Momentum Episode 33:
Education Meets Automation: How Upward Bound Solved Onboarding with AI Agents

What would you do if your student program suddenly lost its key staff right before onboarding season with federal requirements on the line? On today's episode, we talked to Kevin Todd, program director of Trio Upwardbound in St. Louis, Missouri, who faced exactly that and turned to AI for the solution. With Jotform presentation agents, Kevin transformed a major staffing crisis into a fully automated onboarding system, helping students and parents self-enroll without missing a step. From saving 12 plus hours of manual work to meeting every program requirement, Kevin's story shows how the right tech at the right time can keep a mission moving forward even under pressure. Welcome to Momentum, a podcast by Jotform where we talk about the technology, productivity tips, insights, and best practices that help us move forward in business and in life. Let's get started.

Thank you so much for joining the show, Kevin. It's such a pleasure to have you on. I'm really excited to hear all about Trio and Upwardbound and how you're using Jotform.

I'm very happy to be here. I appreciate the opportunity. It really is an honor. Honestly, I've been using Jotform for a long time, probably about 8 years or so.

About 8 years or so. It really is an honor that you guys somehow found me. I believe Chris was the first one to reach out. He did a very nice write up for the case study and then he thought I'd be good on the podcast. And the rest is history. Now you're here.

I appreciate Chris. Let's just start at the beginning. Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what your role is at TRIO Upwardbound?

I am Kevin Todd. I'm the director of the Trio Upwardbound program at the Higher Education Consortium of Metropolitan St. Louis.

For those who aren't familiar, do you want to tell us what exactly Trio Upwardbound is and what kind of support it provides for students?

Sure. Trio Upwardbound is a federally funded pre-college program. We work with rising ninth graders through rising 12th graders. In the summer, we have a summer academy, and during the academic year, we work with the same group. We try to keep them from falling below a 2.6 GPA. We're talking about students who are low-income, first generation, meaning parents don't have a four-year degree. We work with them with tutoring in all core academic areas including ELA, math, science, and even foreign language.

That's kind of who we are.

I remember when I was in high school, I did something very similar. It was a nice prep for college. Do you actually have them take some college courses while they're still in high school?

We do. I also work as an adjunct at our local community college, St. Louis Community College, where we work with them on a program called Smart Start. It's one college credit, but they can do that. We also encourage them and sometimes pay for students to have college coursework before they graduate, which helps them be more debt-free. It also doubles as college readiness because they're getting exposed to college-level coursework while in high school. We've had several students graduate and a couple on pace to graduate with both their high school diploma and a two-year associate's degree.

That's incredible, finishing your two-year before you're even out of high school. I wish I had seen that when I was in high school; it would have saved some money.

It also removes the stigma of college being scary. You realize it's kind of similar to high school courses.

Absolutely. It's somewhat of a handholding in the beginning portion, but the kids that graduate with the two-year degree are actually on the campus of the community college. They still get full access to their high school, can participate in sports and extracurricular activities, so they don't feel abandoned but are in class with ordinary college-level kids. It helps eliminate that stigma.

Two things: college is scary, and over the last few years, people don't want to go to community colleges if the education isn't as valuable or rigorous. What most people don't know is that many professors at those colleges are adjuncts working at other universities, so they're still very rigorous.

I was a community college student before transferring to a university. It was probably even more valuable, especially for hands-on stuff. I'm a big supporter of community colleges and saved a lot of money.

Can you explain the role that the Higher Education Consortium of St. Louis plays in supporting Upwardbound?

Most TRIO programs are located on college campuses. We're one of the few sponsored by a nonprofit. The Higher Education Consortium, or HEC, is our sponsor. They wrote the grant for our program and sponsor my Upwardbound program, as well as a talent search and an educational opportunity center serving adults in our office. So they're our sponsors rather than us being on a university campus.

Switching gears, what led you to look for a new solution for onboarding students?

I had a conversation with my coworker after the article Chris did. I had two employees down, like a coach losing two key players before a big game. One has a recurring illness that sometimes keeps her from working consistently, and the other was dealing with a family illness. Both were home, but the job still had to be done because the clock was ticking. We had to recruit and onboard students properly at the same time.

So you were down Steph Curry and Draymond Green right before the playoffs?

Yes, both needed someone to jump in. That's when you discovered the AI side of Jotform.

