Today’s non-profit world faces numerous operational and strategic challenges. SCNO provides services in these six areas:
Douglas Center
About
The Douglas Center serves adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities that live in and around the Skokie area. They provide work/vocational training, training and educational components about life, art therapy, dance therapy, electronic recycling, reading groups, computer groups, health and wellness programming, multi-sensory therapy, horticulture and several other initiatives.
One of the main goals of the program is community integration and public education about topics regarding special needs. The Douglas Center has conducted several presentations at local Skokie schools, libraries, rotary clubs, and various organizations to raise awareness. Some of their participants engage in paid day jobs, volunteer at local food shelters, and participate in programming at local libraries.
The Engagement
The Douglas Center currently employs a piece-rate wage model to pay participants for day jobs such as incense and screws packaging. However, under the new guidelines set by the Illinois Department of Labour, they are required to transition to an hourly wage model and came to SCNO for a recommendation on the best strategy for implementation.
Within this engagement, the Douglas Center also wanted to identify community organizations to foster partnerships for part-time employment and volunteering opportunities for its participants. In order to identify the best strategies for this transition, SCNO initially researched other similar organizations that had already transitioned from piece rate to hourly wage to learn the best practices adopted within these groups. SCNO then benchmarked The Douglas Center’s job descriptions and current practices with these organizations to determine the most feasible strategy. Based on this research, SCNO created two Excel tools that can be used to consolidate pay structures for each individual participant and total participants per job.
The objective of this tool was to help organize the finances under the hourly rate and also help demonstrate to employers that the hourly structure creates greater costs and therefore some contracts need to be re-negotiated. In order to compensate for the workers who now will not be employed under the hourly model, SCNO also identified other volunteering and work opportunities with external organizations that the Douglas Center can explore in the future to provide more engagement opportunities to its participants.
Kenneth Young Center Case Study
About
The Kenneth Young Center is a non-profit organization headquartered in Elk Grove, IL. Established in 1970, KYC supports the community in a variety of areas and provides services to nearly all age groups. KYC’s work is separated into four divisions: Elderly care, youth mental health services, substance use prevention and recovery, and LGBTQ+ support services. Across all divisions, KYC offers 30 different programs ranging from free health insurance counseling for Medicare beneficiaries and their caregivers to assistance for people (18 and older) in their recovery from severe and chronic mental illness. In total, KYC works with over 15,000+ clients from 25 different towns/villages across townships. With many of their clients coming from underserved and underprivileged communities, KYC provides invaluable resources to the community which otherwise would not have been available
The Engagement
KYC had no unified intake process through which to collect data from its many different programs and divisions. Data within KYC was effectively siloed and assembling organizational-wide data is a laborious and time-consuming process. Seeking to fix this problem, KYC asked SCNO to examine three different initiatives that they are planning to implement to help resolve and improve the way data is collected and managed internally. To that end, SCNO focused on three areas of analysis:
1. Competitive Analysis of three different data management programs (Salesforce, FamCare, and Social Solutions) and evaluating each program according to KYC's expressed preferences.
2. Develop the framework and details for a new data management position within KYC by completing benchmarking analysis on other nonprofit organizations data management strategies and staff responsibilities.
3. Create the blueprint for a new general intake form and provide recommendations on how to reform the overall structure of the intake survey process.
As a result of a criteria-based analysis, SCNO recommended that KYC choose Salesforce as their data management vendor and partner moving forward. However, in addition to the Nonprofit Success Pack identified by KYC, SCNO also strongly recommends considering the Case Management, Grant Management, and Experience Cloud add-ons as part of the overarching Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud platform.
SCNO developed a reference template for a data manager position at KYC by compiling common characteristics of competitive positions. It offers options to tweak the description in order to best fit KYC’s needs.
SCNO was asked to perform an analysis of KYC’s current front-door approach, which has suffered from a lack of uniformity among departments and “data silos.” By examining existing intake documentation, SCNO identified major improvements to how KYC deals with new clients. After creating a list of common data fields between the provided intake forms, SCNO designed a sample intake form for all departments to use. Additionally, SCNO created a visual depicting the suggested data intake structure for KYC to follow when setting up its new data platform.