U.S. Soccer Foundation
Smarter Systems, Greater Reach: Scaling Coach Training for Deeper ImpactThe Mission
The U.S. Soccer Foundation transforms children’s lives through the power of soccer. By creating access to safe places to play and evidence-based programs, the Foundation helps children in under-resourced communities reach their full potential, improve their well-being, and lead healthier lives. With over 1 million children engaged annually, more than 800 mini-pitches opened nationwide, and 98% of participants reporting safer communities, the Foundation is breaking down barriers and expanding opportunity.
The Challenge
The U.S. Soccer Foundation faced a pivotal growth challenge: how to expand its programming to reach more children across the country. Their traditional method of training coach-mentors through only in-person events was not scalable nor cost-effective given their team size and resources.
"Originally, when we first started working with Idealist, we were in a place where we were getting ready to scale our programming. For us, a significant driver of our ability to scale is training more coach-mentors. Coach-mentors are the vehicle in which programming can then occur," explained Zach, a team member at U.S. Soccer Foundation.
As the primary drivers of the Foundation’s programs, coach-mentors are essential to delivering impact. To scale effectively, the Foundation needed a more efficient, scalable solution for coach training.
Several years ago, the Foundation had partnered with Idealist Consulting to build a Resource Hub using Salesforce Community Cloud, integrated with Salesforce’s MyTrailhead learning management system. While this solution initially met their needs, two critical challenges emerged:
- Salesforce announced it would deprecate MyTrailhead, prompting an urgent need to migrate.
- Feedback from coach-mentors revealed that MyTrailhead wasn’t delivering an intuitive or engaging learning experience.
"My Trailhead was designed as more of a knowledge base where you could have all of these standalone content pieces, but it was difficult for our users to navigate to the right place, or easily watch a training start to finish without a lot of clicking," Zach noted.
To continue scaling their impact, the Foundation needed a robust, industry-standard LMS that could integrate with Salesforce while offering a more accessible user experience. This required not just a platform switch, but a complete overhaul - from selecting a new system and migrating content to redesigning workflows and improving data integrity for thousands of coach-mentors.
The Solution
Idealist Consulting developed a holistic migration and transformation strategy that extended far beyond a simple platform switch. Their approach addressed immediate technical needs and laid a strong foundation for long-term scalability.
The project began with a comprehensive needs assessment. Idealist delivered a detailed report that explored multiple pathways forward and served as a roadmap for the Foundation’s RFP process.
With Idealist's support and partnership, the Foundation evaluated five different LMS options. The consulting team facilitated vendor interviews and guided the selection process. Ultimately, the Foundation chose Absorb LMS, which offered the best fit for user experience, integration capabilities, and content flexibility.
Rather than taking a lift-and-shift approach, Idealist and the Foundation used this opportunity to improve the Foundation’s digital ecosystem:
Customized Integration Architecture
The new system enables bidirectional data flow between Absorb LMS and Salesforce. Course completions and certifications automatically sync back to Salesforce, empowering real-time reporting and program management.
Experience Cloud Transformation
The team rebuilt an Experience Cloud portal for program administrators, aligning its design and function with the new LMS. To support the transition to Absorb LMS, the team also shifted all coach-mentor logins to the new platform and refined the portal’s look and feel to ensure a cohesive and intuitive user experience across platforms.
FormAssembly Optimization
Our team worked with the Foundation to update FormAssembly forms, streamline coach registration, and ensure consistent data capture across all programs, improving both user experience and back-end efficiency.
Duplicate Management
To address the common challenge of duplicate records, the Idealist Consulting team implemented sophisticated concatenation formulas based on coach names, birthdates, and email addresses, creating a proactive strategy to minimize the creation of duplicates.
The Result
Launched in January 2025, the new Learning Lab has improved the Foundation’s approach to coach training, solving near-term platform challenges while unlocking new possibilities for impact and growth. Throughout the process, Idealist collaborated closely with the Foundation, providing technical expertise and strategic guidance grounded in a deep understanding of the organization’s mission and goals.
Improved User Experience
Coach-mentors now engage with a more intuitive and streamlined learning journey. The platform minimizes unnecessary clicks and focuses on ease of access.
"I think from a coach-mentor perspective, it's a better product that they're interacting with," Zach shared.
Feedback from users has echoed this sentiment: the platform’s modern look and feel has been well received, and the team has noted a drop in support requests - a strong signal that the improved backend and interface are working smoothly.
Administrative Efficiency
The project dramatically streamlined data collection and management across different programs. Program administrators now work with consistent data structures regardless of which program a coach-mentor participates in, simplifying reporting and program management.
"From an administrative perspective, the registration and data collection processes have really improved, and there's a lot more consistency across all the different ways and different programs that coach-mentors engage with the Foundation," noted Zach.
The new system has also significantly reduced issues with duplicate records, especially when paired with updated matching logic. This means the team spends far less time cleaning up Salesforce data. Additionally, coach-mentors can now access content from multiple programs through a single login - a major upgrade from the previous system. These capabilities also make it easier to deliver education and training materials not just to coaches, but to trainers and facilitators as well.
Strategic Positioning for Growth
The upgraded platform sets the stage for future expansion, including engaging new audiences like families and parents with educational content.
"The biggest benefit is just strategically where this positions us," explained Zach.
Enhanced Content Creation Capabilities
The Foundation’s team can now produce and organize new training content quickly and effectively, keeping pace with evolving program needs.
"The ability to create new content and upload it to the LMS and organize content in a more functional way is also a huge improvement versus what we had in MyTrailhead," Zach added.
Mission Impact and Fundraising Success
The platform upgrade has already boosted the Foundation’s credibility with partners and funders, strengthening its case for investment and collaboration.
"I think that our Learning Lab is an asset... It’s helped us with some recent fundraising... that's already paid dividends," Zach noted.
Expansion of Diversity Initiatives
The platform aims to enable the Foundation to scale efforts around diversity and inclusion, particularly by making it easier to train more women coach-mentors—a key lever for increasing girls' participation in soccer. By improving operational efficiency and functionality, the new system frees up staff time for women-specific recruitment efforts and offers stronger training resources for newly recruited coaches.
By transforming their learning infrastructure with Idealist Consulting’s partnership, the U.S. Soccer Foundation has built a scalable, mission-aligned platform for growth. What began as a necessary technical migration has evolved into a powerful enabler of expanded reach, enhanced training, and deeper impact.
When you talk about reaching kids at scale, in different ways... those are the things that only technology can solve for when we're talking about a small team of 30-40 people at the U.S. Soccer Foundation.
