Case Study
The College Funding Coach exists to solve one of the most stressful financial challenges American families face: paying for college without derailing their financial future. Founded by Brock Jolly with the mission to help parents navigate the complex, often opaque world of financial aid and college savings, the organization has grown from a small advisory practice in the Washington, DC area into a national network of dozens of certified coaches, running workshops, webinars, and one-on-one consultations for families across the country. Yoko Co has been their web partner since 2010.
Yoko Co has supported the organization’s growth by building a solid foundation upon which new features, functions, and front-ends could be built modularly. Meaning that over the course of over a decade, while the site has gone through multiple updates to the front end, it’s never required a from-scratch rebuild. Through this tenure, several critical features were built into the site, including:
- A custom Advisor Directory with geographic and categorical search and filtering
- Integration with Hubspot and development of automated workflows to help provide prompt follow ups and next steps to prospects
- Calendar integration enabling prospects to quickly schedule meetings with either their local Coach, or a Coach of their choosing
- Eventbrite integration, enabling coaches to easily leverage the site to market workshops, and capture registrants through the CFC or Eventbrite sites into the CRM
- Zoom integration, a critical pivot through COVID to enable parents to continue the workshops that would have traditionally occurred in person, online
- Enabling users to access webinars and workshops on demand through registration
- Created an internal Advisor portal for internal communications and storage of common assets, logos, signage designs, handouts, and more
- Built in multiple calculators, including:
- an EFC/SAI Calculator to help parents discover their possible contributions to college costs
- 529 Calculator with State Tax and Fee comparisons
- A College Savings Estimator
- A “Find a 529 Plan” search tool
- Configured Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and other analytics tools to provide optimal reporting of key activities
Over time The College Funding Coach's mission has only become more important and impactful. College costs continue to soar, and many parents, and students, are questioning the affordability, and the return, of attendance and various degrees.
The College Funding Coaches continue to to a bastion of expertise in this decision making journey, and use their website to serve parents, coaches, educators, and media through their podcast, blog, on-demand webinar library, video catalog, workshops and events calendar, and a national advisor directory.
- Built and scaled a custom Advisors Directory from simple pages with a headshot and bio to full-featured network directory with filtering by state, language, and specialty, proximity-based search, and related content integration
- Developed and maintains multiple interactive financial planning tools for families, including EFC/SAI Calculator, College Money Report, College Savings Estimator, and 529 tools
- Implemented SSO between WordPress and TalentLMS to unify the advisor knowledge portal login experience
- Integrated HubSpot throughout for lead distribution, advisor-level appointment tracking, and event management workflows
In-person and online workshops are available for search and registration, connecting prospective students and their families with the resources they need.
Embedded calculators allow users to quickly make projections and decisions about planning and saving for college.
