Background:

A major Canadian Charity with a focus on supporting the youth homeless community was struggling to quantify the impact of their programs. Clearly, they were making a difference but they were hoping to better understand what could be done differently to have an even greater impact on the community. Moreover, the lack of documented results was inhibiting their ability to solicit funding. AAARL team worked directly with the Director of Program Services for this project.

Challenge:

To substantiate the impact that the service was having and identify ways to better deliver programs supporting the homeless community.

The Approach:

AAARL started with the baseline information that the Non-Profit was already collecting and analyzed the outcomes based on the service delivered against numerous variables. A combination of logistic and multivariate regression was used as part of a broader suite of statistical review.

Specifically, AAARL was able to measure the effectiveness of each program, identify what aspects lead to improved client outcome, and conversely identify early warning flags of potential negative outcomes. As well, timing effects were identified for optimizing of program delivery and attendance.

Result:

A quantifiable measurement of which programs were generating the most success, what aspects of the service was driving the success and the relative efficiency of those initiatives.

AAARL was able to clearly establish the probability of a successful outcome based on the number of client interactions. For example, clients will see the most improvement in their outcome if they attend more than 2 programs within a 12 month period. Another great example, those client with a dedicated social worker will be 3x more likely to have a improvement in outcome than those who doesn’t.

Based on the expected outcomes and the resources required, recommendations were outlined to allocate the limited resources to maximize the overall benefits.

The substantiated and systematic approach to measurement of the positive impact the Non-Profit has on the homeless community is now used directly in funding applications. As well, market materials were created with these quantitative results for fundraising purposes.