Experts of Experience - #4 Adam Vasallo: Redefining Customer Experience With Technology

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Discover how Big Brothers Big Sisters leverages technology to provide innovative customer experiences and track long-term societal impact.In this episode, Lauren is joined by Adam Vasallo, CMO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Adam shares how the organization, founded in 1904, creates life-changing mentorship opportunities for youth facing adversity. Learn how Big Brothers Big Sisters empowers volunteers to become mentors ("Bigs") who are matched with children ("Littles") in their communities. Adam outlines key strategies to drive awareness and recruit Bigs, including digital marketing, strategic partnerships and leveraging alumni as advocates. Discover how technology enables personalized experiences and keeps matches connected, even during the pandemic. Adam also explains Big Brothers Big Sisters' approach to CX, including journey mapping for Bigs, robust match support systems and measuring long-term societal impact through rigorous studies. Tune in for insights on youth empowerment, volunteer engagement and bringing relevance to a 100+ year old nonprofit. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to rate our show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ExpertsofExperience?sub_confirmation=1 Imagine running your business with a trusted advisor who has your success top of mind. That’s what it’s like when you have a Salesforce Success Plan. With the right plan, Salesforce is with you through every stage of your journey — from onboarding, to realizing business outcomes, to driving efficient growth.Learn more about what’s possible on the Salesforce success plan website: http://sfdc.co/SalesforceCustomerSuccess (00:00) Preview (00:32) Introducing Adam Vasallo(04:30) Creating life-changing mentorship opportunities  (08:15) Recruiting and Onboarding “Bigs”(13:10) Engaging Bigs and Littles throughout the mentorship (17:56) Leveraging Technology To Enhance CX (24:01) Supporting The Mission Through The Pandemic (28:32) Measuring Long-Term Societal Impact(33:16) Leveraging Data to Improve Programs and Partners(36:55) Keys to Mapping The end-to-end CX Journey

Being a mentor to many feels like I have to be always on, I have to be supporting the young person who I matched with, you know, at all times. For us, what we know is that just being present is important and just being persistent. Technology has been just a really critical place for us to invest in and to really grow our mission. We know that we have a weighty list of 30,000 kids. We know that currently one in three kids in America say they're growing up without a positive adult mentor. Hello, everyone. Today I'm speaking with Adam Vassallo, the CMO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. I'm sure you've all heard of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. But what you may not know is that the company was founded in 1904 and has served over 2 million youth with life-changing mentorship opportunities.

Adam has been with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America since 2018, generating awareness for the organization, inspiring volunteerism, and bringing the brand's commitment to youth equity to life. Thank you so much, Adam, for joining me. I am so excited for this conversation. So tell us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do with Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America to start us off. Lauren, great introduction. Thank you so much. And I'll add one note that those 2 million youth that have been served, that's in the past 10 years.

So just an incredible growth. We have an estimated 20 million alumni and champions across the country right now, which is something that's possible when you were founded over 100 years ago. So really excited to be a part of this mission. As a chief marketing officer, I think I have a unique role in that my original involvement with Big Brothers Big Sisters started in a past life when I worked for a for-profit company, but I was invited to attend an orientation that my company was holding for Big Brothers Big Sisters, recruiting volunteers to join the mission to become what we call bigs. In our program, the mentors are called bigs and our mentees, the young people who are enrolled in our program are called littles. So I went to a workshop at our company that was recruiting bigs.

Our local Big Brothers Big Sisters office was on campus. And I went reluctantly. A few of my co-workers encouraged me to go. At the time, what they said was they needed more men. So I felt like I had a lot of pressure from a lot of my co-workers to go and to attend. But it was a life-changing decision, life-impacting decision for me. I became a big brother to my first little brother, Adrian. He was in the sixth grade. We were matched from the time he was in the sixth grade until he graduated from high school. He went on to be a college football player. And today he's an adult. He's a father of two. We're still friends to this day. He's refereed and my son's like footballing. But it started just for me a life-changing bond with somebody that I would have never met had

it not been for the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. And so I became a volunteer. Then I became a part of their young professional council for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay. That's a plug for where I was living at the time. And then I joined a junior board. All of these things happened. And then one day I received a call that I was being recruited for a role at the National Office for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. And it felt like a culmination of all of this work.

