Social Solutions Founder and Vice President Adrian Bordone took some time out of his busy workday this week to talk about why he initially entered the social services sector and what keeps him going.

Adrian is one of three founders – all of whom left the human services industry to start Social Solutions. Almost a decade since he launched the company, today Adrian spends most of his time working with customers, helping them prepare and implement Social Solutions performance management software, Efforts-to-Outcomes (ETO).

He kids that his days consist of three-martini lunches. The reality is that he works 10-12 hour days on average and travels two to three times a month meeting with current and prospective clients and community groups to learn about their needs and help them understand how to take a performance oriented approach to service delivery. The time and energy he dedicates to his job comes with a high price –less time with his wife and three children.  But at the end of the day, the message he wants to relay to others in the nonprofit sector is, “…It’s worth it.”

Following are excerpts taken from my conversation with Adrian – offering a window into why he’s so passionate about what he does and where he sees the nonprofit sector 10 years from now.

The ETOlutionist: You’ve been involved in the nonprofit sector since the start of your career – what was the initial motivation to work in social services?

AB: Moral obligation - I felt a very strong need to dedicate my time and energy to invest in, support and strengthen the citizens and community of Baltimore.

The ETOlutionist: In an interview five years ago you said the typical nonprofit organization relies heavily on paper records stored in file cabinets as their primary means of auditing work and progress. Have things changed since then and if so how?

AB: I think things have changed – those file cabinets still exist but they now contain much more archived data that is not believed to be sufficient moving forward. More organizations are realizing the concept of a database as a tool. Whether or not they are doing it well is open for discussion.  A big challenge is that most depend on the undying efforts of front-line staff to sustain their mission.  Historically, case managers have always excelled and been more comfortable in developing interpersonal relationships than being disciplined around data management.  The human service sector has also been underserved by technology.  Therefore, by and large, the community of service professionals has not looked at technology and data as assets that help them do their work better.  That is definitely changing.  Companies like ours are improving the way we meet the community’s needs by making the technology more intuitive, seamless and transparent.  Also, users are coming to the table with a broader variety of experience using technology as part of their everyday lives – so it is a lot less foreign.  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I believe the industry as a whole is evolving and asking more of itself and its data to look toward a performance management and evidenced based model of understanding its impact.  

The ETOlutionist: What are some of the contributing factors to this evolution and what are some obstacles?

AB: Younger service professionals entering the industry have an expectation that technology will be readily available to simplify their work.

There continues to be a good amount of insecurity throughout organizations about risks of investing time and energy in technology (even when there is a very low risk of failure), which is one obstacle. The bigger challenge is the culture shock – organizations deciding to take more evidenced based approaches have to be prepared to revisit and re-examine many of the tools and core assumptions that they have been using in the past – the stories they have been telling for years to get funding need to be evolve into data-based service models. They have to be ready to say ‘We are not sure the work that we do actually has any positive impact on the lives of the people we serve,’ then work to demonstrate their relevance and value in the community.  

While this takes a significant amount of leadership, risk management and communication skills, the best news is that it doesn’t (it can’t) happen over night.  Organizations and leaders who embark on this transition can mitigate the risk and avoid the culture shock by making slow, steady and methodical progress toward the goal.  There are very clear paths to success and very clear paths to failure.  It certainly doesn’t just happen overnight or all of a sudden. 

The ETOlutionist: Have you seen any signs to indicate that there is movement in this direction?

AB: There is a lot of discussion on the topic of data and measurement in the service community – it’s definitely a hot topic now, more so than in the past – which is great.  The discussion has also broadened beyond academic circles and into the community of service.  This is a very good sign.  I trust it will continue to grow as the funding community and service community recognize the value that data offers to improve decision-making in many phases of their lives.  We see this happening at the most fundamental level as consumers – we now have exponentially more data available to drive our purchase decisions than our parents ever did.  We take this expectation into other phases of our lives.  The workplace is a natural extension of this.

However there is still a lot of hesitation. The industry has been built on certain habits and conventions.  It has been fueled by passion for more than 100 years and that passion has often been used as the moral equivalent of performance. Old habits die hard.
 
The ETOlutionist: How can people start to think about this differently and ‘break the habit,’ if that’s what you are suggesting?

