United Way of the Bay Area’s (UWBA) SparkPoint Centers provide one-stop community access to a full range of financial empowerment services focused on three areas: improving credit, increasing income, and building savings and assets. Each Center brings together government and nonprofit partners to provide services including financial coaching and workshops, career coaching, credit and debt management services, access to checking and savings accounts, foreclosure assistance, home buying assistance and more.

By offering these services in one place, SparkPoint Centers eliminate the need for struggling families to navigate a complex, confusing and time-con-suming system of service providers. Centralizing these services also allows SparkPoint to track client outcomes and progress as they access intercon-nected bundles of services that often have a compounding effect on each other and the achievement of separate financial goals.

Evolving Data NeedsWithin months of the SparkPoint program’s launch in 2009, UWBA imple-mented Social Solutions’ Efforts to Outcomes (ETO®) software to track client data and goal progress. The SparkPoint program quickly expanded, grow-ing to four Centers within the program’s first year. Today, UWBA operates 10 SparkPoint Centers in the Bay Area, and is actively expanding SparkPoint services to community colleges and community schools, offering financial and workforce services in schools to families of low-income children.

During SparkPoint’s rapid expansion, UWBA’s use of ETO also grew and evolved. UWBA reconfigured its ETO system and reporting processes to coordinate data collection and reporting across all sites in the SparkPoint network. With support from a federal technical assistant grant from Cor-poration for National and Community Service, UWBA provided technical assistance to SparkPoint Centers to improve its capacity to collect, analyze, and use data to improve the program.

Customer Case Study

United Way of the Bay Area SparkPoint Centers

“ETO software provides a single shared database where everyone can enter data, pull reports and see their contributions to the SparkPoint initiative as a whole.”

-Sandy AllenProgram Analyst,

SparkPoint & Education, United Way of the Bay Area

SparkPoint Center staff delivering services log data directly within the ETO system to track metrics and indicators for four primary outcome areas: • Livable income that reaches the Self Sufficiency Standard (i.e. $65,0000 for a family of four in San Francisco)• Good credit score of 650 or above• Savings equal to three months of living expenses• Debt less than 40% of monthly income

More recently, SparkPoint Centers have started to track client progress in stages. UWBA worked with its Spark-Point Center partners to develop a new set of metrics that measure not just short-term and long-term out-comes, but progress along a spectrum: financial stability (75% self-sufficient income, 600 credit score, 2 weeks savings); financial success (85% self-sufficient income, 650 credit score, 1 month savings); and financial pros-perity (100% self-sufficient income, 700 credit score, 3 month savings, no revolving debt).

The data collected within ETO is then used to produce four primary reports, which allows the SparkPoint Cen-ters to conduct staff management and quality control, inform service delivery on the ground, and motivate and inform clients about their progress toward goals. Additionally, SparkPoint Centers and UWBA are able to understand on an aggregate level, the impact of each SparkPoint site and the network’s progress toward long-term goals. Using the four primary reports as a foundation, custom reports have also been built to meet the unique reporting needs of individual SparkPoint Centers.

Report Name Audience Purpose Frequency

Weekly Report Center ETO Super Users, Center Staff

Used for staff management, quality control, data audits. Includes all efforts by center, by staff member, values and time spent.

Weekly/Monthly

Site Statistics Report

Center Directors, Partners, Steering Committees, Center Staff

Provides overall data audit of # of new & returning clients, # served, % of clients with up to date assessment.

Monthly

Site Outcomes Report

Center Directors, Partners, Steering Committees, Center Staff

Provides overall client progress toward short term and long term goals, % of clients who made progress on goals.

Quarterly

Client Financial Snapshot and Progress Report

Clients, Center Staff Provides clients with a snapshot of their own finances, and individual case management

Coach gives to client after each meeting

SparkPoint Center ETO Reports

A Client Financial Snapshot and Progress Report shows a client’s progress between meetings with SparkPoint Center staff.

Identifying What WorksIn 2013, UWBA experienced a “transformative” moment that informed the organization’s approach to maximizing the effectiveness of finan-cial services. SparkPoint Centers, also part of the Working Families Success Network, offer services to clients in bundles—rather than a client only accessing services for one issue, clients receive multiple interventions through the bundling and sequencing of complementary services and supports. With consulting from Social Solutions staff, and later from Stanford University’s Statistics for Social Good, UWBA de-veloped tools to analyze client data to determine whether there was a statistical significance between bundling services and client out-comes, and which combination of bundled services were the most ef-fective. UWBA discovered the most effective combination of bundled services is: one on one financial coaching, paired with one on one job coaching. With the new information, UWBA incentivized the entire SparkPoint network to increase bundling of these services in an effec-tive way to drive client outcomes.

UWBA has also been able to use data from ETO to identify the impact of SparkPoint Center services and outcomes on other aspects of cli-ents’ lives. The first SparkPoint Center at a community college—Spark-Point at Skyline College San Bruno–was able to compare SparkPoint data to college persistence rates. The comparison found that college persistence rates for SparkPoint clients were significantly higher than the college-wide persistence goal of 51%, with students receiving any combination of services showing an 87% persistence rate. Students receiving all relevant SparkPoint Services had an even higher college persistent rate at 93%.

Moving ForwardAs UWBA moves forward, the organization is pursuing plans to expand the SparkPoint model even further by looking at a two-generation ap-proach with centers in community schools. UWBA is also fielding in-quiries from several other cities across the country. The organization is looking forward to further refining its usage of ETO software, and using ETO data to identify and understand the impact of SparkPoint services on clients’ lives and wellbeing, both financially and beyond.

425 Williams Court, Suite 100 | Baltimore, Maryland 21220moreinfo@socialsolutions.com | 866-732-3560

“With the data in ETO software, we’re able to identify what works and make these shifts and changes so we can help drive people toward those outcomes.”

–Ena Yasuhara LiDirector,

SparkPoint Network at United Way of the Bay Area

College persistence rates for SparkPoint clients were significantly higher than the college-wide persistence goal of 51%, with students receiving any combination of services showing an 87% persistence rate.