How INvets serves those who served their country 

Our military veterans have all made an incredible sacrifice. And once they’ve finished that stage in their lives and careers, the least their communities can do is assist them in the transition to civilian life and work. 

That’s the mission that drives INvets, an Indiana-based nonprofit organization that works to bring veterans back to the state after they exit the military to settle and find the right job. Founded by veterans, INvets’ model connects employees to local Indiana employers who are seeking veterans for their workforce. 

To do this, INvets has built a career and community portal to support veteran job seekers on their website. The portal is critical to the success of their operations—which is why they’re using Pendo to optimize it.

Understanding the path to user success 

INvets began using Pendo to better understand how veteran users engage with their portal and learn from their in-app experience. Right away, Pendo analytics data showed that INVets was struggling to get veterans to come back to the portal after their initial sign up. This was a problem, because they saw a strong correlation between people who were heavily engaged in the portal and those who ended up securing jobs and moving to Indiana. 

“Pendo helped us identify a month-long time window where we needed to really focus on engagement and retention after veterans sign up for our member services,” said Simon Andrews, owner of Hatchet Consulting, a technology and marketing partner for INvets. Strategically, these insights helped the INvets team prioritize and craft a first-month strategy to bring those users further along the employment-seeking journey and drive deeper engagement. 

Building a network of champions

Part of INvets’ strategy has been to leverage successful Indiana transplants to evangelize the services it provides among their fellow veterans. Here again, Pendo’s usage data has proven crucial. “We now have visibility into who our superusers are versus those who aren’t using [our platform],” Andrews explained. “We’ve been able to segment our database of users and target people to provide testimonials and referrals, as well as to connect newly hired veterans with more established Indiana veteran community members who can help ease their transition.”

To drive this engagement and help make these connections, INVets has leveraged Pendo’s In-app Guides for personalized, contextual outreach that happens when and where it’s most relevant—in the app itself. “Communicating in-app with all these different users with different information has been very beneficial for our marketing efforts,” Andrews shared. 

Leveraging data today to secure more funding tomorrow

Using insights and data from Pendo, INVets has not only boosted veteran engagement today—they’re building for a bigger, better tomorrow as an organization. In the pursuit of increasing their funding, they moved beyond reporting only on the number of veterans seeking work and employers seeking workers in their system. They’ve now added data around portal engagement to their reporting, both to support marketing materials and to bolster fundraising in order to secure greater financial backing. “Pendo data has become a key business metric for us and enabled us to lead with data during these conversations,” Simon reinforced.

As a lean and focused nonprofit, INvets has finite technical and marketing resources to utilize. But with Pendo’s data and insights, they’ve been able to direct those resources where it matters most, empowering veterans to find meaningful work as civilians while setting the organization up for greater funding and effectiveness in the future.