During his first year as PEP’s CEO, Eric Gordon made data collection a priority, both formally and informally.
“Over the course of the last year, I've done a lot of what I would describe as ‘low-tech market research,’ ” says Eric. “I'd see an idea and stuff it in a folder, and I'd see another idea and stuff it in a folder.”
That “low-tech” research included staying informed about current events and trends in the educational and mental health landscape, with an eye toward impacts on PEP and the young people it serves.
He also spent considerable time studying PEP’s existing data sources: reports on projects and programs, current OKRs (objectives and key results), strategic framework documents, and plenty of staff feedback and suggestions.
Eric wants his second year at PEP to focus on organizing and synthesizing all the data he’s collected his first year, including that folder full of ideas. To accomplish this, he realized he would need a way for PEP staff to access relevant information and key metrics about goals and progress, and explore existing data that could lead to innovation.
“In my second year, my vision is to activate PEP’s strategic framework,” says Eric. As he puts it, “all of this stuff has to be constructed and live somewhere” to be helpful to staff. “Project management doesn't happen when it's done on scraps of paper.”
PEP needed some kind of data dashboard that would give staff access to this rich, crucial data, and would help Eric establish the work goals of the executive and senior leadership teams going forward.
To help accomplish this, he created a dedicated Strategic Performance and Analytics Internship to design the tools to synthesize PEP’s data, better define and update PEP’s existing key performance indicators (KPI), and streamline PEP’s project management and monitoring process.
“PEP has called them a number of different things, but whether you call them an OKR, a key performance indicator, or any other thing, there should be some set of measures that we proactively monitor through the course of the year in a predictable way to ensure that we are maximizing the likelihood of achieving the outcomes that we desire,” says Eric.
“I often encourage people to think about it in the terms of temperature,” he continues. “We very often measure the temperature. We know how hot it got, and it's forensic. It's in the past. I want us to set the thermostat. I want us to decide what moves we're going to make that help us to get to the temperature we want. That means being able to routinely check in with performance measures, as opposed to waiting until the outcomes have been achieved and then measuring whether they were successful or not.”
Enter Hannah Mattam, PEP’s strategic performance and analytics intern, a temporary position charged with creating tools and infrastructure that will help Eric and members of PEP’s senior team accurately and more easily synthesize data and monitor PEP’s progress on its strategic framework.
Hannah, a native of New Jersey, is a rising junior at Colgate University, where she is working on a double major of Economics and Computer Science/Mathematics. She says she found out about the internship at PEP through the Summer on the Cuyahoga internship program, which partners college students with Northeast Ohio organizations, including nonprofits like PEP.
She was attracted to the internship because it combines the kind of work she likes to do—project management, data analysis, and data organization—with meaningful work.
“PEP is mission driven and has purpose,” Hannah says. “I wanted … an opportunity to pursue something that mattered to me. I also very much value education and always wanted to help in that way.”
Hannah is no stranger to helping others through meaningful work. When home from school in New Jersey, she volunteers regularly at a soup kitchen with her father, and at Colgate, she teaches coding to third and fourth graders at a local public school as a board member of the Hamilton Central School Coding Club.
She says working for PEP gives her an opportunity to move from the theoretical to the practical. “It's different than school,” she says. “You're working with people to make something that other people will use. It's not just an assignment for you, but something you've created for others.”
Eric stresses that the kind of data Hannah is working with has always existed at PEP, but that it has been challenging for staff to use since it has not been accessible in one central, accessible location. Additionally, there has not been an agency-wide understanding of how staff are supposed to use the data to achieve desired outcomes.
As an example, he cites a recent policy change around Medicaid reimbursement. “There is a pretty aggressive shift to value-based care, where we are measured by what is a perceived measurement of adding value, and that the more that value statement is achieved, the more revenue we can generate,” he says. “Agencies can either react by seeing what happens to their revenue, or they can respond by pulling that revenue into a key performance indicator that is being routinely monitored, to see if our revenue is at risk in ways that we need to understand and respond to quickly.”
The dashboard that Hannah is creating will allow staff to monitor the impact of changes in the environment like that regularly, and take the appropriate action when needed.
“All of the evidence I've gathered internally and externally confirms that PEP is a gold standard, best in class for optimizing our existing programs and services, which is our first core objective,” says Eric. He says PEP is now ready to take on its second core objective—the innovation of new programs and services that will leverage PEP’s assets to expand offerings that close program and service gaps in the communities we serve.
“Eric is trying to move things forward--he has a lot of vision for the company and I like seeing that,” says Hannah. “It's inspiring.”
The data dashboard and related tools will be introduced to the PEP Senior Leadership Team at their August 14 meeting.