Student Conservation Association Connects Students with Service Opportunities Using Salesforce

Student Conservation Association (SCA) is America’s conservation corps. SCA engages college and high school students in hands-on conservation service opportunities on public lands to instill lifelong stewardship. Members protect and restore national parks, marine sanctuaries, cultural landmarks and community green spaces in all 50 states.

Prior to implementing Salesforce, SCA had been struggling with an outdated proprietary CRM system that had become difficult to use, costly to maintain, and hampered the organization’s ability to address evolving business needs. SCA made the decision to migrate to Salesforce to improve its flexibility and ability to innovate and to accommodate rapid, double-digit growth business growth.

SCA migrated its community of roughly 70,000 student applicants and 60,000 partners to an environment built on Salesforce to better facilitate the application, matching and placement process. The system enables students to search for and apply for open positions, indicate their preferences and submit references and medical records. Partners are able to manage open positions, and review and select student candidates.

SCA further streamlined the process of filling positions by using App Cloud to automate medical risk calculations for candidates, and leveraged an AppExchange partner to capture electronic signatures. Today, 30% of medical forms are cleared automatically using Salesforce workflow rules, and another 70% are auto-scored to determine the required approval routing levels.

SCA also manages all aspects of student recruiting as well as their external and internal help desk through Salesforce.

With consistent visibility across the organization made easy by the analytics and dashboards in Salesforce, SCA has not only improved decision-making but has also upgraded its impact reporting to federal agencies and funders.

Overall, SCA estimates that Salesforce has helped improve productivity of key processes by between 10- 25% due to improved automation, self-service, and collaboration.