It never felt like I was doing work, charity, nonprofit. This was just a passion. And now I get to do this passion every day, but with an impact far beyond the community where I live and across the United States. So it's been a personal passion project for me. But Epic Grows Big Sisters, I oversee marketing. It's the full gamut. It's everything from the brands to the creative to our digital experiences.

And we have a really exciting time right now as an organization committed to growing. As you mentioned in the opening, we were founded in the early 1900s, 1904. But our mission has never been more relevant than it is today. Back in 1904, we were founded by a gentleman named Ernest Coulter, and he was a clerk of court in the New York City Children's Court. And every day he saw too many kids coming through the court system. And what he realized was these kids weren't necessarily

doing anything wrong or purposely getting in trouble. They didn't have guidance. They didn't have a positive adult. And so you can imagine what situations were like in 1904. And Ernest got a group of his friends together and said, hey, we're going to look after young people in this community. We're all going to mentor a young person in our community. And from that founding in 1904, our organization has grown to be 230 local Big Brothers, Big Sisters across all 50 states in the United States, collectively serving 5,000 communities. And again, that mission really founded through our commitment to justice. We were an innovative alternative to the juvenile justice system. So founded through those pillars of justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, being an organization whose work has remained relevant and has remained important. And now

I have the important role of making sure that it's relevant to the outside audience, to our potential supporters and donors and volunteers who are out there in the world today. That's amazing. What incredible impact. And it's so cool to be speaking to someone who is coming from a company that's been around for so long. We don't often get to dive into history like what Big Brothers Big Sisters of America has really created. So I'm so excited. So as we are talking about customer experience on this show, I'd love to just tee us off by understanding a little bit more about who you would define as your customer, because I'm sure there's a few different parts of that. There are a few different parts of it. And so for us at Big Brothers Big Sisters, especially a big, I'll start even with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, because our customers are a little bit different than our local agencies. First and foremost, we are a federated model. Those 230 local Big Brothers Big Sisters offices are their own 501c3s with their own governing boards and their own CEOs and executive directors.

And so our number one customers are our local agencies who are sure they're equipped, making sure they're trained, and they have the resources that they need to carry out the mission and to create positive change and be advocates for positive change in their communities across the country. I just mentioned a few of those other customers, though. First and foremost, other families that we serve, the parents and guardians who enroll a young person in our program to receive mentorship. Of course, the young person in our program to receive mentorship. Of course, the young people in our program, they're at the center of our mission. Everything we do is to empower the young people in our program. So you can picture a world where we have a little, a young person in our program who's surrounded by those critical supports,

none more important than that parent or guardian who took the first step to enroll them in our program. And then you have the Big Brothers Big Sisters Agency. Those are the caring professionals who support our young people and our volunteers. And then that's the other group, the volunteers, right? They're so critical. They're the big. They're the person who comes in and together. This isn't one person supporting the other.

It's the big and the little benefiting from mentorship together. About 60% of our alumni bigs, our mentors in our program, say that their relationship with their little will change their life for the better. So frequently when you hear mentorship program, everybody thinks it's the younger person who's benefiting. We know it's both the big and the little who are benefiting. And so those volunteers are our programs. And then we have a lot of, you know, very focused groups. I mentioned our alumni are critically important to us. So those are alumni bigs and alumni littles. But then we know that there's the parent involvement, our best advocates and our best spokespeople for our program are our parents.

