Boys Town Ensures Employees Provide Consistent Experiences to the Communities They Serve Using MadCap Software

The Big Win 

Boys Town is one of the largest nonprofit, nonsectarian child and family care organizations in the United States, touching the lives of more than 4 million people. To ensure consistency and quality services across its youth care programs, the nonprofit relies on MadCap Software to deliver modern training workbooks, manuals and other resources for employees. 

Enhanced Learner Experience: Boys Town is able to deliver employees consistent information, give content a uniform look-and-feel, modernize content structure, and offer print and web options using MadCap Flare together with MadCap Flare Online.

Streamlined Content Delivery: The team is able to create and update workbooks and other content faster by leveraging MadCap Flare features for content reuse, such as topics, variables and snippets.

Easier Collaboration: SMEs can easily review and edit content in MadCap Flare Online that the documentation team has created in MadCap Flare.

Stronger Executive Buy-in: The ability to quickly prototype new projects using MadCap Flare, such as a new safety accreditation website, has led to near immediate buy-in from senior leaders at Boys Town.

Boys Town Ensures Employees Provide Consistent Experiences to the Communities They Serve Using MadCap Software 

In 1917, Boys Town opened its doors to welcome children in need, regardless of race, religion or creed. More than 100 years later, it has grown to become one of the largest nonprofit, nonsectarian child and family care organizations in the United States. Each year, Boys Town provides compassionate, research-proven education, prevention, training, and treatment for behavioral and physical problems in multiple locations throughout the United States—impacting the lives of more than 4 million people and earning Charity Navigator’s highest rating. 

To ensure consistent, quality services across its youth care programs, Boys Town delivers employee training and provides a range of supporting resources, including workbooks and manuals, among others. Today, the nonprofit is turning to MadCap Software to streamline the delivery of this content while enhancing consistency and quality.  

A Call for Consistency and Quality 

At Boys Town, ensuring consistency and quality across youth care operations is a top priority, so the nonprofit onboards employees with two weeks of training at its Nebraska headquarters. For years, Boys Town primarily relied on Microsoft^® Word to produce workbooks, manuals, and other learning aids. However, this led to discrepancies in the materials used for different classes.  

“We would find that someone changed the name of something in one workbook, but it didn’t get changed in other places. So, learners were going through the classes and saying, ‘Wait a minute, in the other class they called it this.’ That was a huge problem,” recalls Ron Hackbart, manager of instructional design at Boys Town. “We also had subject matter experts with varying degrees of proficiency using Word, so formatting would vary from one document to another.” 

Recognizing that the number of documents would only continue to grow, the nonprofit decided it was time to migrate to a new solution. The course workbooks were the most pressing need, but the team wanted software that could scale to meet the large volumes of content being produced for different groups within the organization, such as marketing and documentation. 

“The solution also had to be flexible and support reuse because one workbook version might be 95% the same as another one and simply require a few changes,” Ron explained. “Additionally, we wanted software that was already proven and tested in the market.” After evaluating different vendors, Boys Town selected MadCap Software.  

“MadCap Flare hit a sweet spot for us between complexity and ease of use,” said Brett Brinkmeyer, documentation writer at Boys Town. “The more I learned about MadCap, the more I saw how the company has taken a really valuable authoring tool with Flare and provided a versioning system in the background with MadCap Flare Online. At the same time, MadCap addressed our need for a solution that we could train others to use.”  

Making the Migration 

Boys Town determined that phase one of its MadCap implementation would focus on the student workbooks that accompany the pre-service training courses for new employees. To get started, the team imported the workbook content from Microsoft Word into a MadCap Flare project.  

“MadCap Flare, which has a great import-from-Word feature, did pretty much everything for us,” Brett recalled. “We got one Word document looking about the way we wanted everything to look, and we imported it. Then, working with Flare, we made slight adjustments to the way that it was going to look.” 

The team also received assistance from MadCap Software in setting up the imported content to support Boys Town’s requirements. 

“All of our workbooks need to look the same; they all need to function the same, and there's so much reuse of content,” Brett explains. “With the help of our MadCap rep, we were able to quickly bring them all together in one big project and create different tables of contents for them.” 

Additionally, the Boys Town team developed cascading style sheets (CSS) and page layouts in MadCap Flare that would be applied to all the workbooks for a consistent look.  

