Following the youth journey

It all started when…

Digital NEST is a nonprofit in Salinas, California, that gives young people a path into tech careers. I know it from the inside — I was a member there, and later an instructor.

That’s why the research was my idea, not an assignment. I proposed investigating whether there were specific points in the member journey where people hit friction. Leadership reviewed the proposal, approved it, and brought me on to run it. About a month, start to finish.

The approach

I built a journey map of how members experience joining Digital NEST and progressing through it, then pressure-tested it with five interviews — youth members and staff. Being a former member and instructor made access easy: people I already knew, a journey I’d personally walked.

I organized findings into three stages: Entry, Engagement, Progression.

The number that anchored everything

Entry. Between May and November 2025, 17 new adult members joined. Five completed the mandatory onboarding training.

That’s not a vibe from an interview — it’s a hard data point, and it reframed the entry problem from “how do we market better” to “people are getting in the door and then stalling before they’ve really started.” Around it, the interviews filled in texture: new members hesitated to show up in person at all, either from shyness or an assumption that the NEST had nothing for someone not already into tech. And 47% of new members had heard about the NEST through someone they knew — word of mouth was doing most of the recruiting.

Engagement. Attendance conflicts were mostly life circumstances — jobs, family — not a scheduling flaw the org could design away. More telling: members felt it was on them to reach out when they were struggling. That quietly disadvantages the students least likely to self-advocate.

Progression. There was no shared understanding of why people join — career, community, fun, volunteer hours — so the org couldn’t tell whether it was delivering. And members felt “out of the loop” once a season ended: a communication gap, not a caring gap.

The recommendations, scoped for who has to run them

Five pilots, deliberately kept to near-zero resource cost, because a nonprofit won’t adopt anything expensive:

1. More reminders for the mandatory training — in class and by email.
2. Refer-a-Friend — formalize the 47% word-of-mouth that’s already happening.
3. Check-In — shift the burden of reaching out from member to instructor, via a light weekly touch.
4. Encouraging Understanding — a short goals form at season start, so programming can flex to why people are actually there.
5. End of Season Push — a coordinated, site-wide effort to communicate next steps as a season closes, carried into the off-season by email and social media.

I also left something out. I found a genuine pain point around the age limits the org places on members — but it read as one sharp problem for a narrow slice of users, not something generalizable. Putting it in the main report would have overweighted it. Knowing what not to report is part of the deliverable.

The outcome

Digital NEST has since put a regular newsletter and steady social media presence in place for member communication — which is what “End of Season Push” recommended: proactive, off-season contact through exactly those channels. I can’t claim sole credit for an organizational change, but the recommendation and the change line up directly. Leadership’s response to the set overall was enthusiastic.

What this revealed about how I think

The strongest part of this study was a single ratio — 5 of 17 — because it turned a fuzzy retention worry into a specific, checkable failure. Good research finds the number that changes the question.

And recommendations aren’t wishes. Every one of these five was designed around the fact that the people implementing them are a small nonprofit staff with no spare hours. A great idea that no one can execute isn’t a great recommendation.