So we call them our champions. So, yeah, we have a lot of great audiences and very focused on the experiences that we give them because they do become our best advocates and influencers in their community. That's so awesome. So tell me a little bit more about how you bring in those bigs. I'm imagining that that might be the greater challenge of the champions and the littles. But how are you going about attracting people like yourself who were maybe hesitant to join these programs? Yeah. From a volunteer recruitment standpoint, I often share, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, one of our goals is to be the most culturally relevant

nonprofit, the most culturally relevant brand. Because at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is intercept people out in the world who had no thought or belief or inkling that they were going to sign up to become a mentor and to become a big. Just last month, September 14th, we launched a new national brand campaign. It's called It Takes Little to Be Big. And it was created through insights that we had done with those core audiences we just talked about, our volunteers, our potential donors, our alumni. And what we found in those consumer insights and in that research was that there were two barriers that existed for potential volunteers coming into our mission. One was the barrier of time, which is very clear. We're all busy, right? We don't have time for – we have time for work.

We have time for our families. And then beyond there, it starts to stretch where you're going to spend those very precious hours that you have. Being a mentor to many feels like I have to be always on. I have to be supporting the young person who I matched with at all times. For us, what we know is that just being present is important and just being persistent. The other barrier that we identified was this notion that we call the burden of mentorship. And it's that we as potential

mentors, I was a potential mentor at the time, we had to build it up in our heads. I remember going to that recruitment session at my former employer and thinking to myself, like all of the reasons I shouldn't do it, right? I was a recent college grad. What did I know, right? What was my lived experience? And we hear that from potential volunteers. They say, you know reasons I shouldn't do it, right? I was a recent college grad. What did I know, right? What was my lived experience? And we hear that from potential volunteers. They say, you know, I don't have superpowers. I can't be a superhero. I haven't gone to school to learn mentorship

or to support a young person. And again, the truth is that it doesn't take much to make an impact. And for us, it's those everyday activities. And so through our campaign, that's one thing that we've been able to bring to life is that the power, the impact of mentorship comes to life in the things that These are the things and these are the conversations because of each of these interactions, there's this conversation, there's this relationship, there's trust being developed. And those are the things that have a significant impact on our young people. They're not superhero powers and they're not things that are incredible feats that have to be achieved. It's the everyday support and activity and conversation. Again, being persistent

and being present. Those are the only two things required to be a great big in our program. So from a volunteer recruitment perspective, where we're really focused is making sure that our mission's out there, because we have to find as many bigs and littles and champions as we can. And so from a volunteer recruitment perspective, we strategically leverage corporate partnerships, media partnerships to attract the volunteers that we need. And for Big Brothers Big Sisters, our priority audience is men. We always have a need for more men. So all the men out there, visit BeBigNow.org, sign up, give a little time. You'll see give a little time on our website.

We always need men to sign up to be mentors. So as we rolled out our national campaign, we've been very strategic with where we're activating and where we're reaching out. Fandom, right? You know, popular, millions of followers, significant male audience. That's a place where we're reaching out. You know, we're using our social media platforms to target male audiences with an interest in volunteering or giving back to their community or being positive change. We're partnering with Bounce television platform. We actually just, if anybody's familiar with Bounce,

it's a script sewing platform, original content, and we were featured on a show called Johnson, which features four friends, adult male friends, kind of going through life. And we were able to create an opportunity to highlight the work of Big Brothers Big Sisters within the show. And so these are just those real-life examples where we're able to actually put Big Brothers Big Sisters in front of our targeted audiences. And then the third part that I'll just share around volunteer recruitment is there's no better advocate for our mission than individuals who have been a part of our program. They're our best champions. And so resourcing and providing platforms for our bigs and our littles and our

alumni bigs and our alumni littles to share their experiences, to share that it doesn't take much to make an impact. It just takes being present is critically important for us. And so with our national brand campaign, we actually have a user,generated component, and it's called A Million Little Moments. And we've created A Million Little Moments for those alumni of our program, those bigs and littles, to come back and share their experiences and use their platforms, use their social media channels, use their friends, their followers, their fans to encourage others to get involved and to become a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters. Wow. Thank you so much for laying all of that out. I mean, it sounds like you're really taking

