Excel templates. That’s what led me to Salesforce.”

Managing Program Results from Beginning to End

Breakthrough New York has seen tangible, real results from their new Salesforce program management system in their first season since launching. The system has helped Breakthrough program-wide, from initial application to student performance management.

Initial Application Process: Previously, six Breakthrough New York staff members spent three weeks, or 240 hours, collecting, collating, and processing applications. Now with Salesforce, two staff members spend three days or 48 hours processing, with hopes of getting that number down to even less next year.

“The new application functionality has been an absolute game changer and has allowed us to expand to more students than ever before, and process more quickly than ever before. The automatic email about missing materials has been especially efficient,” says Natalie Cox, Senior Program Director at Breakthrough New York.

High School and College Application Process: Previously, staff spent the majority of their time following up on student to-dos and chasing down submissions. Now with their new system, staff focus only on the quality of applications, such as essays and interview preparation. The system is set up to auto-remind students of outstanding tasks.

Student Support and Opportunities: Previously, student support situations and college access opportunities existed in individual email accounts or staff members’ memories. Now, they are shared across all staff in Salesforce, giving them a historical record of student needs.

Managing 10 Years of Student Performance: Previously, success metrics were undefined and unaligned. Building their Salesforce system helped Breakthrough New York be more explicit about defining their metrics and what was important to track overall along the 10-year timeline.

Walking Through Breakthrough New York’s Salesforce Student Data Management Solution

Breakthrough New York breaks down their student 10-year journey into a few critical phases:

• Initial application to Breakthrough New York
• Student support through middle school (focus on academic support)
• Student support between ninth grade and last year of high school (focus on socio-emotional support)
• Student support in college (focus on career support)

Each of these phases contains processes that Breakthrough New York manages through Salesforce.

Breakthrough New York Application Process: The start to the student journey, the Breakthrough New York application, is highly competitive.

Students must meet 6 core eligibility requirements (such as being a current 6th grader in a New York High School), and 2 out of 4 of another set of requirements, such as being an English language learner and being the first in their family to attend college. Student selection is also based on applicant scores from essay responses, recommendations, interviews, and in-person observations.

Breakthrough New York leverages FormAssembly, a third-party app that Exponent Partners integrated into their Salesforce platform, to collect and track all students’ application materials in one accessible place. The FormAssembly application features:

• A link that any sixth-grader can use to apply for the program
• Basic information tracking, such as contact, demographic, and other information that program managers need internally and for funders
• Questions that meet and trigger basic and complex eligibility requirements, such as the middle school they attend, and how they performed on state test scores
• Household and income information tracking
• The ability to upload proof documents directly like test scores, report cards, and income documentation
• A second unique link for students to fill out the qualitative portion when deemed eligible
• The automatic sending of a link and form for a teacher recommender to submit when the student enters a teacher email

When students enter their application in FormAssembly, it is immediately entered into Breakthrough New York’s Salesforce back-end as well.

Within Salesforce, staff can track student applications at a glance by opening a view that shows all application statuses, alongside name, overall scores, eligibility status, location, and more. From there, they can drill into individual student records to view more details such as receipt of their documents and qualitative responses.

Rather than staff manually entering each application and sorting thousands of documents, they can dedicate more time to assessing qualitative responses. Also, they can more easily see an overview of the applications and the quality of candidates they are receiving.

For recruitment purposes, they have a unique link to the application they can easily share via email, mailings, social media, partner communications, and more.

Student Support (Academic, Emotional/Social, & More): Breakthrough New York tracks academic data like student grades, test scores, and attendance in Salesforce on the student record. This helps them see where they can provide support at each stage of the student lifecycle. They track how students are performing in the Breakthrough New York program as well as their current schools.

Staff can also manage mass data, such as summer program attendance. With a tab showing a view of Breakthrough New York sessions, they can enroll an individual student or many students, see an attendance roster of a given day, and keep track of homework and meals. From this view, they can also drill down into an individual student’s attendance and performance. They use a similar format to track school grades, school attendance, school enrollment, and opportunities.

The format works for other custom aspects of their program. For one facet of social/emotional support tracking (a later focus of the journey), they worked with Exponent Partners to create an object called “Risks,” which tracks individual student issues. A staff member can note an issue like bullying, rank its severity level, and note whether it is active or resolved.

Tracking College Access Opportunities Throughout Program: Students in the Breakthrough New York program have varying opportunities at different stages of their journey, such as internships and scholarships. Salesforce allows Breakthrough New York to more easily note and share out the criteria of a given opportunity (deadline, location, compensation, etc), and track eligibility. If a student applies, staff can track them as one applicant on the opportunity, and see how many students total are submitting to it.

This tracking also helps when students are completing their college applications, as they have a history of extracurriculars that are tracked on their individual student records.

Monitoring Student “Health” Annually: With Exponent Partners, Breakthrough New York created a feature called “Pathways” that shows the overall aggregate rating of a student as a color: green, yellow, orange. These display when a student struggled or did very well, and are tracked for each year. This provides an at-a-glance view of what students accomplished at the end of the year, based on aggregate milestones, paperwork, and expectations.

Cruz recommends, “Choose a data system and build it. While you’re waiting for the perfect system, it never really comes along. You have to create it. Make it a priority, and take the time to build the system that will help your staff support your students in the best way possible.” Learn more about Breakthrough New York’s program management on Salesforce and see their live demo in this webinar.