Step Up Tutoring

Providing free online tutoring to thousands of young students

My Roles:

UX • UI • App Development • Branding • Marketing • User Testing

Type:

Startup & current job

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Project Overview

The misson

Step Up Tutoring is a non-profit organization that I co-founded in May of 2020. Our mission is to innovate and scale free online tutoring and mentorship for over 25,000 families from under-resourced schools. Amidst the uncertainty, isolation, and academic stagnation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, our volunteer tutors provide academic support, mentorship and emotional support for students. Our goal is to increase engagement, improve academic performance, and strengthen students’ social safety net.

The outcome

We have supported over 7000+ 3rd-6th graders and continue to grow! We have secured a 5-year MOU with LAUSD, the second largest school district in the country and are integrated in 1000+ classrooms. The journey has been amazing and I am so grateful I decided to build Step Up Tutoring!

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Step Up tutoring sessions take place every week on average!

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Website Design & Branding

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First steps in my design process

Step 1: Developed a brand guide

I chose a name that was straightforward, inspiring, and applicable to both our volunteers and students. I decided on playful colors and fonts to highlight that our tutoring program is designed to be fun for students. Download the full brand guide here.

Step 2: Prototyped and user tested UI & UX in Figma

Throughout all my design processes, I consulted friends and family to get their opinions on the user flow and the UI. I utilized processes from my Product Design courses to conduct structured user testing for the many tasks a user may need to accomplish on our website.

Step 3: Created website and iterated as our organization evolved

I developed the website for four user groups: potential tutors, families interested in receiving tutoring, teachers and administrators who want to partner, and people interested in donating. Throughout the last 12 months, I have tracked metrics and conducted A/B tests for tutors and families to determine the optimal design for conversions.

Program Design

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Program Design & Automation

Using Zapier, custom API’s and webhooks to connect our Bubble.io and Airtable to tens of apps, I built a system (that I continue to build upon) that automates all communication, backend data management for our staff, and front-end onboarding processes.

I led monthly sprint designs with interns at Step Up to come up with new ideas. The design sprints were a chance to align goals, uncover problems within our program, reframe our problems into opportunity areas, and then critically assess those opportunity areas to determine which initiatives we should proceed with.

Process Lay out

In June of 2020, I began ideating and asking myself questions on how we may want to design the program. What onboarding steps will be necessary? Using research and my prior experience as an educator, I created a mandatory workbook for tutors and designed a Live Training session outline.  What communication may be necessary? I mapped out all of path and wrote out draft emails. What can be automated and what cannot? How much support will we need? I wrote down all of the questions I had and then did research and spoke to industry professionals to assess the best path forward.

Database and automation set up

First, I structured the backend database on Airtable. Then, I built out a comprehensive set of automation flows in Zapier to account for every path a tutor applicant, matched tutor, student applicant, matched student, parent, and teacher might go through. I developed more than 100 automated sequences, integrating our database with all the other apps we use. We are now currently running over 80,000 automations a month to manage our 6,000+ active users.

Iterations and more iterations

Throughout the process, I iterated and evolved the program structure. For example, our application has a low completion rate, so I conducted user research and found one of the major pain points was that applicants felt uncomfortable recording videos.  I replaced the video with an interview process. I recruited 25 volunteer interviewers and created an automated system to manage the process. We went from an application completion rate of 10 percent to over 60 percent. We got funding and hired staff to take on the day to day management.

Tutor Portals

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Tutor Portals

I led an amazing team of 8 interns to develop our Onboarding Portal and our (post-onboarding) Tutor Portal. We are now in the process of developing our Session Guide site. I lead the team as the project manager, also working on the design and coding in some of the HTML/CSS.

Onboarding Portal

We developed our onboarding portal over the course of 4 months in an effort to increase our onboarding success rate and increase our tutoring pool.

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Prior to the onboarding portal, onboarding success rate was only 16%, so I wondered...
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‍How might we develop an easier onboarding process and increase our onboarding success rate?

I started by...

replacing our application's video upload screener with an interview sign up
        • Increased our application completion rate from 10% to 60% (still had a low O.S.R though)
reconfiguring the Tutor workbook - fewer training modules but better content
       • Increased workbook completion rate by 35%
partnering with an additional school district who did not require LiveScan Background Check for applicants; utilized online background checks for tutors who could not get LiveScans.
       • Increased our background check completion rate by 54%
changing the copy on website to be more clear about program expectations to reduce unqualified applicants
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While these changes increased our onboarding completion rate from 16% to 25% , we still did not have the 40% onboarding completion rate we were striving for. I talked to more users and found that some of them had trouble knowing where they were in the process at times. Our automated emails that updated them of their status in the process sometimes went to spam or were never opened.