an approach of like bringing so much relevancy to today, you know, like that using these channels that people are on where I feel like nonprofits can often struggle to really connect with like the modern customer, let's call it, or in this case, you know, just people who are available to be mentors, whether they know it or not. So tell me a little bit about what happens once people sign up. How did they then like move through the program and how do you as big brothers big sisters of america continue to engage them throughout their their mentorship yeah i'll start i'll start even kind of addressing what you shared is is you know we see it as we're an organization that we are we are people we are relationship based and that that is not just our mission but it's a part of every experience that

we have and so so you sign up right so you go toBigNow.org, you sign up to become a big, you're going to enter your zip code. It's going to, it's going to send you to your local Big Brothers, Big Sisters agency. So you start the process. And so one thing that we're, you know, as part of the campaign, you get to do a lot of testing. So we're doing a lot of testing around just quick automated journeys so that as soon as you sign up, you get a, you know, you get a welcome, lot of testing. So we're doing a lot of testing around just quick automated journeys so that as soon as you sign up, you get a welcome. It's personalized. Maybe you're returning.

Maybe you are new to the mission. But just a quick introduction gets you into the mission and gets you into Big Brothers Big Sisters and make you feel that warm welcome. But you're quickly engaged with your local Big Brothers Big Sisters office. So whoever's in your community

that is supporting volunteer engagement at the Big Brothers Big Sisters office will So whoever's in your community that is supporting volunteer engagement at the Big Brothers Big Sisters office will be in contact with you. And we have a quick interview process because this is the most important step in our mission is making sure that we're making the right matches. I'll use my example of myself and Adrian, my first little brother. They want Big Brothers, big sisters is very good. Again, over a hundred years of making relationships, strong relationships that last. Our average matches, mentorship matches last over three years. And so that's significant because the requirement is only for one year that a big and little must be matched for one year. So we're

exceeding, you know, we're exceeding that minimum. So during the interview process, we ask a series of questions of first the parent and the guardian, first the young person, and then the volunteer big, because we're trying to find that right match. When I was matched with Adrian, our match support specialist identified, hey, you both love sports, specifically football, you have a passion for football. That was where we rooted everything. And of course, our relationship and our friendship grew once we were actually matched. But so during that process, interview focused on making the best possible mentorship match. Then there's a meeting where the potential big gets to meet with the parent and the guardian and the young person. And that's where from that conversation, the decisions made ultimately at the parents and guardians that enroll their young person get to decide if they want to move forward

with that mentor. In many cases, they do, obviously, because we have a really great process for those developments. Then once it's created, we know from our research that there's a fear, there's this burden of mentorship concern. And so what we immediately start to do is to train our volunteers and provide them with the resources and tools to make them comfortable being the best possible mentor they can be to their young person. And so we have a series of trainings that we created a platform about five years ago. It's called Learning Exchange. It is our online learning platform with quick, easy modules our bigs can quickly complete, but just to help them

make them feel resourced. Then once you're matched with your little, this isn't like, hey, big and little, go out and conquer the world. And in many cases, they do conquer the world, but they do that with a third party. And that is our match support specialist. So these are professional staff members who are there to only make sure that our bigs and littles stay connected, are hitting their goals. Every match has goals that they want to reach only make sure that our bigs and littles stay connected, are hitting their goals. Every match has goals that they want to reach. Making sure that communications are okay, that the meeting times are okay. Just making sure that the entire experience is supported.

And it goes such a long way. I can speak from experience as a big, that having that match support specialist is just a key important pod for us. And frequently it's a differentiator for our mission that we're able to have this professional staff person walking alongside each of our matches. And it's really a key to keeping our relationship strong. And then once you're a part of our mission,

there's so many ways to get involved. There's local events, there's opportunities for you as a volunteer big to recruit your friends or recruit others. And we provide those resources and tools. So you really become part of a, you know, of a family when joining Big Brothers, Big Sisters. And again, I get to kind of speak from experience there. That's beautiful. So I always like to ask a little bit about what's in the back end, what's behind the curtain of this incredible experience that you're creating? What kind of

