The Ask
The nonprofit mental health institute that I was a part of was embarking on a new Certification Program for their mental health professionals looking for a more official indicator of their skills in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. There were many challenges when approaching this project. First, the President and Board of Directors were very protective of the brand and the identity of the institute. Being that they were also no tech savvy, they were often resistant to what was proposed in terms of the technical side of running the program, and often submitted change requests close to deadlines. Second was the very tight timeline to get the program up and running in time for the institute’s 50th anniversary.
Another very important challenge was the nature of the certification process as a whole in the mental health profession. There were several practice-wide standards we had to make sure to meet that could be very complex to run through our different systems. We needed to make sure all of our systems could talk to each other, while also making sure the user knew where they were in the long and complex process, which could take several years to complete based on their experience.
The Solution:
Our institution was already utilizing Salesforce for our off-site organization trainings, so our instance was already integrated into several of our other systems, such as for signing up for Consultation and Supervision from those programs. I proposed that we expand our use of Salesforce to track our Certification users on our end. We could also use that data to display in a user-facing dashboard optimized for their use on our website. Through an API, the dashboard could pull their Salesforce data and populate a checklist. The dashboard could then guide the user towards the next step in the process. Along the way, the user would also additionally get email notification to check their dashboard and other relevant messaging, such as upcoming classes they could sign up for that would fulfill their requirements.
This user flow was presented to both the in-house Certification Development Team and to the Executive Board to demonstrate our proposed solution.
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