Introduction
Taylor Pyles is the founder and executive director of The Blue Ribbon Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to child-abuse awareness and prevention in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
When Taylor founded The Blue Ribbon Project in January of 2015, the organization was very, very small, relying on just Taylor and a couple of volunteers to provide direct assistance to children in foster care. Today, the volunteer base has grown to nearly 70 people. While that growth has been exceptionally meaningful to the community and to Taylor personally, it has presented Taylor with some logistical and organizational challenges.
Challenge
As the number of volunteers increased, Taylor had to implement governance, legal, and ethics policies in order to maintain compliance with Maryland laws and the working relationship with the county’s Department of Social Services. All volunteers with The Blue Ribbon Project must agree to these policies in order to contribute and participate. These new onboarding requirements presented Taylor with several issues:
- Copies of agreements must be distributed to each volunteer, regardless of whether the volunteer intends to participate in only one event or many.
- Each volunteer must sign their own copies of the agreements.
- Signed agreements must be stored in a permanent location.
- Over time, agreements have to be revised, redistributed to volunteers after every update, signed, collected, and, once again, saved in a permanent location.
Solution
Unsure of the best way to proceed, Taylor began searching the internet and Reddit in particular to see what other nonprofits used to stay on top of their agreements. Somewhere in the search, he came across BoldSign and gave it a shot. “It seemed like it was a really good fit for us,” Taylor said.
With BoldSign, he was able to upload PDF copies of unsigned volunteer agreements, place a few fillable fields, and save them as templates, making them ready to distribute for signature at a moment’s notice—all he needed was the volunteer’s email address. “It’s so much easier than everything else,” said Taylor.
Results
The Blue Ribbon Project immediately started saving time with BoldSign. Gone are the days of tracking down volunteers and scheduling in-person meetings to collect signatures. According to Taylor, “There’s so much time that is saved just in that alone, that simple little thing of being able to get these policies out to everybody in a short period of time.”
Now, once an agreement is signed, both the organization and the signer receive the completed document digitally. Plus, the org receives an audit trail with a complete history of the signed document, making all the metadata they could ever need retrievable at any time.
As Taylor and The Blue Ribbon Project continue to implement the capabilities of BoldSign, the more they benefit. “One of the big things that makes my life much, much easier is…you can connect it to your Google Drive.” Every signed document is instantly backed up to the organization’s Google Drive, where a folder is set up for each volunteer. This functionality has become even more important as more volunteers dedicate time to The Blue Ribbon Project. “I didn’t realize how important that would become,” said Taylor.
Another key benefit of BoldSign has been its affordability. As Taylor puts it, “Us being a smaller nonprofit, budget is everything. When we’re spending a lot of money on a product or something like that, that’s less money that’s going to the children that we’re serving.”
As for technical support: “I did have a couple of questions along the way,” Taylor said of the setup process. “And I got a very quick response, and it was very thorough. I’ve got zero complaints.”
