Fixing the State of Human Services
By Steve Butz, MS, LCSW

Having worked in human services helping young men stay in school and out of jail, I know the social value that human service organizations and workers deliver. But while many skilled, compassionate workers are trying to make a difference in people’s lives, the dynamics of human services tend to make many organizations ineffective. People are passionate about their work but often aren’t empowered to do it well. And unfortunately, they end up feeling almost as frustrated and defeated as those they’re trying to help.

Why do such good intentions end up paving roads to hopelessness? A big part of the answer lies in the reality that many human service organizations have not adequately tied their laudable efforts to measurable, desired outcomes. In particular, this does not happens at the place where most staff effort is spent toward program participants: at the point of service. Tying efforts to outcomes delivers benefits to participants, direct service workers, and organizations, as well as the individuals, agencies, and foundations that fund them.

There are advantages to be gained by any organization that can align its mission, funders’ expectations, and daily work by connecting these to clearly articulated, measured, and reported outcomes—through daily work. This advantage will be manifested as better service to participants, clearer direction for direct service workers who will be more focused on their organization’s mission, streamlined management for organization leadership, and actionable data for board members and funders.

Participant Gains
Like any journey, developing a more strategic, outcome-focused approach to human service starts with a first step. Often, this takes the form of recording and tracking demographic data on participants so that, over time, the organization can determine the relative value of the service it provides to various demographic groups. The next step often involves identifying and tracking particular benefits the organization wants to deliver to participants. These benefits might include life skills needed to achieve positive life transformations or gaining knowledge to address recurring life issues. The details are determined by the organization’s mission; the result is a clearer view of the impact of individual program elements on participants’ lives.

Direct Service Worker Gains
To be successful, direct service workers need to understand the objective impact their efforts are having on the lives of participants. Over time, each direct service worker knows how individual lives have been improved by his or her work, generally by intuition. But seeing a clear picture of how specific activities map to specific results increases the direct service worker’s effectiveness as well as his or her satisfaction given increased awareness of the difference he or she is making.

My own experience with at-risk youth provides a clearer picture of why this is important. According to the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS):

Young people who have the Five Promises — Caring Adults, Safe Places, A Healthy Start, Effective Education, and Opportunities to Serve — do better in school, are more likely to pursue higher education and enjoy better relationships with their peers and families. They are less likely to engage in risky behaviors and are 5 to 10 times more likely to become productive citizens in their communities.

Direct service workers are often the caring adults and/or the providers of safe places, healthy starts, educations, and service opportunities that help youth and adults improve their lives. Enabling workers to better connect their day-to-day efforts to measurable outcomes will let them live the organization’s mission daily and have a more powerful impact on the lives of their participants.

Program Manager/Executive Director Gains
Tying efforts to outcomes can also be used to better assess an organization’s program-specific and overall performance, enabling an organization’s leadership to ensure success for participants, build capacity, and strengthen relationships with board and funders.

While program managers carry responsibility for enabling the critical efforts of direct service workers as they support participants, executive directors carry ultimate responsibility for the organization’s success. This means being able to juggle the disparate priorities of participants, direct service workers, program managers, board members, funders, and other stakeholders. For program managers and executive directors and the development teams who help enable them financially, simple, clear, and accurate reporting is paramount.

Good intentions are no longer enough. Effective human service leaders must take a more strategic approach to serving participants, enabling staff, and accounting for success to board members and funders. Such an approach calls for a disciplined system of connecting efforts to outcomes, the ability to quickly and easily generate reports that show success and areas of improvement, and a commitment to using these tools to make dramatic changes. It is hard work, but the instruments are available and the results are well worth the effort.

Board Member/Funder Gains
Driving the disciplined work of program managers and executive directors is the oversight and accountability that comes from boards of directors and funders from within and outside of these boards. Tying efforts to outcomes helps organizations turn what was traditionally a scorched dialogue with directors and funders into celebratory discussions of what more can be done.

Human service organization and other nonprofit boards are often comprised of business people. With a desire to serve their communities by applying their core business skills, they often begin participating on boards and quickly find a lack of data to use to help them understand and direct the organization. In their business roles, they are regularly inundated with data—bottom line results, quarterly projections, etc.—that drive their decisions. In the absence of such information, often the board simply becomes a financial overseer. With no other information on which to make decisions, they gravitate toward the one thing they know: numbers.

There is a dangerous underlying assumption that forms: The board doesn’t really know how human services are delivered and subsequently stays out of the details where their business acumen would be most helpful. Evolving an organization so that it clearly connects its efforts to measurable outcomes can help transform board input from rubber stamping of budgets to actively helping ensure the organization is meeting the potential expressed in its mission.

My colleagues and I have witnesses a number of transformations that have radically improved services delivered, staff effectiveness, staff satisfaction, leadership success, and staff-board/funder relationships.

Over the past decade or more, organizations have made efforts to become more focused on outcomes. As a result, they’ve begun collecting data with greatly varying degrees of operational value. Still, an increase in data collection in the absence of an organizational transformation will not have a significant impact. True transformation can happen only when actionable, “bottom line” information also becomes available. A commitment to a consistent focus on outcomes and the collection and use of data that support them are both required to dramatically increase impact and capacity.

The future is bright for any organization that will commit to and complete this transformation. Others will, unfortunately, continue to confound themselves, their funders and, most tragically, their participants. However, organizations are finding that once they can demonstrate success by tying efforts to outcomes, they better serve their participants and better partner with their funders to continue and expand their good work. Their mission statement becomes more alive as staff members live it out daily.

The unfortunate element is that so many organizations are content in their stagnant states. Their work can sometimes seem hopeless to all concerned because there’s so much need so little time and so few resources. But by applying a more strategic approach and connecting efforts to outcomes, those in human services are given reasons to believe they can make more of a difference. And they can. It takes some work, but the results are rewarding.

— Steve Butz, MS, LCSW, a former at-risk youth worker, is president and founder of Social Solutions, Inc., which supports the mission of the worldwide philanthropic community and human service organizations in measuring the quality of their resource delivery.