technology are you using to, I know you had mentioned like personalization when people are signing up, as well as you're the specialists that are actually like nurturing that relationship. What are they using to really keep track of everyone? And how are you kind of setting that up on the back end? At the core of our program, child safety, youth protection is critically important. So as an organization, we've always been committed to having the data and keeping track of our matches. That's where the match support specialist plays such a critical role for us. And so at Big Reds Big Sisters, when I started about five years ago, we made a transition to a Salesforce platform. And so we have benefited greatly from working with Salesforce. We call our internal platform, we call it MatchForce, because it's all about the bigs and littles.

So it's a place where they all live. So when a volunteer starts a process, they come in, they enroll on Big Brothers Big Sisters, they're immediately put in our MatchForce process. That's where their journey begins. It's a chance for us to talk to our matches, for us to engage with them, share to our potential mentors, to share information about upcoming trainings, to share opportunities of when are they going to come in for their interview? Has it been scheduled? What's the follow-up? When are they meeting the family? So it allows us to kind of keep everything in one stream. At the same time, our littles who enroll in our program, we do have a waiting list.

Like right now, there's 30,000 kids currently waiting to be matched by a mentor. So that's why we're always working. Those littles also end up in this MatchForce platform. And so that's where we're kind of working from a queue to develop them and build them. But then our Salesforce universe, it continues to all of our, so it goes beyond the volunteers. It's also our donor platform. We recently created a national CRM, the first one that we've had in our organization. And it now allows us to look at prospects and champions and individuals that want to support Big Brothers Big Sisters, but with kind of a cross-country view. As you can imagine, we have 20 million alumni champions across the country. Some of those alumni might have been a big brother in San Francisco when they first started their career, but now they live in Virginia. How do we keep them connected

with our mission? The key to doing so is to have this national CRM where we're now able to identify, keep them together, and maybe introduce them to that local Big Brothers, Big Sisters agency if they've moved or become disconnected. So yeah, technology has been just a really critical place for us to invest in and to really grow our mission. I can imagine that data privacy is something that's really important, especially to the guardians of your littles. Tell me a little bit about how you approach that. And I mean, do you get concerns about that or am I just making that up? No, I think that that's the importance of working with a really reputable organization

like Salesforce is that we put privacy and safety first, especially surrounding our young people. I think that's one of the things that's been the most interesting is how trusted our organization is, again, in communities since 1904. You know, when the pandemic, I always like when we talk about trust, I have to share these examples from the pandemic.

Think of the spring of 2020 is we were hearing from our local agencies. Of course, the national office were in contact with our local agencies because they're really on the front lines in communities. And you think about what was happening for young people at that time. Schools were closing down. After-school programs were going away. Suddenly, they were cut off from all of these social connections. And so it became just critically important for us that we could plug in, connect. We have match support specialists who are on a monthly basis getting in touch with youth and families already. And so from those relationships, what we found was we kept doing our goals. We never stopped our match support specialist calls. Our matches

didn't end because we're not place-based or relationship-based. So throughout the pandemic, our bigs and littles stayed together. But in those first few weeks, when we were all trying to figure so many things out, big brothers, big sisters, match support specialists were calling the families and guardians in our program. And what they were hearing, and many times where the family's saying, you're the first organization that's reached out to us. You're the first person that's asked what we need. And we started to also see reversals where we're an organization who is a part of their life every day. And so parents and guardians are calling us and saying, hey, you know. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals,

failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. We might have a problem with rent or there might be a need for us to get food or, you know, who do you, Big Rose Big Sisters, who do you recommend? Who's a trusted source for us in the community? And so then we found ourselves being in a position where we had that trusted relationship. And so it speaks a little bit to the importance of having this relationship and being in constant contact with our parents and guardians. They were able to build, just build that, I say like trust, but it's really building

