Pro Bono Profiles: Supporting Youth Development Through Golf

Youth on Course, a program born out of the Northern California Golf Association (NCGA), is designed to give youth affordable opportunities to golf. They subsidize rounds at hundreds of partner golf courses across America to allow kids to play golf for $5 or less.

“Really, it was born out of the need to eliminate cost as a barrier to entry for kids in Northern California,” says Adam Heieck, Youth on Course’s executive director.

Golf provides not only a physical outlet for developing youth, but also acts as a rich source of mental and social development.

But with thousands of members and hundreds of golf courses, Youth on Course was having trouble tracking their kids, donors and round reimbursements. They needed a flexible platform that could conform to the particular needs of their unique organization and would allow them to break down silos and connect data, and scale nationally. For an organization with limited resources, that’s a daunting task.

Enter Salesforce’s very own Conor Nolen, a lifelong friend of Adam Heieck (they used to play wiffleball together as kids). Conor knew that Youth on Course was a ripe organization for an engagement with the Salesforce Pro Bono Program. As part of Salesforce’s mission to give back through volunteerism, Conor (RVP, Enterprise Sales) and Erik Lue (Product Management Manager) rose to the call.

Conor and Erik have volunteered over 150 hours to help Youth on Course implement Salesforce and migrate all of their data onto the platform.

But data loading was just the beginning. The volunteer team knew that automation was the key to allow the nonprofit to scale. Once implemented, Salesforce automated facility onboarding, golfer check-ins, and facility reimbursement (Youth on Course pays the difference in the cost of the rounds to all 400 courses every month). All of this used to be done manually, wasting precious time and resources.

The migration of data management to Salesforce allowed the program to scale dramatically, giving more kids access to affordable golfing opportunities and expanding golf course partnerships like never before.

Using Pardot to power and automate their email marketing, Youth on Course could better send targeted messaging to their constituents, allowing them to build engaging journeys and, eventually, lifelong relationships. In short, Youth on Course staff streamlined nearly every system running their organization with Salesforce (along with integrations with Classy and DocuSign).

Thanks to the help of the Salesforce Pro Bono volunteers, Youth on Course has been able to subsidize over 450,000 rounds of golf to date — that’s 12.7 million holes played! They have been empowered to serve over 18,000 kids throughout the nation that may have otherwise not been able to afford to play golf.

If that weren’t enough, they’ve also provided job opportunities for 75 interns and 237 caddies, and award over $250,000 in scholarships every year.

The partnership between Salesforce volunteers and Youth on Course has been, well, a hole in one!

Learn more about the Pro Bono Program at Salesforce.

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