A New Approach to Social Service Data — Part II

This is the second in a three-part series of posts about One Degree’s new approach to serving information about social service nonprofit organizations. (Here is the single-post version.)

An “opportunity”-based approach

In Part 1, I talked about what the current landscape looks like for finding information about social services. To recap: It’s a mess, focused on online directory tools that give superficial information about organizations.

One Degree started as such a website. For our pilot, we had a directory of organizations, where people could find basic information about each one. But after talking with users and taking a hard look at whether or not we were making a difference, we realized we needed to try something new. We had a useful database, but it probably wasn’t going to change people’s lives. And from a practical perspective, we had no way to even measure our impact.

So we evolved. Now, we’re going a step further: rather than just giving out information about organizations, we’re serving information about what an individual can do or get. We call these “opportunities,” as they are precisely that: action-oriented, rather than information-oriented. We think this is more aligned with how individuals look for help.

Too much information is a bad thing. Our approach is to only provide information that is relevant to finding help. Most resource directories and organization websites are filled with extraneous information, such as an organization’s mission statement, tax-exempt status, staff bios, and funding sources. If I’m looking for an after-school program for my kids, I don’t care about when an organization was founded or the history of its management team. On One Degree, we show you only what you need to know to get help.

For example, the St. Anthony Foundation in San Francisco has over a dozen fantastic programs for the community, including computer classes. It has one of the better nonprofit websites we’ve seen because it has so much information about its services. Yet the site is overwhelming, and it’s only one organization. An individual would need to browse through dozens of organizations’ websites — most of which are written for funders or supporters, not customers — before finding the help she needed.

If you’re looking to improve your computer skills, you could use One Degree to find computer classes. Rather than just giving you the name and basic description of the St. Anthony Foundation, we tell you exactly what you can do there — you can “take a class on basic email skills this Thursday morning”, or “take a workshop on Microsoft PowerPoint Saturday afternoon.” We also tell you how to sign up, where to go, and at what time.

We think this is a simple, yet fundamentally better way to connect people with community resources.

Measurability

Another advantage of this approach is that it’s inherently more measurable than the organization-based one. The latter, which is the industry standard, gives people information and leaves it at that. Agencies — or funders, for that matter — have not been able to track whether or not someone looking for information was able to find it.

By organizing data in atomic opportunity units, we have devised a system to track whether or not an individual found that piece of information useful, thereby bringing measurability to an area that has had no clear metrics in the past.

With One Degree, we are highly focused on using data to drive what we do. We want to see if this approach works and if it doesn’t, then try something else. Baked into our application is a mechanism to securely track what people are searching for and what they add to their list that interests them, while respecting their privacy and personal information.

However, tracking information in and of itself is not useful. We want to measure whether or not people are actually able to improve their lives with the information we’re giving them. Our approach is to ask them directly. We follow up with users, asking them to indicate whether or not they took an opportunity and if it fulfilled the need they had.

We know this is not a perfect system and recognize some of its inherent flaws: some will be reluctant to give us detailed information about their behavior, they may not be candid with their responses, and others may not know whether an opportunity has actually been immediately useful. But we think this system is better than not measuring the outcomes of automated resource connection at all, which is the situation traditional online directories currently find themselves in.

Our hypothesis is that if we can provide better, more relevant information, then families will be able to more quickly and consistently improve their lives. We’re still at the beginning of this experiment, but we are excited about our opportunity-based approach to data, in particular because we will be able to measure its results.

Thanks for reading so far! In Part 3, coming in a couple of days, we’ll explore some of the challenges that this new data model poses and what we’re doing to address it.