Center of Hope Family Services (CHFS) is an innovative social-good agency dedicated to improving the life outcomes of adults, children, and families. CHFS empowers individuals who have often been unsuccessfully served by other systems in the Toledo, Ohio urban and metropolitan areas. Their interventions are designed for a variety of demographics. They serve students who are struggling in school or at home, children and families involved in juvenile justice or child welfare systems, and adults who are at 200 percent of the federal poverty level and have a child support or custody case.

Since its inception, CHFS has been a data-driven organization focused on delivering immediate positive life outcomes. With the wide array of programs available, Dr. Tracee Perryman used to spend a lot of time pulling data from separate systems and manually combining the information. She had the data she needed, but it was very time-consuming to have to speak with ten different departments to pull spreadsheets. In addition to the amount of time required to collect and analyze the data, there was always the chance that something could be lost or be inaccurate.

“It is important for us to ensure data accuracy when we report to our funders and stakeholders,” said Dr. Perryman. “It’s also difficult for me to act as a CEO when I have to spend my time double-checking spreadsheets for errors.”

After meeting with SureImpact CEO Sheri Chaney Jones in 2020, the CHFS leadership team realized there were additional opportunities for using data to increase the efficiency of their programming, improve outcomes for their clients, and increase CHFS’s overall impact in the community. They knew the time was right for implementing SureImpact.

“Center of Hope has a critical mission in our community, so I’m always keen to make sure we have what we need when we need it,” said Dr. Perryman. “I needed a dashboard that enabled me to check on programs at any point in time. Now if funders have questions, or our evaluation team needs access to the data, they can quickly get what they need. No more worrying about mistakes or lost data.”

SureImpact Increases Programming Efficiency

After implementing SureImpact, it is now much easier for CHFS to look at program progress and efficiency because they can measure multiple indicators on the same platform, rather than looking at multiple platforms and Excel spreadsheets. SureImpact has also enabled leadership to proactively look at productivity reports and spot trends before they become a serious problem. Because of this, they have identified areas for improvement in staff performance and put corrective actions in place for certain staff members.

According to Dr. Perryman, “As a result, client participation numbers have increased by at least 5 times since we put the corrective plans in place. SureImpact also enables staff to see where they are performing well, encourages them in those areas, and enables us to celebrate what they are doing well. It also shows me where people need more training and enables us to recruit new staff more effectively.”

SureImpact Improves Client Outcomes

Before implementing SureImpact, CHFS lacked a way to easily view a student’s performance over time. This made it difficult to identify issues such as unexpected declines in their performance or lack of school attendance. SureImpact worked with CHFS to have a dashboard that displayed data from the iReady tutoring software.

Dr. Perryman shared, “SureImpact gives us a dashboard where we can easily view a child’s academic performance over time to see if there is acceleration in their performance or any unexplained declines. SureImpact helps us make sure that everyone is making progress and that we are paying attention to every child, no matter their scores upon entering our programs.”

SureImpact Increases Revenue

“Our annual revenue went up by 50% when we started calculating and sharing our social return on investment in 2020, and our annual revenue has increased steadily ever since,” said Dr. Perryman. “Now that we have SureImpact, we have real-time data that we can share with funders. We can tell them at any point in time how our children are making progress. That means we don’t have to wait for our grant cycle, an annual cycle, to make that case. We can really hone in on helping schools meet their goals and relating it to their report card data and focusing on the kids that have the most need. We can also now speak with even more specificity as to why the dollars funders are investing in our programs will make a difference.”