A data maturity journey
Sacred Heart Mission
Written by DR Kristen Moeller-Saxone, a data professional and social innovator with experience in the NFP, university, health and government sectors. At Infoxchange, Kristen leads the Data Catalyst Network.
As demand on Sacred Heart Mission continued to rise, the team wanted to make better use of data to optimise their response.
To do this, they asked questions: what is the average length of time for which people seek housing assistance? Is there a connection between a person’s rated vulnerability and the length of support they need? How many women over 55 have been helped into housing? How much does it cost to sustain a tenancy for a vulnerable community member?
The team needed to bring together data from different sources into one place, including demographic data, support period profiles and contact support hours to help tell the story.
“The data is very clear that more people are needing support because we’re working with lots of additional newcomers who haven’t been in the service system before and are unable to sustain their rentals,” said Supported Housing Program manager Annie Lynch.
They went through a process of data field identification and aggregation in their Service Coordination and Referral (SRS) platform and across varying spreadsheets, then built a data warehouse using Amazon AWS. Then, the team learned how to use PowerBI, OneLake, Microsoft Fabric and CoPilot to collate the data into a structure that would streamline monthly reporting and reduce the time spent on data checking and cleaning.
Annie and the team will be able to assess at the program level, or look into the finer details of the length of support of programs, and what types of support lead to good outcomes. They can now track insights such as how many staff hours are needed to achieve a positive outcome, visible on a unified dashboard.
“For us to tell the story of the people we’re helping support, we have to get data on the table and make it everyone’s world because it’s relevant for so many different departments to do their work better,” Annie said.