Youth Unlimited Case Study

/ Update / / Collavate customer use case - Youth Unlimited



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Youth Unlimited is a highly decentralized and entrepreneurial organization with programs working out of community-based locations in churches, community centres and etc. Youth Unlimited (Toronto Youth for Christ) is a registered charity in the Greater Toronto area.


This organization has over 60 passionate staff members and 750 committed volunteers. They serve approximately 3,000 young individuals that are involved in their 35 available programs. Their work is focused on community youth across the Greater Toronto area catering to ages ranging from 10 to 25. Programs include after-school and evening sports, arts, and academics. They also provide specialty programs for youth linked to the following problem categories: homeless, crime-involved, sex trade, and other at-risk settings.



Collavate solves challenging workflow problems



Annual planning has always been a challenge, and Youth Unlimited implemented a new planning process to build greater synergy between their teams and to drive towards their vision of seeing “transformed youth, transforming our city”. Two years ago, paper documents were heavily used, and last year a combination of paper and Word and Excel files were used. To streamline the process further, Youth Unlimited built out a series of Google Sheets to capture planning input and facilitate collaborative discussions about goals.



Collavate manages workflow through processes, removing the need for a member of the Admin staff to manage the flow for the rest of the organization.  Members of Youth Unlimited use Google Sheets as the basis for collecting input and conducting their planning process.  



All team leaders create workbooks consisting of worksheets that are then loaded onto Collavate as “shared templates” which allows the worksheet to be deployed numerous times for user input.



Dave Armstrong, Special Project Leads pointed out that “Collavate allows users to open a shared template with a cell locking feature to ensure spreadsheet integrity and makes it easy for user input.”



Collavate also manages the flow of the review and approval of workbooks as they are created. Once plans are approved for Youth Unlimited’s teams, each team member opens an additional shared template to collect information that most applies to that team member. Collavate handles the approval processes of all these documents.



Benefits of Collavate to the Youth Unlimited Organization



The Youth Unlimited organization utilizes Collavate because it works in seamless harmony with Google, is simple to use, and is cost-effective! With Collavate, admin staff members save precious hours and easily manage all of the documents and sheets of the whole organization. Utilizing the Google-integrated Collavate application facilitates the review and approval of worksheets and workbooks allowing the organization to focus on it programs and services to youth. Youth Unlimited anticipates a savings on headcount through its increased efficiency with the use of Collavate!

Collavate strives to ensure that our application is helpful for organizations and companies, and we like to hear back from our users. We had the pleasure of receiving feedback from Youth Unlimited’s Special Projects Lead, Dave Armstrong,  who described for us how Collavate plays a role in his organization’s daily tasks and workflow. Thank you so much for your wonderful feedback Dave. We are so happy to hear of the great and admirable work Youth Unlimited is doing, and we are proud that you are using Collavate  as your organization’s workflow management tool.



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