I am a very God-fearing person, and in the Christian world, AI is often seen as the devil, so I was hesitant. But when your back is against the wall, you ask yourself what to do. I started watching videos about AI agents from Jotform and YouTubing it. I decided to delve in, even though I had never used ChatGPT before. I was amazed at what could be done with AI agents through Jotform. It was phenomenal and mind-blowing.

There's definitely a stigma associated with AI, but it's meant to be a tool to make life easier, not take over. It helps you navigate tasks more cleanly without hitting the waves too hard.

Once I realized that, I fully embraced AI. Now I can't stop talking about it. Were you using Jotform forms for onboarding before that?

Yes, we were using forms for onboarding but hadn't incorporated AI agents. I've been using Jotform since around 2018. We went from paper applications to using Jotform completely. Our application is very lengthy with many moving parts, so we divided it to make it less cumbersome. Students fill out what they know in the classroom, and the rest is onboarding done by parents.

If you send an application home to a 14-year-old, it probably won't come back. When parents see an eight-page application, they might refuse to do it. Having a person walk them through it made the process a lot easier. So the student submits interest, and then mom or dad does the onboarding.

The form has many parts including student and parent demographics, income charts, citizenship, health questions for field trips, essays, and more. We use form logic to show certain parts to students and others to parents. We use save for later so students fill out what they know and save it. Then they send a link to me and their parents to complete the rest. Half the time, it didn't get back, so we had to do onboarding with a person to walk them through the rest.

The form itself isn't difficult, but because it's so much, it can be overwhelming. Parents often don't want to do it, but having someone hold their hand makes it more palatable.

Are you using Jotform to submit that information for grants?

Yes, the demographic data is used for the grant, including low income, first generation, ethnicity, and gender. The Department of Education uses this data to know who we're serving and funding distribution. Information about schools and demographics is also used for the grant.

It's great to hear nonprofits using Jotform to help with that process. Many nonprofits don't realize they can get grant money, and Jotform streamlines that process.

We use a platform called Blooming, which has a bot form based on Jotform. Our students complete applications there, which directly affects the grant data. This helps us get prior experience points and other funding-related data.

I love hearing that Jotform helps smaller companies and nonprofits doing good work out in the world. It makes me feel better about what we're doing.

You should feel very proud of the work you do. Jotform Enterprise and even the bronze level gave a lot of features at no extra charge. AI agents came along without a price increase, which is amazing. You may be for-profit, but you help the little guy, which helped us scale.

The nonprofit discount has always been in place at Jotform since I started. Our CEO implemented it from the beginning, which makes me proud.

When your two right-hand women went down, how did you implement presentation agents with your current form?

I got creative because the Jotform was already in existence. I created a presentation, trained the agent, and used a widget to embed the presentation agent in the application form. So when you open the application, the first thing you see is the presentation agent.

Since my second right hand couldn't go into the classroom, I spoke to the principal who let me talk to a counselor. I sent the application link to the counselor, who distributed it to teachers. They could play the presentation agent in the classroom like a YouTube video, and kids could hear about Upwardbound.

I created a presentation that looked like my adviser who normally goes out. She loved it, and the kids were able to hear it. After that, rising ninth graders could complete the application easily.

The counselor gets notified when an application is submitted and can call parents to say they have a notification to do onboarding. When parents open the onboarding form, there's a presentation explaining Upwardbound, just like the right hand would do if calling them.

The first two submissions were from parents who didn't speak English as a first language, which proved the system worked well. We had a staff meeting recently and received several more onboarding applications even while on vacation, with no recruiting happening. People are doing onboarding at odd times when we're not available, which is a huge benefit.

AI helps us do more with less, alleviating late nights and vacation work.

Other than this, I haven't done any work-related tasks. It's really nice not to be so time-sensitive. It has truly revolutionized recruiting for us, making it much easier.

Now both right hands are free to do other things. Most questions are answered in the presentation. We've had a couple of glitches like schools missing from the list, but those are easily fixed.

Using AI frees up time to be more hands-on with students. AI gets a stigma of removing the human element, but here it allows more one-on-one time with students instead of paperwork.

We trained an AI agent called Mr. Wright to help students learn to write. He can't write paragraphs but helps with brainstorming, spell check, grammar, sentence structure, and logical flow. We teach students to use AI responsibly.

The students loved it and were engaged. I hope to gather data on its impact this fall. One grant objective is proficiency in both ELA and math, so we're working on that.

AI is here to stay, so teaching students to use it responsibly is important. Hopefully, we can talk more about this later.

