Visual Risk IQ skilled volunteers provide valuable data management insights and Tableau coaching to help Supportive Housing Communities improve the management of their social media, financial, and client data
Supportive Housing Communities (SHC) provides affordable housing to alleviate homelessness and human suffering. Their vision is to develop and operate permanent supportive housing for men, women and families overcoming homelessness, especially veterans and those with mental illness, substance use, and medical or other disabling conditions. Their goals include assisting residents in obtaining/remaining in permanent housing, encouraging residents to increase skills and/or find employment, fostering self-sufficiency and improving self-image, and supporting recovery and wellness.
SHC leadership reached out to Apparo for support in creating a dashboard on Tableau, a data analytics software platform, to manage their social media, financial and client data. Apparo matched them to a volunteer team from Visual Risk IQ with expertise in using Tableau for the creation of dashboards.
Visual Risk IQ Volunteer Team: M’Shiela Hawthorne, Kim Jones, Joe Oringel
Supportive Housing Communities Nonprofit Team: Laura Caldwell, Jessica Williams
This work originally began as an Apparo Team Training engagement, where volunteers would provide training to SHC team on how to use a newly acquired Tableau. After the first meetings to discuss training needs, the conversations became more focused on Tableau dashboard coaching (Tech Therapy) for leadership. As the work evolved, the volunteer team graciously offered to support SHC with pulling their data from various sources to create one dashboard in Tableau. The project was then reframed as a Community Impact Project, and volunteers shifted to working with SHC to go back to the basics of data management so they will have measurable data to work with. The entire process helped the SHC team realize that in order to fully implement Tableau, they needed to think about the current ways they are recording, viewing, and measuring data.
“We’re still learning, but now we know what information we need. Through this process, we had to develop and document KPIs and other types of goals as a first step. Having an improved understanding of the value of integrating our systems has been helpful in the process of narrowing down what is most important so we can work towards having consistent data. ” – Laura Caldwell, SHC
Volunteers provided flexible, dedicated, one-on-one technology and process advice that helped the organization ask the right questions to determine which areas they need to prioritize in order to leverage their data to amplify their mission. SHC is now thinking more strategically about their data and will use it to maintain effective business operations and make better decisions for the future.
“The team spent more than 100 hours building social media dashboards and it felt like SHC was happy with the end product. We hope to see that they can maintain the dashboards over time and through staff changes. We appreciate the introduction to SHC and trust that the relationship has been mutually beneficial.” – Joe Oringel, Visual Risk IQ
Laura Caldwell, Chief Executive Officer at SHC shares highlights from the work:
“I can’t speak more highly of the effort and patience from volunteers throughout the project. We started with an idea of what we thought we wanted, and we thought we had the tools we needed to get to that point. Instead, the volunteers worked with us to help us get to a point where we could look at our data in a different way so we can start recording and measuring the information we need.”
“One of the major highlights of this project was how the volunteer team helped us look at how our social media impacts awareness about our mission and how we can measure that and other valuable data. They helped us ask important questions like if we are engaging with our audiences in the best way and consider if we have the tools to answer those questions.”
“We wanted to fully implement Tableau in hopes of better understanding our clients and their progress. We know now we have to start with pieces like finding out where our funding streams are linked to in order to have the documented data we need. The idea of starting from scratch was overwhelming because we care so deeply about our mission, but Joe coached us to see the value in taking a step back to determine what our goals are so that we can efficiently measure and work toward them. As nonprofit leaders, we want to do things like end homelessness quickly, but those processes take time and having the right systems in place. Although we didn’t get the result we initially anticipated, we walked away with something much better.”
