Orangewood Foundation builds lasting change with Bonterra Apricot’s Impact Hub
Meeting youth where they are
Orangewood Foundation is an Orange County, California-based nonprofit organization (nonprofit) providing innovative services designed to uplift and empower young people facing challenges in their lives. The organization serves community-based youth between the ages of 11 and 24 across four connected domains: housing, education, workforce development, and human trafficking. Rather than siloing clients into a single program, the foundation encourages every young person to tap into the full range of resources available through its programming.
Customer profile
Product: Apricot with Impact Hub Reporting
Sector: Nonprofit
Vertical: Human services
The approach reflects the foundation’s deeper mission. The Orangewood team isn’t focused on surface-level guidance or quick fixes. Rather, they work to create lasting, meaningful change that helps young people thrive well beyond their time in any one program. Central to this work are the interpersonal relationships the team prioritizes. By building genuine rapport with each client, staff members earn the trust that enables long-term change.
The foundation’s programs bring this mission to life in practical ways. Orangewood runs a school for grades 7 through 12 with boarding options for those who need it, giving students a stable place to learn and grow. Its scholarship program helps young people access the everyday experiences that shape a typical student’s life, including sports and other extracurricular activities. Through its grants program, the foundation covers real, immediate needs like books, housing, and car repairs, removing the practical barriers that can stand between a young person and their goals.
Orangewood’s staff understands that good intentions need good evidence. The organization leverages data and evaluation processes to measure the effectiveness of its programs, ensuring resources go toward what truly moves the needle for the youth it serves.
The challenge
A system that couldn’t keep pace
Before adopting its current solution, Orangewood Foundation managed its case management and data collection through an aging, internally managed system that had outgrown the organization’s needs.
For nearly a decade, Orangewood’s case management was run through a Microsoft Access database on the frontend and a SQL database on the backend, with data collection handled entirely by an IT Manager. When Josh Meyers joined as Assistant Director of Data and Evaluation, that dynamic shifted. He was tasked with collecting data in a way that worked for three distinct groups: Youth Support specialists, the management team, and the development team.
The challenge was clear from the start. The existing database simply wasn’t built to serve all three parties. Its workflows didn’t reflect how each team needed to interact with data, and the rigid structure of the legacy system left little room for the kind of customization that a multi-stakeholder environment demands.
Reporting limitations compounded those challenges further. The previous reporting environment had real ceilings, both in terms of what it could produce and who could access advanced functionalities. Day-to-day operational data could be surfaced for the youth support specialists, but rolling up 7,000 or more records to assess program or organizational efficacy proved difficult. Attempting to generate those higher-level views slowed the system considerably. Because the data couldn’t be rolled up efficiently in an accessible, modernized platform, it became difficult for Josh to carve out the time needed to consult with leadership team members on performance. Strategic conversations were delayed by the very tools that were supposed to support them.
Security presented another significant burden. When operating within its own database infrastructure, all accountability for data protection fell directly on Orangewood. Safeguarding sensitive medical data internally was both expensive and time-consuming, pulling resources away from the foundation’s core mission of improving client outcomes.
Josh and the team assessed their logic models, mapping outputs to outcomes, before evaluating a wide range of database solutions. Throughout that process, two priorities remained constant: flexibility and simple user experiences for end users. Orangewood needed a new technology partner with a flexible, intuitive platform with robust reporting capabilities, reduced internal security overhead, and the ability to support distinct data collection workstreams across multiple teams.
The solution
Building a foundation for lasting impact
After carefully evaluating a wide range of platforms, Josh and the Orangewood team selected Bonterra Apricot to elevate their case management experience. Apricot gave Orangewood the configurable, centralized platform it needed to replace its decade-old system and build something that truly worked for its programs.
A key priority in the transition was continuity of data, particularly demographic records, which were carefully carried over from Microsoft Access to Apricot to ensure no historical information was lost. From there, Josh worked with Bonterra’s Implementation team to custom-configure Apricot’s available templates to meet all of Orangewood’s stakeholder needs in a way the legacy system never allowed. After reviewing grants and contracts, extracting reportables, and meeting with program directors and managers, Josh now captures each program requirement in a purpose-built form. When circumstances change, he can make edits, publish updated versions, and return to those forms whenever needed. The rigidity of the old system made that kind of iterative workflow impossible.
Every Orangewood Youth Support Specialist now has an Apricot login. The platform serves as the database of record across all of Orangewood’s programming, including the ILP Program, the ORC Program, Project Choice, and the combined Grants and Scholarship Program. Over the past eight years, the platform has expanded to encompass additional initiatives as the foundation has grown. Case plans, case notes, and assessments are all hosted in Apricot. In line with the foundation’s commitment to its clients’ voice and choice, each client also has access to their own documentation within the system.
At the management level, Apricot enables the team to track key staff productivity indicators, including clients per caseload, heaviest caseload days per week, and the average time to completion from initial client engagement. When assessing program performance, Josh and his team analyze pre- and post-program status based on a set of predefined criteria to evaluate whether individual initiatives and combined programs are delivering as expected.
Apricot has also changed how Orangewood handles data security. Aside from end-user-driven vulnerabilities, Bonterra owns data security across every other facet of the platform. That shift has saved the foundation both time and monetary resources that were previously spent managing data protection internally.