the relationship, which is sharing the same commitment, which is just to empower the young people in our communities. One other note, just because we talk a lot about experience and technology, but I've shared a lot of positive things about Salesforce and it's really true. We entered the relationship with Salesforce about five years ago, but what we didn't envision was at the beginning of the pandemic, doing the pivot. We could keep bigs and littles together, but we always wanted to also just keep, we wanted to keep monitoring matches. We want to keep tracking progress and make sure that they're still communicating. And so having a partner like Salesforce, and this is really important to just the overall experience,

we were able to create in the matter of months an app that would keep Biggs and Lills connected, but also within that Salesforce platform. And for us, it was critical because many of our matches preferred to meet in person, right person and go out in the community and do all those great things we see. But by having a great technology partner and investing in technology and experience, we were able to create an app, again, in quick response to the landscape that we were facing and the connection challenges that we had to keep our mission going and keep it strong. And most importantly, keep matching young people during a time of so much uncertainty for all of them. For sure. I mean, I can imagine how that completely changed your entire model going through COVID and like having to respond. How did you like create that switch so quickly? What kind of powered that? And, you? And also from just a leadership

perspective, your team must have been dealing with very different scenarios. Yeah. I think, yeah, it was for us, developing an app where we could keep matches connected, help support them, monitor them, track progress in real time was a really big part of it. I think another one was, I talked a lot about our local agencies being the customers of our national office. And so what we focused on was what was happening on the grounds of communities. And that required us to be reaching out to our local agencies and see what they were hearing. And so many communities were different. The rules and regulations in communities were different.

And so what we immediately did was we just started gathering best practices, what's happening around the country. And as a national office, you're able to bring those in. You're able to create resources and toolkits. You're able to coach agencies and help them get through so much in certain times. There were a lot of things that we discovered, though. We discovered that we would never want to shift away from being in person and being present with each other to being just technology driven. But we've discovered that technology could be enhancing. And as we've come out of the pandemic, we've been able to add supplements where our matches now have curriculums

that they can tap into. And maybe if they have something they want to tackle or work on together, they can do it thanks to the support of an app and using our Salesforce app, or ways that you could safely get together. You know, a lot of our agencies, we would share best practices around convening together, getting into a park, staying six feet apart, following, you know, always driving back to the rules and regulations of the local health department. But it was really about mobilizing and us over communicating back and forth, both the local agencies to our national office and us over-communicating back and forth, both the local agencies to our national office and us to our local agencies, because kids have very, very sophisticated social networks. I don't mean like social media, I mean social networks.

When you think of what they might have at school, at church, at their afterschool program, within their families, with their teachers. And so with so many being cut off, we really found ourselves standing squarely on our mission and finding ways that we could keep our littles connected. And coming through the pandemic, that's been a real driver in developing our national outreach campaign, our national brand campaign, is we know that we have a weighting list of 30,000 kids. We know that currently one in three kids in America say they're growing up without a positive adult mentor. And so those are

the things that drove us to prioritize. We need to bring back a million alumni and champions of our mission to get involved, to be supportive, to be volunteers, to be donors to our mission. And so that's been a real driving factor was all those experiences that we had during the pandemic because what we've learned is that it's just critically important.

You know, there's really three, you know, kind of core elements that are driving the strategic vision of our mission right now. And we saw them really all come to fruition at some point during those tumultuous years around the global pandemic. And one was college and career readiness for young people. We saw young people lose their entire senior years of high school and college. And in these last few years, the fastest growing segment of young people we serve, everybody thinks that we're a kindergarten through a senior year of high school organization. But we've seen our fastest growing segment of youth

served by our mission is actually 18 through 25. And that's because young people are graduating from high school and saying, what's next? And you and I, as I'm assuming, former 18 and 19 year olds, know that those are the years that you need a mentor more than ever. And so we've been able to really find ways to connect and create those mentorships. And the conversations might be different than when you're in the fifth grade versus when you're trying to fill out a FAFSA or maybe get ready for a job interview. But college and career readiness has been a key driver. Mentorship for many years has been a proven resource to promoting positive youth mental wellness as we come out of the pandemic.

