A New Approach to Social Service Data — Part I

At One Degree, we’re making community resources more easily discoverable by organizing agencies’ services into plain, action-oriented statements of opportunity, so people can find exactly what they need. In this three-part blog post, I discuss the issues with the current state of social service discovery, our new “opportunity”-based approach, and the challenges that lie ahead. (Here is the single-post version.)

Part I: The organization-based approach

In the United States, we are fortunate to have a huge network of organizations that are sometimes referred to as the “social safety net” — nonprofit and government agencies that serve families who need some kind of comprehensive or supplemental help in meeting their basic needs. Unfortunately, figuring out where to go for help when we need it is still much more complicated than it needs to be.

80% of us will face poverty or near-poverty at some point in our lives. That means making a low income, being unemployed, or generally needing assistance to overcome obstacles is something the vast majority of us deal with in our lifetimes. It happens to nearly all of us. There’s no shame in utilizing the network of organizations set up to help us. That’s why they exist.

Frustratingly, however, as life gets more difficult, so does the process of finding help. So far, efforts to make navigating social services have been focused on incremental improvements on the “resource binder” concept. Since the advent of the copy machine, agencies have kept literal binders of photocopied lists of organizations and their contact information. In the last couple of decades, these binders have been turned into online databases, but they have the same design flaw.

Let’s say you are a single mom, working two part-time minimum wage jobs, and facing some emotionally difficult circumstances. You’d like to try group therapy, but there’s no chance you’ll be able to afford the high-priced programs you’ve heard about. Finding a group that you can afford, for your demographic, and at a time that works with your schedule is not so easy. It requires a lot of digging and, most often, a helping hand from someone who knows the terrain.

Like everyone else, you start with Google, and get back a list of organizations and their websites. Then what? You’d need to sift through each organization, determine which seemed relevant — probably based on their name, at first — and try to visit their websites and call around to figure out exactly which organization offers what and when.

There are a number of organizations that have put the “resource binder” online. We think tools, such as United Way’s 211, are useful to certain audiences: case managers, social workers, and other practitioners already well-versed in the network of local organizations and what they offer. But for an actual individual looking for help, they provide little more guidance than a Google search.

Here at One Degree, we often say we’re creating a Yelp for social services because of the rating and review system we have. While that’s a good starting point for discussion, the analogy only goes so far.

Yelp results contain companies in discrete categories, whose purpose is clear: at a restaurant you eat food; at a dentist’s office you get your teeth cleaned; at a salon you get your hair cut. But now imagine if Yelp returned a list of company names, mission statements, and jargon-filled paragraphs of mostly-useless information. More importantly, each company in the list might serve food, cut hair, clean teeth, serve alcohol, or repair automobiles — and some might do all of those things. (This is in no way a criticism of Yelp; it does a great job at what it intends to do. I’m just using it as a point of reference.)

Social service organizations don’t fit into discrete categories because their services are so varied. Saying that an organization is a “housing organization” or a “food bank” tells you very little about what exactly it offers, whereas saying that a company is an “Italian restaurant” at least gives you the basics of what to expect.

In the case of a search for social services, returning organization names, jargon-filled descriptions, or basic categorization is really only helpful to other service providers or social workers who are already familiar with what each organization does, and who can interpret the jargon to find something useful.

We believe it’s time for a solution to this problem that is built for the customer, not the intermediary or service provider.

Look out for Part II coming in just a few days…