Our Customer Spotlight installment is meant to feature outstanding organizations and their unique use of ETO. For our first post, we’re featuring the collaboration between the City of Hartford and Capital Workforce Partners and their efforts to effectively distribute human services citywide.

The City of Hartford and Capital Workforce Partners are leveraging Social Solutions ETO Software® to improve social services across the community. Several Hartford city departments, including Health and Human Services, Office of Young Children, and the Office of Youth Services, are collaborating with nine community nonprofit organizations, through the use of ETO Software.  This collaborative approach is helping the organizations provide better, more effective service to the city’s diverse population.

The Hartford-wide initiative was introduced to establish a continuum of care, enabling service providers across a variety of agencies and organizations to collaborate and share information ensuring consistent, high quality care to the community. The ETO Software® facilitates easy and convenient access to many different resources and information so that social service workers can:

•    Monitor and asses background information of people in need of care;
•    Input information to manage cases shared across all organizations involved;
•    Assess efforts, and improve service quality by documenting connections between activities and outcomes.

“We are excited and pleased about using ETO to help us better identity needs in our community, inconsistencies in our service and ways we can more effectively provide for our residents,” said Eric Jackson, Chief Information Officer at the City of Hartford  “Not only is the software flexible and scalable, but it is also robust enough to meet all of our service provider’s needs and allow for more effective use of our resources.”

Kevin Deame, Project Manager, Hartford Connects, comments on the collaboration and efforts of the partnership at ETOlution 2008. 



What do you think of the City of Hartford’s unique use?  We welcome your comments and suggestions not only about this post, but regarding exceptional use of ETO among any organization.

Isaac Castillo, Director Learning and Evaluation at the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC) in Washington, D.C. joins us from the National Council of La Raza's annual conference in San Diego to share what is happening at this year's event.

(From left to right-Isaac Castillo, Sandy Gutierrez, and Alvin "Pibe" Alvarado from the Latin American Youth Center)

The day began with an excellent workshop session entitled, “Effective Case Management Can Make Your Work Easy.”  In the session, current ETO users AltaMed Health (in Los Angeles) described their process for working with youth and how they provide holistic case management as part of their services.  Angelica Gomez, a program coordinator with Association House of Chicago, followed by describing how she uses ETO Software as part of her client assessment process, as well as their procedures for documenting success among their service population.  Luis Enriquez, the Director of Friendly House, rounded out the discussion by talking about the importance of outcomes tracking and the need for extensive case management systems to document progress for participants.

During the lunch session, presumptive Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama spoke to the entire conference and discussed several important factors relevant to the ETO community, including the need to turn the passions of staff members into identifiable change for the populations we serve.

To round out the day, I had the pleasure of presenting with two fellow Latin American Youth Center staff: Sandy Gutierrez, the Chief Operating Officer, and Alvin “Pibe” Alvarado, one of our fantastic case managers.  Our session, entitled “¡Si Se Puede! – Measuring Success and Using the Results”, was attended by approximately 60 individuals.  We shared lessons learned from LAYC’s move towards becoming a true learning organization and how all staff can benefit from the use of ETO.  We also answered over 40 questions, ranging from “How did you convince staff that ETO was worth the effort?” to “Did becoming a learning organization lead to increased funding opportunities?” Most importantly, we shared the importance of pursing data collection and outcomes measurement for the improvement of services for the clients we serve.

Stay tuned for more updates from Isaac and his team at the conference!

Evaluator Karen Walker, PhD

Karen Walker, PhD, is a University of Virginia professor of research methods and qualitative/quantitative community-based research design and an independent program evaluator with significant experience in the nonprofit sector. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the largest U.S.-based philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans, contracted with Walker through Public/Private Ventures to evaluate Children’s Futures, one of its long-term programs. Children’s Futures is an initiative to improve the health and well being of children in Trenton, N.J..  In response to inadequate data collection by the programs throughout the first five years of the initiative, which hampered both program monitoring and operations and the evaluation, Walker oversaw the implementation of ETO Software. 

ETO Motivations

To successfully improve the health of Trenton’s children and document progress to RWJF, Children’s Futures needed to design and maintain a database that would support its overall initiative, which involved the work of a large number of public and nonprofit agencies throughout the area. Walker and RWJF needed Children’s Futures to better manage the types and collection methods of the data it would use to ultimately measure its positive impact on children’s lives and demonstrate the program’s social value. The foundation and Children’s Futures agreed to implement  ETO Software and leverage its proven processes to support broad, consistent data collection and management so it could measure and report accurate overall outcomes.

Success Hurdles

The biggest challenge for RWJF/Children’s Futures was facilitating the cultural change required so that multiple agencies would collect and manage data using a new or different tool. Also, the lack of an extant, cohesive data collection process called for a highly flexible solution that would provide needed adaptability and enable nearly immediate generation of reports to demonstrate value. Moreover, as the independent evaluator hired by the foundation to produce useful information about the initiative's implementation and outcomes, Walker needed to maintain critical business relationships with the agencies providing services even as she worked alongside those same agencies to implement the ETO performance measurement solution.

Lessons and Achievements

Due to a visible commitment to ETO by the foundation and Children’s Futures, Inc., the agencies involved in the Children’s Futures initiative are now fully interacting as they all move forward with the ETO implementation, which is strategically leveraging the extant data collection activities of the agencies. ETO’s easy accommodation of additional data elements is enabling the building of a system of consistent measurement for the long term. Any cultural resistance to new ways of working is dissipating as the agencies realize the value of increased access to meaningful and reliable data.

Children’s Futures, Inc. has assumed responsibility for the implementation and continuing administration of ETO, and is focused on identifying service agency priorities, generating funder reports, and conducting site visits to derive the greatest value from ETO.

The evaluator is now focused on her primary role with improved access to the data that enable her to objectively and accurately assess program efficacy. Such data include extensive demographic data, which add critical dimensions to measures of program efficacy, as well as case-weighted data that allow for a more detailed understanding of staff effectiveness.  ETO’s reporting capabilities are also contributing richly to the substance of Walker’s program evaluation. Moreover, ETO’s flexibility allows Children’s Futures to easily modify the tool to capture additional types of data, adding more substance and depth to the evaluator’s work.

We've taken you inside to see the inner workings of the Latin American Youth Center—and in the coming weeks you'll get to step into the shoes of nonprofit organizations like the Boys and Girls Club of NYC, Roca and Catholic Family Services.  Now we'd like to give you the opportunity to share your own successes with the readers of the ETOlutionist. Is your organization on the path to an ETOlution? Have you seen an increase in the success of your programs through the use of ETO? Are your funders increasing budget allotments because of your efforts to produce measurable outcomes? If you are making a difference in the lives of your clients and ETO has helped along the way—we want to hear about it. So send your stories, your successes, your milestones… and let us take “a look inside” to see how you are changing the world.