Critically important, and we can continue to see those positive connections. And then, as I mentioned earlier, inclusion and belonging has always been a big part of our program. And so these are the things that are really driving us as we reach out and create a campaign that's going to bring in the mentors and supporters and the advocates that we need to power those key elements that our young people need across the country. That's great. How about measuring success, especially knowing like this isn't a quick interaction, right? There are long-term impacts here. I'd love to understand a little bit more about like, how are you measuring those long-term effects within the organization? Yeah, we're a people-driven organization. So we have real-time data and real-time insights. And I'll share two because one is how are we doing it every day? But the other is how are we looking at it in the big picture? Because everybody, whether you're a nonprofit or you want to see a long-term impact. And so at Big Brothers Big Sisters, when a young person first enrolls in our program

before they get matched, so when they're getting matched with their mentor, with their big, they will complete a youth outcome survey. And the youth outcome survey, when they first fill it out, is to create a baseline. And so it asks a series of questions, but really driving towards three things. One, what are their, you know, how is their progress? How are they feeling about education and classroom performance? How are they feeling about peer relationships and developing positive relationships with both their peers and other friends and adults in their lives? And the third is focused on what is their perceptions around risky behaviors?

Think using drugs or alcohol or violence. And we want to establish a baseline. And the questions are all geared to be administered to a young person, to be answered by a young person. But each year on the anniversary of being matched with their big, our littles will complete the survey again. And so I shared earlier that our average mentorship match length is over three years. And so we're able to track progress. And what we see across the board is 80th, 90th, 100th percentiles for either remaining, like maintaining their current status or growing and improving in these areas. And so that is a driving force. Our youth outcome survey is something that's critical to help us understand and make sure that our mission is working, that bigs and littles are achieving the goals that they set out for when they're first matched in our program.

And then in terms of just making sure that we're focused on long-term outcomes, back in the 1990s, an organization called Private Public Ventures, PPB, did a longitudinal study on Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America to see if this mission worked, if there were real long-term outcomes. And what they did was a randomized control test. And they had littles. They worked with Big Brothers Big Sisters across the country. And they looked at littles who were enrolling in our program, and they held out a control group. And for the young people who were in the control group, they were not matched with a mentor in Big Brothers Big Sisters, but we did connect them with other organizations and supports and resources within their community. At the end of this multi-year study, the PPB study, it's become one of the kind of baseline studies and research studies conducted on youth development. It was really groundbreaking because what it showed was that having a mentor in the life of a young person, it provided clear evidence that it

was creating more successful outcomes in the classroom, that it was helping them create better relationships with those in their life, and it was helping them avoid risky behaviors. And so that was in the 1990s, right? And so you can only lay it on that research for so long. So about four years ago, we partnered with Arnold Ventures to again, do a new four-year randomized controlled trial. And we got to look, we're about, we're just over halfway through, but we got to do an interim check on how the research is going. And what we saw was that across all three of those key guidelines, how are young people performing in class?

How are young people feeling about the relationships that they can develop with others and their peers? And how do they feel about risky behaviors? Are they able to stay on the right track? All of these things in the interim findings pointed to replicating those outcomes that we saw during the PPB study. So we're really excited. It's going to be really just the interim findings were excited to us. So we're sitting here thinking, like, what's going to happen at the end of four years when we're able to say that impact that we saw back in the 90s is still true today for our mission? Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful.

