Be sure to check out tomorrow's webinar featuring Boys and Girls Clubs of Newark's Felix Rouse and Mike Sancho discussing their use of ETO Software® to affect social change and gain funding by effectively measuring and reporting outcomes.
Click here for more details. And for some background on Boys and Girls Clubs of Newark, check out this great customer spotlight!
The Boys and Girls Club of Newark (BGCN), in operation for nearly 70 years, has more than 3,300 registered members, and it served over 12,500 youth in 2006 through a combination of outreach activities, after-school programs and summer camps. The mission of the Boys and Girls Club of Newark is to provide opportunities to youth that empower them to succeed and excel as contributing members of society. This will be accomplished by providing a safe environment, under the direction of caring and trained adults, where programs will develop their life-skills, values, character and leadership, thereby helping them realize their individual potential.
ETO Motivations
BGCA adopted the Enterprise version of Social Solutions’ ETO Software™ as part of the organization’s nationwide initiative to measure outcomes, improve service quality and demonstrate internal quality controls. BGCN began leveraging ETO as a means to evaluate which of its programs – and how many of them – were being used by BGCN members. The organization also sought to use ETO as a tool to report to funders on good work being done, in the hopes that a thorough analysis of efforts and outcomes would increase the organization’s impacts on the lives of young people.
Lessons and Achievements
Once BGCN staff put ETO to work, they were able to analyze the organization’s 40+ program offerings, which were then offered on a drop-in basis to all BGCN members. ETO enabled BGCN to track program attendance for each of the thousands of youths served annually – how many children come each year, how many take advantage of each program, per-youth program enrollment, and correlations between program enrollment and attendance.
One particular factor stuck out in BGCN’s enrollment data – that more than half of youths attending the centers were enrolled in one program or less. Concerned that Clubs were being used more for socialization than for their life-enhancing programs, BGCN leadership changed their membership policies to require that each member be enrolled in at least three programs. ETO enabled BGCN to monitor the impact of this program change, tracking enrollment, individual schedules and program histories, youths not in compliance with program enrollment requirements, and programs with best and worst attendance records.
This new policy helps the club focus on helping young people lead more productive lives, and the results to date have been quite positive. The Newark club has been recognized by the BCGA national office for its cutting-edge use of ETO, and the club’s CEO has spoken about the value of ETO at the annual BGCA national conference. The funding community has embraced BGCN’s outcome measurement, and BGCN reports increased funding as well as increased respect in its community.
Success Hurdles
BGCN had begun in recent years to focus more intently on ways to capture outcomes beyond simple “how much, how many served” statistics. To that end, BGCN developed outcome logic measurement models for all of its 40+ programs offered annually. What they needed was a tool to put the logic models to work to affect program improvement – and in ETO, they found what they were looking for.
Implementation wasn’t immediate, but it was steady, as staff adoption and buy-in increased over time. An initial barrier to success came simply from the time and cultural changes required to get day-to-day employees and volunteers at the Newark BGCA accustomed to using ETO beyond tracking demographic information. Other staffers reported challenges in identifying milestones to be used in measuring adoption.
Looking Forward
BGCN is looking forward to the next milestone in its ETO adoption: full implementation. At the same time, BGCN is embarking, with help from its funders, on an ambitious study of the effectiveness of its program offerings. Through ETO, BGCN is going to track two groups of middle school-age children over a three year period – one group of youths required to attend weekly programs across 5 core program areas, and another control group without specific program requirements.
Program attendance and progress milestones will be tracked for each youth, and results will be compared annually and at the study’s end. If, as BGCN predicts, success milestones are greater for young people with more stringent program requirements, BGCN will use its data to support changes to focus on programs with proven success rates – and to secure funding to support those changes.