AB: One of the habits we want to break is that the momentum can be reversed all at once – that we can (or should) go from passion without evidence to evidence without passion.   Aspiring to or achieving either of these extremes would represent failure.  As I mentioned earlier, the key is providing and managing a framework of incremental changes. Make a decision to do things differently and then create a one to two year plan so that the change will not be a culture shock to the organization. Move at a pace that is reasonable so that you bring everyone along in the process.  Move, measure, modify, move, measure, modify, rinse and repeat…

The ETOlutionist: Adrian, thank you for taking time for this interview – any final thoughts?

AB: I think the big call to action for the industry is this: “If we can’t prove that we are providing some benefit to the people we serve, then we can’t be sure that we are not working to their detriment.”  There is a big, fat swath in the middle of these two extremes.  I’d like to make sure that we are all taking time to candidly assess where we and our organizations fall within this continuum and acting with some sense of urgency, discipline and diligence toward the benefit side of the equation.

I hope that sentiment will help people see that it is not measurement for the sake of measurement – it is about whether we are really saving lives or just burning resources.  It’s not someone else’s job to tell us what we are worth, it is our job to demonstrate the undeniable value of our work, so that we can continue to attract and deploy the very best resources for the individuals and communities we serve.

Check out an interview of Adrian, further discussin Social Solution here.

Q:    You started your career as a human services case worker. How’d you get here from there?

A:    I loved being a case worker. I got to help young men stay in school and out of jail by keeping them focused on the value of themselves and their education. That’s of course just one small corner of the human services world, where many skilled, compassionate people are working to make a difference in people’s lives. The dynamics of human services, however, can sometimes make organizations ineffective. People are passionate about their work, but don’t always have the tools and disciplines to do it well. Unfortunately, they end up feeling frustrated. Frankly, I got a little frustrated myself. There are so many good intentions paving roads to nowhere. When I had an opportunity to help make human services more effective, I made the move, even though it meant leaving an environment I love.

Q:    So you left human services to help make it better. Why not do that from inside?

A:    I tried, and unfortunately got stopped cold at several points. That’s when I realized I needed to work from the outside. We created ETO Software® (Efforts to Outcomes) and related processes as a turnkey tool for supporting the good work of human services organizations. Our solutions help organizations align their funders’ expectations, their mission, and the daily work they do by connecting these—through the daily work—to clearly articulated, tracked, and reported outcomes. It’s not rocket science, it’s really just good organizational discipline. But, sadly, it’s lacking in much of the nonprofit sector.

Q:    How’s it going?

A:    I feel like there’s good progress being made in general. Our software alone has been acquired by several thousand human services groups and other nonprofits. So we’re in a position to watch organizations complete their ETOlutions, to better connect their efforts to outcomes. They begin with a disciplined desire to help their constituents succeed, and that compassionate motivation drives their transformation. The great news is, once an organization has gone through an ETOlution, not only are they making a bigger difference in people’s lives, but they become a beacon for other groups. Everyone seems to want to learn how they’ve done it.

Q:    How does an organization get past the hurdles that would keep them from better connecting efforts to outcomes?

A:    They do it by caring enough to muscle through the changes needed to ensure greater effectiveness. It is a challenging transformation. But once people start down the path to ETOlution, they begin very quickly to see benefits. Case workers become energized as they get a clearer picture of the true impact of their efforts. Program managers find themselves with a much better understanding of what’s working well and what really needs their attention. Development people find themselves with a more compelling story to share with funders, a story that’s backed by solid, easy-to-retrieve data. It can be very motivational.

Q:    Is this concept of efforts to outcomes really going to make things better?

A:    Organizations are finding that once they can demonstrate success by tying efforts to outcomes, they better serve their constituents, and the scorched dialog with their funders turns into a celebratory discussion about what more can be done. Their mission statement becomes more alive as staff members live it out daily. So yes, to the extent people can focus on human needs instead of process issues and burdensome reporting, things will get better. When the value of a case worker’s efforts is unclear, it can be frustrating. There’s so much human need and so little time and resources to address it. I’ve been there; emotionally I never left. But we’re trying to give people reason to believe they can make more of a difference. And they can. It takes work, a little know-how, and some tools, but the results are very rewarding.

philanthropy, efforts to outcomes, ETOlution, funders, human services, nonprofit, solutions