Social Ventures Australia: Measuring & reporting on employment program success.

Overview

Social Ventures Australia (SVA) is a not-for-profit agency that works with organisations and government bodies to drive social change for disadvantaged communities using evidence-based solutions across Australia.

SVA partnered with Revium to assist with gathering, interpreting and reporting on data for an employment program that assisted disadvantaged young people to find and maintain fulfilling careers as well as monitoring the performance of Employment Agencies that managed the programs.

Revium was consulted to develop an economical solution that identified the progress of candidates and how to improve the effectiveness of the program. The process that followed measured candidates with 3 surveys completed throughout the program lifecycle. The surveys were segmented into 10 key characteristics that helped to benchmark performance.

SVA subsequently partnered with Revium to devise a solution, which measured tangible outputs to identify candidates’ progress and the capability to flag issues where candidates needed more support from the agencies or the program required an update.

Challenge

The key challenge was to deliver a complex solution with a lean budget which employment agencies could use to measure and better understand the programs’ performance against 10 key characteristics, along with job outcomes measured from the survey. As this was the first time SVA had ever conducted a project like this, there was a natural level of anxiousness and no prior solutions to refer to. Aside from all of these issues, the nature of the data collected and business structure presented also proved to be a significant challenge.

At minimum, the solution needed to;

• Provide a way to securely collect survey data from all participating agencies

• Aggregate survey data into a single repository

• Transform data to average scores across key characteristics measured in the survey

• Most importantly, tell a story through clear visualisations that would highlight the impact programs had on youth employment overtime through the use of radar graphs

Personal and sensitive information was collected in the surveys, and it was imperative that data collection was encrypted and that access was limited to only critical users to protect the privacy. of the candidates.

The visualisations selected needed to show performance of an employment program and individual overtime so that Case Managers could receive insights at both levels. These Case Managers also
needed a way to keep track of responders from their agency so they could follow up those who had not completed the survey.

Solution

To deliver to the lean budget, answer the required questions and meet time critical deadlines, Revium recommended using Google Suite of products to build a solution that would meet the data requirements.
Revium followed our proven analytical approach to deliver a solution that exceeded expectations whilst
still complying with privacy and data protection considerations.

The process Revium followed to develop the solution was:

Data Collection
After thoroughly researching the top survey tools available on the market, Revium decided to use Google
Forms to create base templates for three surveys. The templates were copied for each participating
employment agency so that each organisation would have their own set of surveys to issue to participants at key times after joining the program.

Data Aggregation, Transformation and Data Visualisation
Google Sheets was used to build workbooks that would aggregate and transform collected survey data as it natively integrates with Google Forms, in addition to the desired radar graphs for the 10 key characteristics.

Each form was dynamically linked to a sheet in a workbook where raw data accumulated with each response. Data across all three surveys were aggregated in real time and transformed on a separate
program to format the data required for the visualisations.

Data Privacy and Protection
Google Forms and Google Sheets were selected to build out the solution as they meet accepted security standards for cloud-based document and questionnaire sharing. Data transmissions within the
Google Suite are encrypted using SSL and access to data can be managed.

Outcome

Revium and SVA have completed the pilot program across 52 selected employment agencies. The solution is scalable, and it takes under 20 minutes to create a new workbook for an employment agency. Information collected from these trials has helped to fill the knowledge gaps about
Employment Agencies’ roles in driving youth employment, and SVA have decided to deploy the solution across more Employment Agencies within Australia.