Avenue Scholars

Case Study

Custom-built software leads to optimal results and high marks for scholars, staff, and business professionals in Omaha, Nebraska.

Volano was honored to partner with Avenue Scholars, a 17-year-old nonprofit dedicated to guiding high school and postsecondary students into high-demand careers through internships, training, and real-world work experiences. The program supports students beyond graduation with a focus on full career placement. Currently, Avenue Scholars operates in 13 high schools across the Omaha metro area.

Business

Challenge

Avenue Scholars has a website platform they use for student internship applications, a major piece of their mission. However, they faced ongoing reliability and support issues with their previous website vendor, according to Audrey Gustin, the organization’s Director of Business Outreach. The Avenue Scholars team had poor visibility into the system backend and limited internal knowledge of web development which made them dependent on the vendor, whose lack of communication and transparency made the day-to-day harder for the organization as well as they students trying to apply for internships. The platform experienced recurring downtime and functionality failures that frustrated the team as well as the students and business partners that Avenue Scholars works with. On top of that, reporting tools were difficult to use and time-consuming to manipulate, leading to a lot of wasted time and effort and increased risk due to reporting compliance requirements.  Business leadership grew concerned that the inefficiency and lack of platform usability would soon result in a drop in applicants as well as business partner satisfaction. It was clear that their rising business needs were outpacing the vendor’s capacity to deliver and introducing risk, so they turned to Volano to make a change.

Implemented

Solution

Avenue Scholars hired Volano to stabilize, support, and improve the existing platform with the goal of restoring trust and instilling confidence in their internship application process for students and eliminating staff frustration. Volano also sought to improve response times and create transparency around issues and updates for the team as well as provide education and documentation on system functionality like backend processes and email automation flows. This enabled internal team training and a much easier onboarding process for new staff at Avenue Scholars. Finally, the website could work for them to accomplish goals rather than be a hindrance to success.