Social Impact Project for Data Collection Systems at the Northeast Community Center and The ZONE

How This Works

As part of the TRANSFORM Support Hub, you will learn how to advance your career while getting hands on experience on projects like this one.

Project Description and Impact

For historical context, the challenge of knowing the unduplicated number of households served has not been a number the Northeast Community Center or The ZONE has been able to monitor accurately. This challenge is also due to the various entry-points that people come to us. For example, some people stop by our front office when they are visiting one agency and get referred to another. Referrals occur on site with agency partners, and on site to other community-based partners. The only demographic data we track is for the individuals who join our ZONE housing stability program, but we also help a lot of people connect to resources that we do not stay in touch with beyond the phone transfer, email introduction, or sharing the partner with the individual directly. We hope to explore creative and innovative ways we can better capture the impact of our work, the number of completed referrals, and the communities we are serving (beyond our housing program). We currently have access and pay for Power BI, but do not have team adoption outside of case managers.

Learning Opportunity

This can be an entirely virtual process, however we would also be glad to invite the volunteer(s) to our physical location at the Northeast Community Center. The experteer can learn about the challenges nonprofits face with quantifying impact, how people of different generations interact with technology, and how we as a community center can maintain strong relationships, trust, and support (without overasking for sensitive data in a time of crisis). Of note, we can share how we currently receive demographic data of all students, with our agreement with Spokane Public Schools, because of our funding of youth before/after school programs. We can export this data into Power BI, and Power BI could be our agregate for unduplicated data, or another solution imagined with a team of F5 Volunteers.