First Place for Youth, an Oakland, Calif., nonprofit that helps young people leaving the foster-care system, has seen Big Data turn into big support, even in the tough economy.
In the past eight years, its budget has jumped from $2-million to more than $11-million, boosted by grants from national philanthropies, like the Edna McConnell Clark and Robert Wood Johnson foundations. A key to its success: the charity’s commitment to collecting data to demonstrate results.
First Place reports that roughly 85 percent of young adults live in safe, permanent housing after they leave the organization’s two-year program. By contrast, 65 percent of former foster youth statewide face imminent homelessness when they leave the system.
But while showing results is critical, data is even more important to help the organization get better at what it does, says Sam Cobbs, chief executive of the charity, which provides subsidized housing and employment and education services.
“We can pat ourselves on the back for the 85 percent of the kids we’ve been successful with,” he says. “Or we can dig down deep and think about how we can help that 15 percent that we weren’t successful with.”
The charity’s focus on measurement began in 2006, when the organization decided that to help the young people it serves become self-sufficient, it needed to stop thinking of itself as a housing group and instead use housing as a tool.
Becoming a data-driven organization wasn’t easy—at one point, employee turnover reached 40 percent—but the results have been decisive. The nonprofit has been able to improve success rates, expand significantly, and become an important voice on foster-care policy.
First Place for Youth closely tracks the youths’ progress toward the goals they set for themselves. Case managers and supervisors use the weekly and monthly reports they receive to identify clients who need extra help, and the nonprofit’s leaders use the information to identify issues that affect young people across the organization.
The nonprofit also uses client data to evaluate and compensate employees based on how well they’re meeting performance targets. (See below.)
A lot of nonprofit leaders are reluctant to examine their programs because they’re not sure what they might find, says Jehan Velji, a program officer at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which has awarded more than $2.6-million to First Place since 2008.
“But Sam is not afraid of data,” she says. “He genuinely wants to understand what’s happening so that he can make sure that he and First Place are serving youth as best they can and always striving to improve.”
No Surprises
Rather than, as it did in the past, simply gather data on the final outcomes of its programs—such as whether participants earned their GEDs—the charity now monitors the small steps that young people need to take to achieve their goals.
Today case managers record when students sign up for a GED class, if they attend regularly, and whether they get tutoring. That way, if a client isn’t making progress, case managers can step in to find out what’s holding them back and help them overcome barriers, such as a lack of transportation.
“What we began to understand was that it shouldn’t be a surprise to us at the end of the program that a young person gets his GED or not,” says Mr. Cobbs.
Case managers also ask clients a standard set of questions every three months, in part to identify issues that haven’t come up in weekly sessions. Sometimes the answers help improve results for the young people.
For example, Tanya Goins, a case manager, remembers working with a client who was struggling in school. During a quarterly assessment, she asked him how many people he felt he could turn to in an emergency. He then told her that one of his close friends had recently died. That information allowed Ms. Goins to help the young man find ways to deal with his grief and refocus on his education.
“We noticed, ‘OK, this isn’t a youth who’s not motivated or being lazy,’” she says. “’This is a youth who just recently experienced a loss.”
Finding Patterns
Documenting the information in a central location also makes it easier for another case manager to step in and continue a client relationship if an employee is out sick or leaves the organization, says Connie Handlin, First Place’s Contra Costa County program manager.
Ms. Handlin says that at previous jobs she had to remember vast amounts of information about the caseloads of the people she supervised.
“Things lived in my head,” she says. When she wasn’t in the office, she notes, that data went with her, leaving her colleagues without vital information.
The group can also identify problems that affect many of the young people it serves.
Case in point: Two years ago, while analyzing its data, the organization realized that domestic violence was the number-one reason young mothers failed to meet their goals. Armed with that knowledge, the nonprofit conducted extensive training for all employees to make sure everyone understood the issue and how to help young people in abusive relationships.
Without that data analysis, it would have been difficult to identify the scope of the problem, says Mr. Cobbs.
He says case managers who reported that they were working with young people struggling with abuse, might have been seen as dealing with isolated examples: “You wouldn’t have a sense of the patterns across the organization.”
First Place was able to take on the time-consuming and expensive task of developing data-collection procedures with support from Tipping Point Community, a San Francisco grant maker that has awarded the organization more than $1.8-millon in general operating support since 2005.
At that time, First Place served 500 youths, mostly in Alameda County. Now the organization works with more than 2,000 young people in five counties in the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Los Angeles.
Rebecca Cherin, managing director of programs at Tipping Point, credits that growth to First Place’s emphasis on measurement and evaluation.
“It’s not easy to go into new geographies and convince county government folks that this is a program that they should invest in,” she says. “Because of their results and what they’re able to demonstrate, it makes a very compelling case.”
But while the benefits of measurement are clear now, the transition to being a data-driven organization was grueling. First Place underestimated the time and energy it would take to win employees over to the changes, says Mr. Cobbs.
At the beginning, he says, the organization focused on technical considerations like building the data system and designing reports. But it didn’t spend enough time helping staff members understand how the new data would benefit the young people they served. As a result, he says, employees were just going through the motions.
“Staff were putting the information in in a way that kind of met what we wanted,” says Mr. Cobbs. “But they really had no idea why they were putting the information in and what it was they were getting back.”
Seeking Input
So First Place slowed down its introduction of the new system to focus on employee education. Leaders also gathered a committee of front-line workers, to offer their ideas about what was important to measure and to test future changes to the data system.
“We had to make sure that the staff people saw the data as being relevant to what it was they were doing,” says Mr. Cobbs.
Though First Place got grants from major philanthropies after it got serious about data, groups need to embrace measurement as a way to improve the lives of the people they serve, not because they think it will lead to new support, says Mr. Cobbs.
The time, energy, and tumult it took to create a data-driven culture wouldn’t have been worth it just for the money, he says: “Where I had to be as the CEO, where the leadership team had to be is, ‘What is the right thing for young people?’”
How First Place for Youth Uses Data
Step 1: Collects data on clients who are reaching the age to leave foster care
- Case managers and other charity workers who help young people find jobs and advance their education use a central database to record their clients’ progress.
Step 2: Uses the information to improve programs
- First Place’s data team creates regular reports that show young people’s progress. Employees use the reports to identify clients who need extra help.
- Senior managers look at analysis of data from across the organization to spot common problems clients face and figure out how programs can be strengthened.
- The group uses data on how clients fare to evaluate employees, determine raises, and make budget decisions.
Step 3: Shares results outside the organization
- A full-time employee generates the data reports required by more than 60 government agencies, foundations, and other donors that support the organization.
- The charity’s data analysis is featured in its advocacy, grant proposals, and annual reports.
- First Place provided data to outside researchers who found that the charity’s clients made big strides in their ability to live independently.
