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At our 2010 Users Conference last June, I facilitated a panel titled “Data by Design”. The aim of the session was to expose attendees to a wide variety of reports in AWARDS and to provide them with the opportunity to hear from several of our clients who use various reporting features in AWARDS rigorously to support agency growth and health.
One of my panelists was Larry Grubler, CEO of Transitional Services of New York, Inc., an organization based in Queens, NY that provides a variety of mental health services to the community. In his role as CEO, Larry does a lot of fundraising and advocacy work, and because of that he talks to politicians regularly. In his presentation at the conference, he spoke about the importance of being able to look at data via zip code, and how, using the demographics report in AWARDS, he is able to build reports that tell him all sorts of things about the population his agency serves by zip code—race, income, education levels, types of mental illness, entitlements, etc. With that kind of data at his fingertips, he is well equipped to advocate for the needs of his client community—with numbers to back up ideas.
I was struck by this because the reporting example Larry gave is in fact quite simple. There are no gymnastics needed to get these numbers, and running these reports takes a minute or less if you are familiar with AWARDS. Yet the result—good data in, good data out—is a powerful and effective tool that you can use to advocate for those who need it most. Laura Marshall, Client Services Division |