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‍I decided that it was time to build an onboarding portal...

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I wanted to create a more clear, customized, and streamlined process for the applicant to always know what they need to do and where they are in the process.
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I developed a second iteration of the onboarding portal to better reflect our shifting brand.

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Currently 600 tutor applicants use our onboarding portal each week to work through our onboarding process and we successfully increased our onboarding success rate to 37%.

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Tutor Dashboard

Our Tutor Dashboard is a centralized hub for all messaging, scheduling, tutor resources, announcements, tutor events, and more. The messaging system automatically connects tutors and parents via SMS messaging and our web portal and automatically translates messages to the preferred language (many parents only speak Spanish). This site is also live but requires a login. Contact me if you would like access to it!

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After speaking with our active tutor focus group, we found that our tutors have a difficult time keeping track of all the information we are sending their way as we lack a centralized communication system. We regularly send events, individual Zoom meeting information, weekly forms, updates on our program, and other action items. Tutors have to go to our Facebook group to communicate with other tutors in the group,  Remind to communicate with their student’s parent, and email to communicate with our staff.

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We need a centralized and customized dashboard where active tutors can access everything and communicate with any relevant parties.
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Marketing

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Marketing and Recruitment

At Step Up Tutoring, I am in charge of the digital marketing. I designed and ran Google search ads and Facebook display ads. I also set up an interest list and an ambassador program.

Ambassador Program and Portal

I founded our Campus Ambassador program in October 2020 with the goal of leveraging our current tutors’ connections to grow exponentially on college campuses.  We had solid growth, but most ambassadors were inactive. After interviewing inactive ambassadors, I found that many ambassadors disengaged when their updated list of referrals were not sent for two or three weeks at a time. They wanted more up-to-date insight into who they have referred. So I took this insight and built a new automated tracking system. In August of 2021, we launched our Ambassador portal. The Ambassador Portal and automated tracking system allows Ambassadors to easily view their recruited applicants, the applicants’ progress in the onboarding process, and the money the tutor earned for their matched referrals. I built the Ambassador portal and backend automated tracking system using Softr for the front-end and Airtable, Webhooks, and Google Analytics for the backend. Final Results: Using a tiered reward system funded by donations, we have 103 active ambassadors and have received over 1000 tutor applications through Ambassador referrals.
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Email Marketing

Our interest list and email marketing campaigns are another big recruiting source for tutors. Through the months, I have experimented with website popups, bars, and chatbots with the goal of securing contact information. Likewise, I designed our tutor application to capture contact information by discretely linking two separate forms so we can  reach out (via automations) to users who never completed the application. Once added to the interest list, the tutors receive personalized text and email communications and are added to our newsletter. Over 30% of the 1800 people that have gone through our optimized interest list campaign ended up applying.

Visual and Display Ads

For roughly 6 months, I managed our monthly $10,000 Google Ad grant. I worked as an apprentice for a couple months under a google ads professional and learned the art of writing ad copy, testing audience segments, and choosing optimal keywords. We ended up with an average CTR of 8% across our 20+ ads campaigns and have received hundreds of applications through our efforts.

I also ran display ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Here’s a few of the square and banners ads I designed….

Results

We have recruited over 15000 tutors since September of 2020. We are matching an average of 7 student-tutor pairs everyday and offboard 2 pairs a day. The collective marketing efforts listed above resulted in securing approximately half of Step Up’s tutor base. Though I have taken a step back from marketing as of June 2021, our tutoring base continues to grow!

Active Tutor-student pairs


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What did I learn?

1. How to manage priorities

Starting an organization from scratch, building my own apps, and managing multiple teams of interns was an overwhelming amount of work. With so much to do, I had to learn what to spend time on and what to cut as well as which program initiatives to pursue and which to drop.

2. How to iterate quickly with a team

Our team, especially in the earlier days, ran at 100 miles per hour. We had (and still have) so much we want to do and only 10 paid staff members. I learned the value of action-oriented meetings, Agile methodology, and clear timetables.

3. Technical skills

I learned how to build complex apps and automated systems (using Zapier/webhooks and softwares such as Airtable, Bubble.io, and Softr). I also got a lot of experience with database structuring, Google Analytics/Data Studio, Jira, HTML/CSS/Git/Java/Database formulas, and Zendesk.
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