Impact Hub, Bonterra’s new interactive reporting experience, fundamentally transformed what Orangewood could do with its data. With Impact Hub, Josh can now create a custom calculation, which draws data from several Apricot fields, and return to it when needed. This new process significantly reduced the time needed to roll up program and organizational data and simultaneously elevated Josh’s level of confidence in the accuracy of the reports. With less time spent rebuilding analyses from scratch, Josh has more capacity to consult with program directors and managers on performance.
The process of reporting to the C-Suite and funders has also been revamped. Previously, Orangewood’s development team had to repackage and redesign data before it could be presented in executive-level formats. Josh can launch executive dashboards with live data that C-Suite members can engage directly by asking questions within the system, removing the need to manually drill up or down.
Impact Hub has also simplified how the team executes board-level reporting.
Orangewood’s board members require special incident reports to assess the acuity of the organization, capturing instances where Orangewood staff need to provide extra care and support to a participant. Previously, Josh relied on a fragile chain of Zapier automations, Excel, and a cloud-based folder accessed by Power BI to produce live data views for board members — a system that had multiple points of failure. Now, Josh creates a Data Standard that flows directly from Apricot to Impact Hub, creating a far more reliable and streamlined reporting path.
Finally, Orangewood, together with Orange County United Way, integrated Apricot with Clarity HMIS, Orange County’s homelessness Continuum of Care system, and CalOptima Connect, the county’s Medicaid data exchange. This extends the work Orangewood has done to meet a critical state reporting requirement: CalAIM is a series of California initiatives designed to transform the Medi-Cal program and connect it more seamlessly with other social services, and Orangewood reports data from Apricot to CalAIM and these other systems through dedicated integrations, eliminating the duplicative data entry case managers previously handled by hand.
CalAIM requires specific forms and fields to be captured by third-party databases to ensure the data transfer is accurate. However, the field labels in Apricot don’t need to match CalAIM’s exact terminology, since those terms are often unfamiliar to Orangewood staff. Instead, fields can be labeled in language the team understands. Those transferable fields are then automatically integrated into caseloads, consolidated in one place, run through a QA process, and shared with CalAIM and the county’s other systems.
I’ve stopped looking at the number of CalAIM notes that have been kicked back to us for resubmission, because there are none. We don’t have to look at it. Our notes that go in are approved. That was unheard of before Apricot.
Turning better data into greater impact
From days lost to days gained
- 86% reduction in time from client meetings to data entry
- 1.5-hour grant report writing and validating process, reduced from 6 hours
- 7,000+ records rolled up to program-level reports
Together, Bonterra Apricot and Impact Hub have delivered meaningful, measurable change across Orangewood Foundation, giving Josh, the management team, and Youth Support Specialists a faster, more confident, and more strategic relationship with their data.
One of the most tangible wins has come in the speed of data entry across the Youth Support Specialist team. Previously, it took 14 to 15 days between client meetings and the actual entry of that data into the system. By leveraging Impact Hub and coaching Orangewood staff on best practices for data entry, the team brought that duration down to two days organization-wide. The path to that improvement was itself a data-driven process: the team began tracking how long entries were taking, identified common trends contributing to delays, and designed targeted interventions to address those patterns. The result was a systemic reduction in entry time that has held across the organization.
At the management level, Impact Hub has elevated the quality and accessibility of performance conversations. Because Josh can now overlay multiple data points in a single chart, he can analyze data, calculate change, and present findings in a way that generates a different reaction from end users. The level of analysis is far more advanced than what was previously possible, while the presentation itself is easier to interpret.
Generally speaking, when it comes to custom measures, I view it like this: if I think it, I can write it. That is super helpful.
This allows the management team to efficiently evaluate fluctuations in clients served, meal distribution, and other key metrics. These ongoing assessments are ultimately what enable Orangewood to refine its programs and services in response to real performance data.
As Orangewood continues to bring contract reporting into Impact Hub, Josh plans to visualize that data in charts, making it easier for end users to consume than traditional graph formats. That shift is expected to generate significant time savings, both in how staff members absorb and act on the data and in the time Josh spends writing and validating reports. Ultimately, streamlined reporting supports Orangewood’s ability to maintain the funding relationships the organization has built over the years.
It makes what we’re already doing more efficient. In terms of securing new funding — it previously took me 5 or 6 hours to write a grant report, then another hour to validate it. I can write that same report in maybe an hour and a half in Impact Hub. That’s the difference in efficiency.
Josh is also in the process of implementing a QA process, backed by Impact Hub, to identify weak spots in current workflows and deliver targeted trainings to address any systemic issues. Beyond improving internal processes, the QA process ensures clean data at the record level. That data integrity is what made it possible for Orangewood to establish an API connection between Apricot and HMIS, the Homeless Management Information System. The time and cost savings generated by a QA process that reviews hundreds of notes per day are significant.
With the time saved from Apricot and Impact Hub, I am now afforded the opportunity to focus on quality and make the jump from quality of data to quality of outcomes.
Before Apricot and Impact Hub, Josh was barely able to focus on the evaluation portion of his role. Database management consumed the majority of his time. Now, with the infrastructure in place to support a working QA process, Josh is looking ahead to a more sophisticated version of it: one that can surface how quickly Orangewood is turning around case notes for correction, how many notes require multiple corrective interventions, and which supervisors are performing most effectively across the organization. Beyond that, he plans to roll the first layers of data up to the program level, giving Orangewood an even clearer view of where its greatest opportunities for improvement lie.
At the center of all of this progress is a simple but powerful truth: Impact Hub made it easier for the Orangewood Foundation to see what is happening in the data, in turn providing opportunities for leadership to coach the staff toward changes that bring out better outcomes for the young people the organization serves.
