Founded in 1889, Barnard College is a Liberal Arts College for Women in New York City. In 1965, the Barnard Babysitting Agency was established as a non-profit that provides parents and sitters a safe and reliable way to connect with one another. Nearly half of Barnard College’s 2,400 students sign up at the Barnard Babysitting Agency. The Agency is widely known and respected on campus and in the local community.
The Challenge
Since 1996, the Agency has been using FileMaker to manage jobs, sitters, and parent information. The Agency came to DB Services to integrate their services with their new website to transition many of their processes from paper to the website.
The vision had three parts:
- Allow Sitters to log into the website and see new jobs that are available.
- Automate the parent registration process from paper to online and include real time payment processing.
- Provide parents the ability to post new jobs online at any time.
All of these enhancements position the Agency to be more efficient and effective and grow their services provided to the community and sitters.
The Solution
Barnard had an existing FileMaker solution that was built and maintained by their staff. Leveraging the existing database, we planned out the project in three phases.
Phase I: Upgrade the system to the latest version of FileMaker and place the system in the cloud.
Phase II: Integrate the website with the FileMaker database; Adding a Sitter login to the website to allow the Sitters to view Open Jobs.
Phase III: Add Parent registration to the website that included payment processing and the ability to post new Jobs at any time. Then, we added a dashboard to the FileMaker system to allow the Agency to process parent registration and job requests in FileMaker in real time.
The Results
Prior to the integration, the Agency used to have a binder of jobs in their office that students had to shuffle through to find jobs. Today, the binder is a thing of the past as Sitters can log in online and look up open jobs. Jobs now get more exposure, cutting down on the time it takes to fill them.
Further, with paper forms now electronic, errors like entering the same data twice have been greatly reduced.
Overall, the FileMaker-to-website integration for the Barnard Babysitting Agency has streamlined operations and transitioned the Agency from paper to digital processing.
The student-run Barnard Babysitting Agency is now well-situated to be a success story for the local community for years to come.