A young child hugs her smiling mother, who is working on a laptop computer and reading handwritten notes.

Case Study

First 5 Riverside: Strengthening families with data

Background

First 5 Riverside County is a multi-service child advocacy organization that invests in programs and partnerships that promote, support, and enhance the safety, health, and early development of young children, families, and communities in Riverside County, California.

Challenges

The agency needed a new way to effectively navigate case management and referral workloads for new family resource programming.

A group of four multi-ethnic teenage girls, 18 years old, standing in front of a school building carrying book bags and notebooks. They are high school seniors or freshmen in college.

Their previous data management system required staff to manually enter information, which led to data entry errors and reporting challenges. It would often take staff multiple business days to review data and reports, slowing productivity. Additionally, their previous data system could not produce integrated views of a family across multiple services, limiting staff’s abilities to optimally assess client information.

Outcomes

Increased efficiency allowing staff to spend less time on manual processes and more time serving families
Enhanced data management, analytics, and reporting, fostering a data-driven culture
Improved collaboration across service providers for the benefit of children and families

As First 5 Riverside County worked to enhance and expand their programming, investing significantly in Family Resource Centers, home visiting, health and early learning programming, they needed a case management solution to support their vision. With Bonterra Impact Management, the team can store data in a centralized database, easily manage client information, quickly and accurately pull reports, refer families to other services, and more. These increased data efficiencies, improved workflows, and cross-system integrations have empowered them to better serve their community.

“Bonterra Impact Management is the connective tissue of data and reporting across the services we provide and fund. The work is moving so quickly in human services, so for us, it’s about building an amazing framework with ideas and vision, and we are able to create this with Bonterra. They are a partner in how we’re evolving our work, and we see Bonterra as playing a key role in bringing our vision to reality.”

According to Jennifer Gomez, program coordinator at First 5 Riverside County, “The transition to Bonterra Impact Management has been great. Impact Management has simplified and streamlined the ability to refer families and see who is using which services. This is giving us a cleaner platform with greater ability to see any false positives or errors, and we are seeing higher quality in our reporting.”