Officials at the Center for Employment Opportunities have at their fingertips detailed, up-to-the-minute information on what is happening to the thousands of former prisoners it helps get jobs. Because the officials have a sophisticated online database management tool, they can turn to data dashboards on their computers anytime to see, for example, how many participants in programs in three states are finding paid work and how long they are staying on the job.
Now a new effort will put additional information on the dashboard to show what clients of the jobs program think is working and what’s not.
“We’ve got the performance metrics,” says Danielle Lutsky, director of business analysis, “and when we started to think about what other data points we needed to help us make improvements, we found that the data missing was feedback, the voice of our participants.”
The organization ran some trials in 2013, at first interviewing participants at one of its New York sites face-to-face, then moving to short surveys sent by text message.
Responses over several months to a question about how well clients understood the services available to them led the group to change the schedule of its orientation program to better engage and educate participants from the start. Instead of requiring that all forms, including, for example, those for proof of Social Security, be completed the first day of orientation, deadlines were spread throughout the weeklong class.
Ms. Lutsky says that such changes are meant to cut down on dropout rates and improve the experience over all. Keeping in touch with participants, she says, might also help the organization identify potential trouble spots in advance.
Client feedback, for example, might provide ideas about how to help young adults in Buffalo keep their jobs longer. Data there show some participants leave their posts within days.
“Participant feedback could help us understand what this trend means and what we can do about it,” says Amira El-Ghobashy, a senior planner at the Center for Employment Opportunities. “Is it a mismatch in participant expectation and the reality of the job? Is it something about the employer, the industry? We only have anecdotes.”
That is already changing. Last fall, the Fund for Shared Insight, a new grant-making group, awarded the Center for Employment Opportunities $300,000 over two years to implement a system to collect and analyze client-satisfaction data for all its programs nationwide. Last month, the group expanded its effort to ask clients about their satisfaction with every program the center runs, starting with more than 2,000 participants in New York City.
The organization will also conduct research on the link between feedback and future performance, using data to predict what kind of interventions would be most helpful for different kinds of participants.
“The ultimate goal is to correlate perceptual feedback with outcome data,” Ms. Lutsky says. “Then we’ll know where to make the changes that will really help participants the most.”
