Understanding Data to Improve Programs Better Serve Community
- Kendra Stoll
- Apr 18
- 1 min read
Located on the near east side of Indianapolis, Shepherd Community Center helps individuals and families in their neighborhood break the cycle of poverty. The organization’s youth programs include a daycare, a pre-school, a grade school (K-5), afterschool, and summer programs as well as employment programs for middle school and high school students. Shepherd’s adult programs provide education, employment and financial coaching as well as food and housing supports.
The organization collects a substantial amount of data from its neighbors and programs that require the use of different software programs and databases mandated by the United Way and the State of Indiana. The software associated with each of the databases limits the data that can be collected, presents challenges to reporting, and does not communicate with the other software being used. This delays the analysis of data because substantial cleaning and reorganization is needed to make it usable.
The data is extracted monthly and key insights are identified and shared with the staff, senior leadership and the Board to help assess the impact of Shepherd’s programs, improve their programs and operations, and assess and evolve their strategies. Data is also shared with the marketing teams to help convey Shepherd’s impact with donors as well as government agencies and institutional funders. For those with a specific interest, custom reports have been created.
Through our efforts, the organization has seen improved data collection, the quality of the data collected and improved systems and processes used to produce the data.