And then how are you using this information? I mean, whether it's, you know, these studies or even just the day-to-day things that you're tracking, how do you then kind of harness that data into actions that are driving more signups, more engagement through, you know, marketing and, you know, the day-to-day activities of the organization? Yeah, many. First, when we're creating resources for our local agencies, for our bigs, for our young people, it helps us identify if there's something needed. If our bigs and littles are telling us that they're on track to graduate for high school, how are we preparing programs for them that are driven for post-secondary success? We have a program called Big Futures, which has been developed to support young people who are 18 and up. And it's new,

right? Because we haven't always as an organization, only in the past 10 years have we been serving youth who are over 18. So this 18 to 25 group is about developing curriculums that are going to support them on their path because they're expecting to attend college or a two-year school or a trade school, how do we prepare them to do that? And so that's been something that's been really important to us is it helps us just become better at supporting the mentees in our program. The other thing that's been critically important is it's really supported us

in developing foundation relationships and corporate partners because we need investment as an organization. To be a part of the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. It's a hundred percent free to the children and the families we serve because we believe mentorship should be free and accessible and equitable to everybody. So there's no charge to get involved, but that means that we need investment to keep those match support specialists there, to make sure that we have staff members who are able to intake the new volunteers that come to our program, to intake the outreach from a family who's

looking for support for their young person. So for us, foundation partnerships, corporate partners, critically important. But what they want to know at the end of the day is if they're going to invest in a mission like Big Brothers Big Sisters, are they going to have an impact? And we're able to say definitively, yes, this is the impact that you have by supporting Big Brothers Big Sisters and our mission of mentorship. It's proof. And it's so inspiring. That's amazing. I have one last question for you. And I ask everybody this. What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should know? This is a great question. My advice, whenever I enter a project, whenever I'm going into something where we're developing a customer experience,

is to start at the end. Envision what you want. For Big Brothers Big Sisters, for our National Brain Campaign that we've just launched, we know that we want to see there's one in three young people across the country who are in need of a positive caring adult mentor. At the end of this campaign, I want to see millions of alumni, of volunteers, and donors, supporters of our mission and advocates as a part of our addressable audience, as a part of this mission, finding new ways to engage them. So knowing that we want to have, that's the grand vision at the end. So I say starting at the end, that's what we want to see. When you do that, you're able to then tick back and identify those milestones, identify those experiences that need to be made, the goals, the measurements, the timelines, critical to any marketing, great marketing project are the

timelines. But by starting at the end, you're able to then, critical to any marketing, great marketing project are the timelines. But by starting at the end, you're able to then create this roadmap on this journey that you're going to go on to achieve your goal. And in there, the reason this is important to customer experience is because customer experience is all about relevance first to bring you in,

but then engagement to keep you here. And that's where you can create that's where you can create opportunities and engagements that surprise and delight your customer that keep them coming back. And, you know, no campaign is a start and a finish. There's, there's a, there's a journey you're going to go on and it's critical that you make sure you build that journey with your customers in mind. Every one of every one of your different customers in those journeys are going to look very different. But by knowing the goal, they're all going to lead to the same goal. I think that that's the most important advice

and the most important wisdom I can maybe install. I don't know if it is wisdom. I don't want to give myself too much credit there. But that's how I've always approached creating a strong and successful customer engagement strategy. That's amazing. Eye on the prize. Eye on the prize.

Eye on the prize. And dream big. Mapping out and dreaming big and then mapping out how we're actually going to get there. And I love what you're saying about really looking at the entire journey that that customer is going to go through and those key points in time that are going to be so critical to their engagement. Yeah. What's driving a microconversion? What, you know, those are the key things that you can identify on that journey. Exactly.

Exactly. Well, Adam, thank you so much. This has been such an inspiring conversation. Remind us, where can people go if they want to sign up to be a big? Yeah. Remember, it takes little to be big. So join us now. Visit BeBigNow.org and start your journey and start empowering young people in your community now. There's a lot of ways that you can do it. And remember, we're all the product of mentorship. We've all had mentors in our life. Maybe that wasn't with Big Brothers Big Sisters, but you can join Big Brothers Big Sisters now and we can bring mentorship and bring youth empowerment to so many kids across the country.

And what an incredible way to give back. I'm definitely leaving here inspired. I hope everyone else listening is as well. And one last thing I'll say, if you enjoyed this episode, please follow us, leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you and we will see you again next time. Thanks so much, Adam. Thank you. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce AI and data. And it is bright.

Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work side by side with your team and turn your AI and data vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.