How CFF's Investment in Measuring Impact Supports The Advancement Of Their Mission
Read how Children and Families First worked with Tech Impact's strategy experts to develop a roadmap for aligning their operations, program goals, technology, and staff capacity.
Children and Families First (CFF) has long served Delaware’s diverse communities by providing a wide breadth of programs designed to build diverse, healthy, and resilient communities where all children and families can thrive.
With over 400 staff members spread across the state and across programs, CFF is a complex organization with a multitude of services, funding sources, and data systems, and a host of different data needs. Leadership at the organization considered itself to be a data-driven organization, but also acknowledged that they were collecting so much data that they were struggling to find effective and efficient ways to use the information to tell the story of what the organization does.
After completing an organizational-wide Strategic Plan in 2023 that highlighted the need for leveraging technology and data to meet its goals, the leadership team at CFF approached Tech Impact for help. “We were looking to answer more specific questions around the vast amounts of data we collect. How could we streamline our data collection and analysis so to make it more meaningful and demonstrate impact? How could we create benchmarks that help us better assess our programs? How could we create a common set of metrics to collect across programs and compare? We knew what our end goal was, but weren’t sure how to make it happen.” said Kirsten Olson, CEO at Children & Families First.
The CFF team started phase one of their social impact project with stakeholder mapping – a process that helps identify who needs to be a part of the project, what their data needs are, and what systems or processes they are currently using to collect and analyze data. After more than 15 interviews with staff members from various roles and levels, the Tech Impact team began painting a better picture of CFF’s current environment, which then helped them create a roadmap to reach their overarching data goals. Tech Impact’s conclusion for a deliverable that answers CFF’s needs? A dashboard that helps align and illustrate the organization’s program and operational data across the organization, while giving space to include individual program and operational information that might differ from other departments.
As CFF prepares for the second phase of their project, they will collaborate with Tech Impact to create and build a dashboard that will help the CFF team set benchmarks, collect and compare the right data sets, and roll it up to organizational wide benchmarks and goals. “We have amazingly talented staff who understand the importance of collecting data, and we’re now at a place where we can elevate our data collection and use. We have staff buy-in and the resources to make it happen – I am excited to launch the second phase of this project and show our teams how we can make better decisions drive program quality by using the data we are already collecting.”
To Kirsten and her team, this kind of technology investment will catapult their current data use into sustainable and actionable information. “For me, we are all doing this work because we are mission-driven and trying to help the people we serve in concrete and measurable ways. For us to ensure that we are actually delivering on our mission and to help us improve, the data and the analysis are crucial.”