How Campground Powers the State of CA's Corps to Career
The Corps to Career Initiative is a program spearheaded by the CA Volunteers Fund to prepare their College Corps Fellows for jobs. College Corps Fellows are affiliated with 5 campuses: CSU Dominguez Hills, CSU LA, UCLA, CSU Long Beach, and Cal Poly Pomona. Each campus has a team administering the College Corps program. Corps to Career also works with the CA Climate Action Corps.
The program mixes and matches the following elements, much like many career and workforce programs: Career Workshops, Job Opportunities, Employer Partnerships, Resources and Partnerships, Career Coaching, and Career Fairs.
To administer these programmatic elements, Corps to Career needed:
🏡A login-protected hub for Fellows to access resources and events
🫂A directory for Fellows and Employers to browse, filter, and connect
🪪A way for students to update their own data
📊A true CRM, not Google Sheets, to manage metrics and track engagement
🏛Multiple campus partners and programs to manage on the back-end, in one place
Campground provided all of these quickly and seamlessly.
Tina Kim, Deputy Director of the program in its inaugural pilot year, shares some of her insights:
What has been the most valuable aspect of Campground?
Since we’re a new program, we don’t have old systems or protocols. Campground creates a centralized version of our systems to start with. Our five schools are spread out. It’s been hard to see one place for folks to come together. It’s been really helpful to build up intentional habits.
When we share links, we post it to Campground, and then we send them to Campground – because while they’re there, they’ll remember the job board, the other resources. One of the greatest values is having a central location for resources.
What would your alternative have been to Campground?
We explored the alternative of building our own system from scratch by hiring a developer. Quite honestly we didn’t want to use our team’s brain space to build a platform ourselves…the infrastructure was built out. I didn’t have a strong alternative to Campground.
David Silver, Director of Corps to Career:
In your opinion, what’s the greatest value of Campground? What are some of the outcomes and metrics you’ve been able to report on?
What makes Campground so valuable is that you can go to ONE place to get what you need AND that it is helpful for BOTH the employers and service members.
I love that both service members and employers can easily both put up relevant info, update their own easily and look at others (employers or fellows they are interested in based on the info provided) and then reach out to them so easily with a touch of a button “invite to connect”. It is simple to explain and to do.
I also like that we can track the data to find out easily who is utilizing it and for what function to see what is most helpful to build on.
Are you running career or workforce programs and juggling similar elements? Reach out to sruti@campground.fyi to learn more!
