" The syllabuses were very helpful, but sometimes it was hard to navigate the volunteer training page on CASA’s website. I got confused on what was expected to be completed. "
CASA Volunteer
Advocates for Children - CASA is a nonprofit based in Parker that serves to speak up for abused and neglected children through court appointed special advocates or CASAs. Advocates for Children is a chapter of the National Court Appointed Special Advocate Association.
CASA recruits, trains, and supports community volunteers who advocate for children who have open dependency & neglect cases, truancy cases, need additional education advocacy, or are an adolescent that may need some additional support.
To pivot their New Volunteer Training program from in-person to online (Do to COVID-19). They have an in-person training curriculum that they have had much success with but struggled to convey comparable quality into the new online version.
Sifting through the current training option, we discovered the online training platform was in much need of improvement. It wasn’t intuitive or well organized. For a trainee to find all the required materials, syllabus, and lessons they had to go to up to 3 different pages and even then there was missing or incorrect information.
To help CASA make a smoother transition to an online training environment that is intuitive so they can use it right away easily manage it.
We found Google Classroom, an existing online classroom platform, that “Helps students and teachers organize assignments, boost collaboration, and foster better communication.”
Working for a nonprofit without a Dev Team, we knew that if our final deliverable needed to be a quick, simple, and almost seamless option so that CASA would be able to easily manage.
To accomplish the goal of creating a user friendly manageable training platform, our team wanted to see what was already on the market. This is what we found…
CASA had just completed one, 3-week online training course for 26 new volunteers.
They gave us their SurveyMonkey results from a series of surveys they ran throughout that 3-week period.
We created another survey to dig deeper into what would make the training experience better. The results from the first survey seemed very forgiving.
Most of the CASA volunteers
were over the age of 50.
Also, most have used another online
training program in the past.
37.5% of our users found the information was fairly organized on the original website.
Here are a couple of the comments from the SurveyMonkey results below.
Navigating the current structure for training was not intuitive. Getting to the content was simple but once inside the platform there was a lot of back and forth navigation, missing files, and broken links. Which made it confusing for the users; shown in the site map below.
Not only is the Google Classroom platform intuitive for the volunteers but also for the instructors. Most of our users have a Gmail account and have used the Google Suite products. Shown in the new site map there are now fewer clicks per lesson and all the needed materials for each class are in one location.
For our client, we added all the content to their Google Classroom Platform. After finalizing loose ends with our clients we created a video and a written manual for current and future employees to learn how to use the Google Classroom.