“All the CCS properties in MadCap Flare were really easy to set up and use,” Brett said. “MadCap Flare also helped us when one person accidentally imported a Word document with the wrong settings, which led to extra CSS and HTML tags, by making it simple to search for and remove them.” 

Multiple Documents, Unified Experience 

Boys Town has used MadCap Flare to produce some 20 different workbooks that support the organization’s pre-service training. Each has the same format and structure and includes some version of the Boys Town model overview. From there, the workbooks branch out to support training for different roles and responsibilities within the nonprofit. Through the use of topics, variables and snippets, Boys Town is able to facilitate reuse and ensure consistency across these various documents.  

Response to the new workbooks has been positive, Ron says: “The facilitators and teams really like the fact that everything is consistent and unified. Using MadCap Software has really upped our level of professionalism when it comes to our materials.” 

Currently, the workbooks are created as PDFs, which are then printed out and either used in the Nebraska headquarters or shipped to the non-profit’s remote locations. 

“The goal is eventually to have all of the documents that we're printing out to be hosted on our website,” Ron notes. “That way teams at our remote sites can either use them electronically or print them off and use them as needed.” 

Rethinking Approaches to Content 

Following the successful workbook rollout, Boys Town has initiated other projects to modernize its content. One effort is focused on using MadCap Flare to build a safety accreditation website using a combination of resources created internally and provided by Praesidium, an organization that Boys Town works with on meeting some safety standards. “On our safety accreditation site, we’ve been using MadCap Flare to create a booklet where the first section outlines how Boys Town approaches some safety practices,” Brett explains. “We’ll then have a second section that references other documentation we have. Some of those documents will appear on the website while others will be linked to the site.” 

A second initiative is centered around migrating the nonprofit’s manuals to MadCap Flare, so they can be more easily created and updated while maintaining consistency. At the same time, the team is looking at how to take the text-heavy documents and make them more learner-friendly.  

“We want to take those manuals with volumes of text and see if we can express the same content in a more visually appealing way, for instance using bullet points and a table,” Ron explains. “MadCap gives us the flexibility to think creatively about how to display information whether it’s in our manuals or resources like our safety accreditation website.”   

Facilitating Collaboration and Control 

For years, Boys Town’s subject matter experts (SMEs) were responsible for both content creation and formatting of the workbooks and manuals. However, some SMEs were more proficient in using Microsoft Word than others, resulting in markedly different formatting from one document to another. But in adopting MadCap Flare Online along with MadCap Flare, the nonprofit saw an opportunity to separate the responsibilities.  

“We want one person to decide how content is going to look,” Brett explains. “Now, we can send raw content from MadCap Flare into MadCap Flare Online where our SMEs make their edits. They never see the formatting; all they see is the content, and that makes things really simple for us.” 

The SMEs had to be trained on using MadCap Flare Online, but they were able to pick up the skills quickly.  

“We've got buy-in now that our SMEs have seen how quick and easy it is for me to submit a topic to them for review in MadCap Flare Online and then for them to kick it back to me,” Brett observes. 

Going forward, Boys Town plans to take advantage of MadCap Flare Online for version control as well.  

“Currently, we create the output as it’s needed and date the versions as we send them out. But I’ve worked with enterprise content management systems in the past and look forward to using MadCap Flare Online to adopt full version control,” Brett says.  

Changing the Content Delivery Discussion 

Notably, migrating to MadCap Flare and MadCap Flare Online has changed the quality of discussions with senior leaders at Boys Town. A case in point is when Brett presented the idea for the safety accreditation site. 

“The senior leaders can be very particular about how things work and look,” Ron explains. “Brett did a fantastic job pulling together a sample website quickly that he could walk them through and use to answer their questions. What we were delivering to these leaders with MadCap Flare was beyond what they were expecting, and it didn’t take long for them to start asking, ‘Could we do it for this? Could we use it for that?’.”  

“That's the thing,” Brett adds. “Everybody that we've talked to or shown what we've done with MadCap Flare, including how the website would use the same content as the printed PDFs, has had almost immediate buy-in. Getting such positive feedback about the work that Flare does is really, really helpful.” 

Having gained awareness and support from the senior leadership at Boys Town, the team is looking longer term at how to leverage MadCap Software in bringing new content capabilities and experiences to the organization and its employees. 

“The relationship with MadCap Software has been so good,” Ron says. “I'm excited to see what other functionality MadCap is going to come out with, especially with artificial intelligence, and seeing how we can use that more and more in the content that we're creating for Boys Town.”