Youth Insearch has been on a digital transformation journey since 2014, which has helped it improve the way it supports young people through traumatic events.
Youth Insearch has been helping young Australians aged between 14 and 20 overcome mental health and wellbeing challenges through peer-led programs since it was established in 1985. These include supporting them through traumatic events such as drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, family breakdowns, domestic violence, bullying, and self-harm. Even though the not-for-profit organisation’s support for youths continued to grow, its ability to keep its IT systems updated stood still. But that all changed when Stephen Lewin, who is currently the organisation’s CEO, first joined as general manager at the end of 2014. “When I came on board… I literally had just one server in the office; it was running on a 2003 [Microsoft] Access database and it was all paper forms,” he told ZDNet. “It was a volunteer coordination model, so we had a few regional community coordinators and those people from the community would fax their forms in or email their forms in, and the data entry person, who was only in three days a week, would enter the forms in this Access database that crashed every second entry.” After assessing the organisation’s “biggest bugbears”, Lewin took charge to shift Youth Insearch’s single server onto Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise. FormAssembly was also adopted to streamline and digitise the organisation’s form application processes. Youth Insearch also looked to Salesforce to stand up a CRM system. “That changed the way we run our weekend workshops from four days of administration down to a few hours, probably about four hours… there’s still a lot of work to be done but the administration person doesn’t have to do those massive loads of data entry, and cross checking, and creating lists,” Lewin said.