Did you face any technical or adoption challenges getting your AI agents working well for students and parents?

None of the parents reported tech issues except for missing schools in the dropdown, which I fixed. On my end, there was a learning curve, but it was simpler than expected. No real tech issues.

When training the AI, I used our website, documents, and an API from College Scorecard to train it on universities in our consortium, costs, and contacts for help. I also trained it on our Saturday academy dates.

I mostly used websites, documents, and the API for training. This gives the agent a lot of information that would take a person years to learn.

Naming the personality and telling the AI the audience is high school students helps keep language appropriate and accessible. I use my personal assistant agent to simplify language for ninth graders before putting it into the presentation agent.

I was really apprehensive about AI at first, but now I'm all in. I still avoid putting personal information online but otherwise embrace it.

I had a similar journey of hesitation but found AI opens many avenues and saves time on tedious tasks. For example, I used ChatGPT to draft questions based on the case study and then tweaked them.

When you sent me that email, the Gmail agent replied, and I felt weird but it's a timesaver. It's like robots talking back and forth while we're behind the scenes like the Wizard of Oz.

When your two right hands went down, what was the outcome of putting those presentations together during that critical period?

Miss Jabar and Miss Hill are my two right hands. When they went down, we still needed to recruit about 10 kids. Using the presentation agent in classrooms helped us get all 10 kids. The link was shared beyond the classroom, bringing kids from other schools we didn't recruit at.

We met and even exceeded our numbers. New people are applying now for the current APR. All students were onboarded, with only a couple needing reminder calls.

Both ladies could handle their personal matters without pressure. They felt supported and valued. The AI agent handled tasks, allowing them to focus where humans are needed. The outcome was totally positive with no downsides except the learning curve.

People are irreplaceable, but AI helps prevent them from being bogged down in paperwork, letting them focus on what really matters.

What feedback have you gotten from students, parents, and teachers?

Feedback from the two right hands was very good. My boss loves it. Parents found it easy to use. Teachers didn't have to do presentations and found it easy. One teacher shared the link with others, which I want to follow up on for more data. Overall feedback is ease of use and simplicity.

Is it set up in different languages for English as a second language?

No, it was totally in English. But since agents can speak other languages, we plan to add Spanish and Arabic once onboarding is complete.

It sounds like you've just scratched the surface and the sky's the limit.

The case study mentioned you cut a couple of programs. Can you elaborate?

We cut two educational programs we were using for assessments, one for ACT prep and another for financial literacy and robotics. Using AI agents, especially for assessments, we can create our own quizzes. We have math teachers ensuring accuracy before release.

Mr. Wright, the AI agent, throws quiz-like questions during conversations to test students. Based on this, we eliminated those two programs, saving about $11,000, which we used to purchase in a box.

We use a learning platform called Canvas where agents can be embedded to answer questions, help students move through modules, and keep track of college readiness tasks. AI agents replaced those programs.

You have no idea what you did. Sometimes blessings come in disguise. If they hadn't gotten sick, I wouldn't have discovered this. One staff member created a teacher assistant AI for each teacher to help with tasks like lesson planning.

Instead of logging into Blooming to find student info, teachers can ask their AI assistant for student names, contacts, GPAs, and tutoring lists. This is why we chose Enterprise for unlimited agents.

Every teacher has their own AI assistant to help design classrooms and lesson plans. The possibilities are virtually endless.

You were hesitant about AI at first. What advice would you give nonprofits hesitant to use AI?

Hesitation about putting personal identifiable information into AI is well-founded. But using AI for other tasks like creating flyers saves hours. You don't have to do it yourself or pay desktop publishers.

You save time and avoid errors from printers. If you have someone in your office doing it, AI can help. So, be hesitant about personal info but embrace AI for other tasks.

Jotform Enterprise has its own server, providing more privacy than public AI platforms. Try AI and don't deny yourself the wonderful ways to use it responsibly to make life easier.

How can people get involved with Upwardbound or help out?

Our website is hcstl.org. You can find Upwardbound and our other two TRIO programs there. You can read about HEC, apply if you're a good fit and in the St. Louis area, especially if you attend St. Louis public schools.

Adults 19 or older looking to go back to college can apply to the Educational Opportunity Centers program. Talent Search is similar but offers different scheduling options. All three programs are on the website.

Thank you for coming on. Hopefully, other nonprofits, especially in education, can learn from this conversation. It's been a pleasure having you.

The pleasure is all mine. Thank you for having me.