CUSTOMER STORY
Bill Wilson Center uses data to enhance community services
Learn how nonprofit Bill Wilson Center infuses feedback into its housing programs, grant applications, and advocacy.
OVERVIEW
Nonprofit Bill Wilson Center supports more than 5,000 children, young adults, and families through housing programs, education, counseling, and advocacy. Working to end youth and family homelessness is no small task—and data makes all the difference for Bill Wilson Center’s goals. In partnership with Listen4Good, a nonprofit that helps social sector organizations build and sustain high-quality feedback systems, the organization uses SurveyMonkey to collect feedback across its many services so it can continuously improve and show impact.
THE CHALLENGE
Collect actionable feedback on community programs
“For nonprofits, feedback is important because we're established to serve the unmet needs of the community,” said Josh Selo, chief executive officer of Bill Wilson Center. “How can we fully understand the unmet needs of the community unless we ask?” Though Bill Wilson Center had previously gathered satisfaction feedback from participants in its housing and community programs, the data wasn’t high-quality, useful, or available throughout the organization. When Bill Wilson Center was introduced to SurveyMonkey and Listen4Good, it discovered the missing ingredient to establish more effective feedback loops, identify gaps and opportunities, and drive impact.
“We are partnering with folks in our community who have had very marginalized experiences. SurveyMonkey is helping us gather their feedback in a way that makes the information that we get actionable.”
Laura Foster
Division director research, analysis, and impact
Bill Wilson Center
THE ANSWER
Comprehensive insights that drive better strategies
Bill Wilson Center uses SurveyMonkey to check in with participants in its housing services, gauge satisfaction when participants exit services, and survey community partners and internal staff.
For its first survey targeted toward young adults in its Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) program, Bill Wilson Center was able to fine-tune the design thanks to SurveyMonkey's diverse question types, Listen4Good guidance, and feedback from the Center’s Youth Impact Partnership (YIP), a youth council of current and former clients. This survey’s results revealed ways that Bill Wilson Center could improve communication and access to services; the Center also received a great Net Promoter Score (NPS®) of 49, which helped validate the success of the program.
SurveyMonkey makes it easy for Bill Wilson Center to share surveys through texts, email, and QR codes. And Division Director Research, Analysis, and Impact Laura Foster appreciates that she can filter results in a variety of ways. For example, by filtering by attributes like age or race, she can uncover how different groups of people experience Bill Wilson Center services.
“The analysis I’m able to do with SurveyMonkey is so easy,” said Foster. “We’re able to harness feedback in a way that would be far more difficult without the features that are available within the SurveyMonkey platform.”
“With SurveyMonkey, we’re able to learn from our clients what we do well and where we have opportunities to grow. Showing the community we're listening to them creates the kind of relationship where people have greater confidence in who we are as an organization.”
Josh Selo
Chief executive officer
Bill Wilson Center
THE RESULTS
NPS wins and data-driven improvements
Bill Wilson Center's internal staff surveys gave its leaders a lot of ideas for improving employee experience, including a monthly all-hands meeting, a relaunched employee newsletter, and new opportunities to recognize staff for their hard work and tenure. And after launching feedback-driven RRH initiatives, a follow-up survey confirmed that communication had improved and participants were benefiting from new staff training. Plus, the RRH program’s NPS went from great to excellent with a 29-point increase that raised its score to 78.
One housing program insight showed that 60% of young adults and 40% of families needed assistance with transportation costs; this data helped Bill Wilson Center secure a grant to provide participants with gas cards. “When we're able to use the data that we get from feedback in a grant application or a news article, it provides a greater level of credibility to our services and message,” said Foster. “It also gives our board of directors a very specific view into the work that we do.”
SurveyMonkey has been instrumental to Bill Wilson Center’s strategic planning, helping it reach out to board members, community leaders, government partners, and donors to find out what the organization is doing well, what it could do better, and what it should focus on next. “Our strategic planning survey enabled us to create a three-year plan that had broad consensus from our stakeholder groups,” said Selo. “They felt that we had the right information and a clear vision of where to go, which wouldn't have been possible without SurveyMonkey.”
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Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.