For the past 66 years, Chick-fil-A has built a foundational commitment to service – service to their customers, service to their franchised Restaurant Operators and their Team Members, and service to communities all over the United States.

To Chick-fil-A, service goes beyond the restaurant doors – They serve communities through volunteerism and giving, and make a commitment to take care of the people who take care of their communities. Their philanthropic giving reinforces that commitment to service by helping children and families in need. This is what makes Chick-fil-A so great.

Chick-fil-A Leader Academy is a fresh approach to leadership development and empowers young people to truly make a difference.

In 2013, Chick-fil-A Leader Academy launched in more than 20 high schools across the metro Atlanta area. Chick-fil-A Leader Academy involves 30 students per school in a seven-month curriculum, with an opportunity for the entire student body to get involved in the Impact Project portion. As of 2016, Chick-fil-A Leader Academy serves over 600 schools and has 20,000 users on the platform.

Whiteboard engaged ADDO in a project to plan, design, develop, and deploy a web application to support the in-classroom and out-of-classroom experiences for Chick-fil-A Leader Academy. The application serves as the central hub of content distribution and communication between the ADDO administrative team and the volunteer teachers and students at participating schools.

The project started with consultation on the social and technological implications of the application itself. Whiteboard sat across the table from ADDO and asked questions like, “of all of the students who are in the program, how many will have smart phones?” and “is it wise to allow students to see each others’ progress? What about letting students from different schools communicate?”

Perhaps the most important revelation in the early stages was the definition of user scenarios.

On one hand, we have a student who uses the application to re-watch a video and review some curriculum from a past session. On the other hand, we have a teacher who presents the curriculum in a live classroom environment. The application should support both, and do it with the same level of excellence in each scenario.

From these initial planning, consulting, and discovery meetings, we synthesized the needs of the ADDO team into actionable features, and went to work designing and developing the application. With Chick-fil-A Leader Academy, design and development happened simultaneously. In-browser prototyping and multiple iterations allowed the application to naturally adapt to the needs presented to us by ADDO.

Along the way, both ADDO and the development team at Whiteboard uncovered new needs and buried what turned out to be unnecessary features.

Technical Implementation

The platform itself is built on Ruby on Rails with a plethora of open source Ruby Gems, in combination with custom JavaScript and CSS. We deployed through Heroku, and utilize Amazon S3 for asset storage. The security concerns of private or identity-specific information related to students were a major consideration when creating access control flows; many different levels of users needed different levels of access. Architecting the security walls of the application was a primary concern. 

Whiteboard continues to work alongside the Chick-fil-A Leader Academy team. Updates to the platform continue being made that enhance how teachers and students engage the leadership curriculum. Our hope is for students who engage Chick-fil-A Leader Academy will learn how to cast vision and define values that anchor their lives.