Editor’s note: This article initially appeared in Crain’s Detroit Business
By Sherri Welch, Crain’s Detroit Business
United Way for Southeastern Michigan is offering its newly developed research and data analysis services to five local nonprofits on a pilot basis in a bid to begin helping the sector better leverage data.
The pilot comes amid rising national interest in measuring the impact of nonprofit programs.
Launched over the past year, the new department is helping to put metrics behind United Way’s own programs and large goals, like turning around high schools, so it can better communicate the impact they are having.
“This is ensuring we have a mechanism to provide support to our internal organization on the work we’re doing,” said Donna Satterfield, a former IBM executive who joined United Way as vice president of community impact six months ago.
It’s also one of the ways United Way is looking to support the nonprofits it funds and works with, offering to them some of the capability it’s developed in-house to strengthen their work, she said.
At the same time, the new research and learning department, which harkens back to United Way’s stronger research focus during the last decade, is elevating United Way’s role as a convenor.
It’s currently surveying residents of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties on their perceptions of their communities and lifestyles through a survey it plans to share with nonprofits it funds and works with as part of a May 9 symposium aimed at sharing best practices around collecting and leveraging data.
The United Way pilot comes just months after the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation announced it would invest more than $5 million over the next few years in a first-of-its-kind nonprofit and innovation center in Detroit to address the lack of a coordinated support system for metro Detroit nonprofits.
In recent years, United Way collected information like the number of people served by a program through employees spread across its community impact teams, Satterfield said.
Former CEO Herman Gray instituted the department before his departure late last year, thinking it would make more sense to pull all those people into one group so they could focus more intently on the work United Way is doing internally and also provide services to other nonprofits, Satterfield said.
United Way is operating on a budget of about $59 million for fiscal 2018. Last year, it had revenue totaling $52.6 million and expenses totaling $55.1 million, according to its audited financials.
It hired Terrence George, former principal of Hamtramck High School and director of pupil services for the district, as director of the new research and learning department to lead a staff of six whose capabilities include computer mapping, statistical analysis, program evaluation, data management and coding.
Pleasant Ridge Mayor Kurt Metzger, who served as United Way’s first-ever research director from 2005-2008, is serving as a research consultant in connection with its new Research and Learning Department.
During that earlier stint at United Way, Metzger, who went on to found Data Driven Detroit after leaving United Way, helped survey thousands of people in the community to identify the most pressing needs that led to United Way’s current focus areas under its community impact model: basic needs, financial stability and educational preparedness.
The new department is now working with all of United Way’s programs, from its 211 health and human services call center to its workforce development efforts, helping to plan, implement and evaluate them.
To take the newly honed expertise to others, United Way conducted a survey with its grantees and 211 referral nonprofits last year to ask what they would like to see United Way help them with, Satterfield said, beyond financial support.
Among other things, nonprofits said they’d like more opportunities to convene and to better understand how to leverage their data.
“Frankly, that’s one of the things we’re all trying to figure out: how do we make the data more impactful?” Satterfield said.
United Way is now providing services around research, data analysis and grant proposal support to five nonprofit partner agencies on a pilot basis at no charge. The agencies include:
United Way plans to take on the requests of additional nonprofits once it’s assisted the first group, Satterfield said, noting some requests are simple and take only a few hours to complete, while others are more robust.
Gleaners’ ability to demonstrate and describe its impact “is valuable to our growth and sustainability,” said Vice President of Programs Rachelle Bonelli in an emailed statement.
“Data gathering and improved communications about impact can only be beneficial to the nonprofit sector overall, and we are looking forward to working with (United Way).”
Many behavioral health nonprofits are currently using data analytics to look at performance metrics, such as cancellation rates, no-show rates, therapist productivity levels in terms of clients served and revenue rates, said Owen Pfaendtner, president and CEO, Macomb Family Services.
Conversely, “we want to look at outcomes to improve the client experience … and how we deliver services to see if there’s things we can improve on.”
Macomb Family Services is operating on a budget of just over $7 million, with 215 employees. It provides behavioral health and substance abuse services and residential services for developmentally disabled adults.
As part of the pilot, United Way has agreed to analyze data on Macomb Family Services’ behavioral mental health clients to see if there are patterns that match up with improved outcomes. ArdentCause L3C is currently helping the nonprofit pull data from its electronic medical records system. Having United Way analyze the data for free is saving it money, Pfaendtner said.
“We don’t typically get funding or resources for this … I don’t even know if there’s grants out there that would provide funding for data analysis.”
Beyond the pilot, United Way is collecting myriad “data points” from tri-county residents through an online survey through April 15. Questions range from asking residents to rank their current community to how important proximity to a library is to them and whether they have a cell phone or checking account.
It plans to combine the feedback, once analyzed, with secondary data from federal, state and other data sources to produce a series of informational pieces. It’s also set to provide highlights of the community report at a May 9 data symposium it’s now organizing with the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions and the Detroit Metropolitan Area Communities Study. This first symposium is aimed at United Way’s 180 grantees and its government, foundation and corporate partners, given limited seating, Vickie Winn, director of public relations for United Way, said.
The push for data on nonprofit impact is picking up across the country.
Among others, United Way for America is pointing to the value of using data to drive impact and other affiliates like United Way of Central Oklahoma have research/data initiatives in place.
The Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University called out the growing push for more data-informed decision making in philanthropy as one of the macro trends affecting the nonprofit sector this year, cautioning that “a request for deep data without funding and adequate organizational capacity can be challenging for some nonprofits.”
It’s not just foundations seeking more information on their grantmaking; nonprofits are looking to both prove and improve their impact, said Kyle Caldwell, executive director of the center.
Technology has lowered the cost to gaining and managing data, while also creating faster ways to analyze and share it, which has provided philanthropy with “powerful tools” to gauge their impact, he said.
But many organizations focusing on some of society’s most vexing social issues still lack the capacity to acquire technology to capture data and the capacity and expertise to interpret it and correlate it to the issues they’re addressing.
“The challenge will be helping organizations be ‘data ready,'” Caldwell said. And that makes the role of data intermediaries vital.
United Way’s Research and Learning Department, Data Driven Detroit and the Johnson Center’s Community Research Institute can help to close the gap of data disparities and make connections between the data collected and the issues nonprofits are tying to solve, Caldwell said.
“They can also help organizations share data across issues, data sources and common solutions that can make data informed decision making more effective and accessible.”