You are here

Customers › Young Life

Young Life

Since 1941, the Young Life Christian ministry has walked with kids and earned the right to be heard in an exhausting and exciting world. In over 100 countries, the organization knows more than two million kids by name. Since its first camp opened in 1950, Young Life has strengthened its commitment to reach kids through its world-class camping ministry. Young Life camping involves high adventure, lots of fun, great food and excellent speakers who understand and respect high school and middle school kids.

As Young Life's worldwide outreach continues to grow, its camping program is expanding as well, with Young Life-owned or leased camps in a number of international locations. Regardless of the facility, the experience is the same — kids getting away from the pressures of everyday life, having fun with friends and their Young Life leaders, and hearing the message of God's love in terms they can understand.

Each year, more than 180,000 kids around the world spend a week or a weekend at Young Life camp, having an experience that many describe as the best of their lives. 

Business Challenge 

As with most non-profit organizations, one of the main challenges that Young Life faces is to become more efficient with limited resources. Laura Boullain is part of a small I.T. department that serves the Young Life Camping division. When Laura became a programmer analyst for this group, the organization was dealing with a whole lot of paper contracts — thousands per year for both camping reservations and volunteer sign-ups. Each reservation contract represents a local outreach group and its best estimate of the number of campers attending along with associated camping fees. The volunteer contract serves as a commitment and represents the number of volunteer estimates from each local group.

The contracts used to be created as a Word document and sent out by email. The recipient would then print it out, sign it and return it either by mail, fax, in person or email with a photo or scan of the contract. This process was inconsistent, inefficient and lent itself to inaccuracies. As a data-driven organization, Young Life’s national headquarters was hindered by its inability to look into its CRM system to track and manage contract reservations and run reports. It was very difficult to forecast accurately the number of committed groups and volunteers without a standardized, digital process in place. Not to mention, Young Life had no quick and easy ability to search the thousands of agreements they collected each year.

DocuSign Solution 

Young Life realized that they needed to digitize this agreement process with an esignature solution that would integrate with their CRM system. The Camping I.T. department had historically been using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, and the decision was made to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 with DocuSign integrated. Young Life used DocuSign’s APIs to build a custom integration with Microsoft Dynamics that facilitated their workflow around status for both camp reservation contracts and volunteer agreements. They also built a webpage that shows the contracts connected to a specific camp and reservation. The solution was implemented in less than four weeks.

Results 

The digital transformation for Young Life’s Camping division has been significant. The organization has been able to improve the completion rate of the agreements and also reduce the time to completion dramatically. By using DocuSign, Young Life now has a 97 percent success rate of agreement signings and the average time to agreement completion went from four weeks down to less than two weeks. Overall, the process of completing the contract is faster, more accurate and more consistent. But best of all, national headquarters now has visibility into the reservation system and can look at statistics and manage their sign-ups. This allows Young Life to spend more resources on making sure the camper’s experience is the best it can be. Young Life is investigating how it can expand the use of DocuSign to other use cases within their Camping department, and it is at ease knowing that DocuSign has prebuilt integrations with many common I.T. technologies.