Strut Your Stuff with Everyday Data

Many nonprofits share a common dilemma: the best of what they do—the transformations and healing they help catalyze, their impact on the greater community—can’t be easily measured. This makes it difficult to demonstrate their successes and full worth to funders and board members, who often want the proof of a program’s benefits in the form of cold hard facts. Here’s how one agency uses the data it collects in AWARDS to provide that proof.

A Safe Haven (ASH) in Chicago offers a network of individualized, integrated continuum of care services for the homeless and people in crisis including: supportive housing, treatment, job training, employment, and affordable housing. As usual, data about clients and services is entered into AWARDS as an electronic record. In addition to providing a historical perspective of a client’s case, AWARDS also offers the ability to aggregate data from different programs and cases to provide a comprehensive view of the work that’s being done across the entire agency. Assisted by the ReportBuilder feature, ASH called up data collected over the course of a year by staff from their day-to-day work with clients and turned it into this simple yet informative graphic.  Says Neli Vazquez-Rowland, president of ASH, “This image conveys the hard work of our clients and our staff, in measurable terms that our funders want to see.” She adds, “With AWARDS, we always have quick access to the facts and statistics we need.”

For more about A Safe Haven, click here. If you’d like to learn more about how to use data to demonstrate your agency’s achievements, stay tuned to our FootholdConnect events for free trainings, or contact your Senior Customer Success Manager.