AIME – Connecting Mentors and Mentees with Salesforce1 and Salesforce Communities

Author: Peter Chalmers, Managing Director, Morphate

Over the past few months the Morphate team have been working with the team from Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) to build a Mentor App on the Salesforce1 Platform.

AIME is a fantastic organisation that is focussed on mentoring and supporting Indigenous students through high school and into university. AIME was launched in 2005 when they mentored 25 students, and by 2018 they are on track to engage 10,000 students annually. Any solution we built needed to scale, but more importantly AIME needed to be able to maintain and update the app themselves.

Our challenge was to build a solution that allowed Mentors to enrol, matching Mentees to study streams and Mentors, and to do so via the AIME website. Most importantly, this needed to be done in a robust manner and allow AIME to create a community to mentor indigenous students over several years then ultimately become mentors themselves.

At Morphate our approach is to always use as much of the native Salesforce functionality as possible which then allows our customers to grow with the Salesforce1 platform. For AIME we built the core solution using Process Builder and Flow with Communities, with Chatter enabling collaboration in the community.

You may ask Why or What is Process Builder? Well it is new functionality that Salesforce announced at Dreamforce last year. It allows us to leverage flows to build a solution in a point and click manner reducing the requirement for code to almost zero! This ensures that AIME can maintain/update/change the flows, as needed, for any future change without involving a developer. This is why we and our customers love the Salesforce1 platform as it delivers power into your hands.

For the portal requirements we utilised Salesforce Communities which allows the mentors to maintain their details, schedules, and more importantly collaborate with other mentors and groups – all within the AIME Community! The community has the same look and feel as their website and works on all devices.

Building the solution around the students and mentors will enable AIME to extend their relationships and reach in the Indigenous communities. Jess Timmins, AIME National Operations Director, advised that AIME has seen a positive impact since the solution was launched in March.

“With the new Mentor App we’ve seen a 70% increase in Mentor Applications, 20% reduction in AIME Staff workload, a 10% increase in conversion from expression of interest to Mentor applications and over 90% reduction in issues from new Mentors”

There is more work to be completed on the AIME Mentor App as we continue to develop further enhancements that will allow them to easily track and report on Students progress over the year and future years.

As Jess has said “The AIME Mentor app and Community are awesome, it’s crazy how far we have come in 6 short months”.

By leveraging the Saleforce1 platform anything is possible, just imagine what AIME can achieve in the next 6 months and then beyond….