Junior Achievement invests in kids’ futures through Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

On a busy street, a restaurant manager, construction worker, delivery person, and pharmacist all work hard to keep their community running. Except this isn’t a real town, and the “workers” are kids. As part of Junior Achievement’s (JA) BizTown, students get hands-on experience testing out jobs, running a business, and earning a paycheck. The program is just one of the nonprofit’s learning opportunities that reach more than 4.4 million students every year. 

JA partners with educators and volunteers to teach children work readiness, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship. The Colorado-based nonprofit operates on a federated model, with more than 100 local offices—called areas—across the U.S. The independence this approach empowers areas to serve their diverse communities, but it also led to a complicated technology landscape with solutions that didn’t talk to each other.

“We observed challenges in Junior Achievement, including substantial reliance on manual processes, inadequate data exchange between systems, and operational inefficiencies. We recognized the need for a connected ecosystem that’s both scalable and user-friendly,” recalls Sridhar Thodupunoori, Chief Information and Technology Officer at Junior Achievement USA. 

To reach even more young people, the nonprofit needed cohesive technology so JA could grow as one. After investigating challenges faced by staff nationwide, Thodupunoori landed on an offering that could address pain points within the nonprofit’s budget. 

“The Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit effectively satisfied our requirements within a unified platform, seamlessly integrating with both our existing and prospective technology stack,” he says. “The interconnected applications and established platforms offer inherent extendibility and scalability, encompassing a comprehensive solution: It’s all in there.”

Microsoft partner Wipfli is supporting JA in an organization-wide, multi-year technology overhaul called JA Level Up. In Level Up's first stage, JA and Wipfli are building out solutions for volunteer and grant management as well as designing the foundation of the nonprofit’s data strategy and analytics. 

“JA Level Up is a strategic digital initiative that will leverage technology as a catalyst for future program growth, area alignment, and engagement,” says Andrew Potasek, a principal at Wipfli who is supporting JA Level Up. “These solutions will streamline processes and enable staff to focus on relationships and connections to scale and support community needs.”

Elevating the volunteer experience

More than 150,000 people across the country volunteer with JA each year. Volunteers bring real-world experience to JA events, making business education more relevant and inspiring to young people. JA is in the process of creating a unified, efficient system so volunteering feels even more rewarding, according to Thodupunoori. 

The new volunteer portal is being built within Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit’s Volunteer Engagement solution. The pre-built tools and resources, including the Power Pages website template, enable the Wipfli team to “rapidly scale development” since they don’t have to build from scratch, says Potasek. 

The volunteer management platform also leverages the Nonprofit Common Data Model so information seamlessly flows throughout JA’s tools and platforms. For example, every interaction a volunteer has with JA is recorded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and stored in the cloud. Staff will be able to filter for community members who work for a certain company or who are JA alumni. They will also be able to segment communications through Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to tailor the messages sent to volunteers. The unified platform eliminates duplicate records, giving the nonprofit a complete understanding of how volunteers engage with the nonprofit. JA and Wipfli are using Microsoft Fabric as the foundation of its data analytics and strategy, so the nonprofit can continue to leverage data as it grows. 

The new portal will replace the current manual volunteer onboarding process with a search-friendly way to sign up for opportunities, like teaching financial literacy or hosting a job shadow day. Once someone signs up, communications—automated through Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—guide them through every step. Volunteers sign waivers, go through training, and stay informed about the upcoming event all in the portal.

Automated post-event feedback is also built into the new solution, creating a treasure trove of volunteer testimonials and ideas for improvement. That way, JA staff will be even more responsive and can further improve programming.  

Relying on technology, rather than manual emails and phone calls, will save staff hours for every event they run. Given that there are several thousand events each year, the efficiency translates to an enormous impact. Staff can then focus more on building relationships and running exceptional events that make a lasting impression on students, educators, and volunteers. 

The new, one-stop-shop portal aims to improve the volunteer experience, leading to improved volunteer recruitment and retention. As Thodupunoori says, “This feeds into our comprehensive growth strategy, yielding advantages across all areas.”

Streamlining grant management

Jumping between spreadsheets, not to mention multiple grant-tracking and financial environments, has created a disjointed grant management process within JA. It made sense, then, to rebuild grant management as one of the first stages of Level Up, according to Thodupunoori.

The new platform, built on Dynamics 365 Sales, manages grants end-to-end. It will integrate with third party research tools and provide a place to organize the pursuit of grants. Grant opportunities are tracked by stages; they also include notes and linked emails from Microsoft Outlook so an opportunity’s status is never a mystery. 

Once grants are awarded, the solution tracks action items and disbursement. Wipfli is building out the system to handle JA’s complex funding reality, where a grant could go to just the national organization or to dozens of areas. 

Each area will be able to see their responsibilities and next steps for gifts. Staff won’t have to manually check in or schedule status meetings, resulting in less busy work—and ensuring greater follow-through, faster. Meanwhile, the national office can see the nonprofit’s overall funding landscape at a glance: the stages of all grants, timelines, trends in funding, donor profiles and history, and more.

All that information flows into Microsoft Fabric, the AI-powered data estate. From there, Microsoft Power BI transforms the data into easy-to-digest visualizations. The integrated systems enable JA to pull reports for funders within minutes—something that would take hours, if not days, to do manually. As a result, JA will be more responsive to supporters, leading to deeper relationships with its donor community.

The improvements JA and Wipfli are building add momentum to the overall JA Level Up project. Future plans include overhauling fundraising management and program management, making them more efficient and effective through technology.

“We’re strategically enabling collaboration, fostering community development, enhancing automation, and reducing manual work, all with the aim of optimizing operational efficiencies to advance our mission effectively,” Thodupunoori says. “Through the strategic use of technology and data, we’re scaling to meet global needs and become truly one Junior Achievement.”

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