Reducing Difficulty in Making Informed Decisions in Human Service Organizations

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Human services organizations cover several essential societal functions and work with many vulnerable individuals and groups. When your organization wants to improve its impact or expand its reach, you must make the right decisions to support your desired outcomes. Understanding the strategies you can implement to streamline decision-making can help your organization reach its improvement goals.

1. Use Predictive Analytics

Many organizations, including those in human services, collect and analyze performance and resource data to understand their daily operations and efficiency. However, you can improve your functions and goal progress by using data to predict and avoid specific outcomes.

When you want to make stronger decisions or increase your organization’s resilience, you need predictive analysis. This data analytics method helps you identify problems and challenges before they occur, so you can respond to changes earlier with vital strategies and tactics that will benefit your community and organization.

Here are some examples of how you can use predictive analytics in human service organizations:

• Proactive interventions: Human services organizations often work with vulnerable communities, and you can use predictive analytics to identify potential triggers and trauma before they occur. Service agents who work closely with individuals can locate signs of struggles and use them to implement preventative strategies sooner to address urgent situations better. For example, agents who work with people with substance use disorders can recognize relapse patterns and implement interventions before the individual returns to harmful habits.
• Drop-out prevention: Many human services organizations work with at-risk communities and implement strategies to prevent harmful outcomes. Your organization might target middle and high school students and encourage them to complete their education to set them up for a successful future. Predictive analytics can identify students more at risk of dropping out or failing, helping human services agents better focus their efforts and assist these individuals.
• Resource efficiency: Resource allocation is essential for saving money and addressing community needs. Your agents depend on your organization’s resources to carry out daily operations. Predictive analysis tracks past resource use to help you forecast how to use those resources in the future. When conditions change, your predictive analytics can alert you when you need to invest more resources to match demands, so you can face situations with everything you need.

2. Make Evidence-Based Decisions

Evidence-based management is the practice of backing decisions with scientific evidence. When you want to make better decisions at your organization, this management system can help add more critical thinking and data analysis to processes in human services. Many organizations base their decisions on instincts alone, but evidence-based management encourages you to consider more factors before implementing new strategies or policies.

Like predictive analysis, evidence-based decisions will help your organization leverage your collected data better. Some evidence you can use to support this management method includes the following:

• Performance data: You can determine if new and existing processes work for your organization by studying your performance data. This information can help you determine if you are using resources well or if your human service agents might need more tools and resources to achieve outcomes. When you use your performance data to support initiatives, you can better justify their purpose and relevance while implementing techniques that can help your organization’s operations.
• Current and historical data: Depending on your decision, you might need to use different data sets. Typically, you will want to use the most recent data available to understand how your organization currently functions. You can better consider how new factors might change metrics and impact performance. However, if you want to bring back a previous strategy, you can compare current and historical data to determine if existing market conditions will support this older tactic.
• Case studies: If you want to implement a new idea that you have never tried, you can gather more evidence and better determine if it might suit your organization by seeing how it impacted other organizations similar to yours. Case studies and performance data from other human services organizations can help you understand how the strategy might affect daily operations and performance outcomes.

When your staff offers valuable suggestions and ideas, you can use your data and other available information to investigate and determine how implementing them might impact your organization.

3. Communicate Clearly With Staff

When you want quality improvement in human services, your staff and agents are valuable resources for feedback and growth. As the individuals working in the field and with your target audiences each day, they will understand strategy impact and resource needs. Two-way communication can help you identify areas of improvement and strengthen your decisions by basing them on what your staff needs.

However, one-way communication is also essential when rolling out new policies and goals. You must clearly define the desired outcomes and the role of each individual and team in your progress.

Your implemented communication method is essential, allowing you to relay information effectively. Some ways your organization can optimize communication to support improvement initiatives include the following:

• Meetings and calls: When you want to share information with more people, meetings and video calls can help you reach an entire team or department. You can effectively share information and ensure everyone receives the same messages. These methods also allow you to open the floor to questions, efficiently communicating concerns and questions at a general level.
• Emails: Emails are another useful way to communicate information to big groups, especially if you lack the space to talk to everyone at once. You can break down news into bullet points and headers to make it easier to consume. Further, individuals can respond to emails with questions and concerns for efficient two-way communication. People can reply to the whole group or just to the sender, allowing them to communicate however makes them comfortable.
• Surveys: You can open conversations about improvement and needs by sending surveys. Many platforms allow individuals to submit information anonymously, so they can comfortably and honestly share their thoughts without fear of repercussions. You can efficiently receive information when everyone can independently work on and submit surveys.

4. Encourage Collaboration

You can boost efficiency and improvement by encouraging individuals and teams to work together. Many human services agents and teams have specific goals they focus on, but others might possess skills to help them more effectively and quickly reach desired outcomes.

You can support collaboration by equipping your human services organization with the right tools. Your communication tools should support individual and group conversations, allowing people to reach out to others as needed. Further, centralized databases for documents and resources can help groups and individuals access information from other departments without requesting it, boosting healthy relationships and operation efficiency.

Team building and bonding opportunities can also foster better collaboration. When your staff feels comfortable and friendly with each other, they can more readily reach out for help when they need it.

Make Stronger Decisions With MIP Fund Accounting

Your finances are an integral part of implementing new strategies and decision-making processes. To invest in new resources and procedures, you need substantial financial support. Your human services organization can support stronger decisions and better improvement with MIP Fund Accounting software solutions.

We designed our accounting solution for nonprofits and government organizations so the platform better supports your interests and needs. MIP Cloud scales with your organization, so you can grow without changing resources with each milestone. The comprehensive reporting features help you understand your current financial performance, so you can make decisions that reflect your existing resources.

Request a demo today and discover how MIP Fund Account can help your human services organization grow.