Examples

Amanda Hope Rainbow Angels

The client

Amanda Hope Rainbow Angels is an organization focused on bringing dignity and comfort into the harsh world of childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. They address the "here and now" of the whole family and support them throughout their battle with cancer. They provide fun t-shirts and clothing, teach families to have a voice, provide financial assistance to families, train health-care professionals to offer Family Centered Care, and provide behavioral health counseling to the patients and their families.

The project

AHRA wanted to be able to communicate their data more effectively with grant funders, donors, stakeholders, and the community. Volunteers were asked to help consolidate all of the organization data into a cloud data-warehouse, to automate reporting, ensure accuracy, and eliminate data silos. This included developing metrics to convey the impact of their services, identifying the data needed, developing surveys and procedures to collect the data and tools to analyze it, and providing instructions on how to use the tools.

Volunteers

1. Ece Ceren Izgi
2. Michelle Muha

organization-health-care organization-family-services project-data-collection project-data-analysis project-impact-measurement

Goodwill of Greater Grand Rapids

The client

The mission of Goodwill is to “strive to enhance the dignity and quality of life of individuals and families by helping people reach their full potential through education, skills training and the power of work.” Goodwill is one of the most respected companies in the US and Canada, known for operating hundreds of thrift stores based on extensive donation efforts and for its successful job training programs.

The project

The Grand Rapids headquarters operated 20 stores in an eight-county region in Michigan. They were faced with a problem most brick and mortar stores are having – declining foot traffic in the stores. The stores and online sales help provide funding and opportunities for job training.

Volunteers worked with the VP of Business Intelligence at the Grand Rapids Goodwill to evaluate the different campaigns used by Goodwill and their effectiveness in generating foot traffic at eight of the stores in their region. A secondary assessment was how the campaigns impacted donations. The marketing campaigns involved a variety of media, including television ads, social media, Pandora, print and billboards.

Volunteers

1. Michael Altemeier
2. Sophia Sullivan

organization-workforce-development project-data-analysis project-marketing

Housed Working and Healthy

The client

Housed Working and Healthy's (HWH) mission is to help people become self-sufficient. The HWH model is a partner based eco-system that co-locates housing, mental health services, workforce training and employment, along with a meal plan. This supportive structure and services helps people stabilize, develop a support network, become trained, gain experience, get a job, secure housing and ultimately become self-sufficient.

Two projects

HWH sought to create a set of community indicators that could be employed to assess the societal need for the HWH process of helping struggling individuals to become self-sufficient, with employment and housing. These indicators needed to be measurable based on available community data, which required exploration of available data sources. The ideal set of indicators would achieve the following:

• demonstrate the societal need for HWH;
• assess the potentially favorable financial impact of HWH on the City of Denver;
• enable comparisons between HWH and similar nonprofit organizations, so as to better articulate the HWH mission; and
  
• provide statistics to assist HWH in fundraising efforts.

After collecting three years of data on candidates for HWH programs, HWH sought to answer questions regarding the success of their students in employment, health, and self-sufficiency.  The analysis included suggestions for modifying and expanding the data collection process and identification of factors related to student success.

Volunteers

1. Dan Betcher
2. Vinayaka Gude
3. Shaifali Juneja
4. Arooba Kamal
5. Prajwal Narayanaswamy
6. Katherine Obenschain
7. Joel Ramos
8. Andini Safitri

project-data-collection project-data-analysis project-impact-measurement organization-workforce-development organization-housing-assistance organization-mental-health organization-poverty-alleviation


IDinsight

The client

IDinsight is a global advisory, data analytics, and research organization that helps development leaders maximize their social impact. They work with governments, multilateral agencies, foundations, and innovative non-profit organizations in Asia and Africa across a wide range of sectors, including agriculture, education, health, governance, sanitation, and financial inclusion.

The project

IDinsight was working with a national government in North Africa on eliminating barriers to schooling for out-of-school children. Since many children come from rural areas, safe transport to school was important but under-provisioned. The mission was to assist the national government in using population, demographic, and geographic data to plan investments in the construction of dormitories and provisioning of school buses.

Volunteers

1. Mohan Chiriki
2. Matheus Diogenes Andrade
3. Manuel Laguna
4. Paul Rubin
5. Joseph Schoenbeck
6. Sankash Shankar

organization-international project-location-analysis project-routing project-capital-planning



KABOOM!

The client

KABOOM! unites with communities to build kid-designed playspaces. Combined with their decades of experience in community engagement, these playspaces can spark joy and foster a sense of belonging for communities of color — communities that disproportionately have less access to play where they learn and live.

The project

Volunteers worked with KABOOM! to create a strategy map that could be used to eliminate playspace inequity gaps in underserved communities of color and low-income communities in three California cities: Los Angeles; Oakland; and San Francisco. Project goals included the following.

• Collecting data from distinct sources on the location of playspaces.
• Utilizing this data in combination with other datasets on race, ethnicity, and income to:
  • Create a report that shows where there is a need for investment in playspaces.
  • Generate a mathematical optimization model to suggest new playspace locations to maximize reach while adhering to budget constraints and other limitations such as bus stops, transportation, etc.
• Building step-by-step instructions to aid in a national rollout of this playspace analysis.

Volunteers

1. Mitch Stepleton

organization-youth-development organization-recreation project-data-collection project-data-analysis

MedSurplus Alliance

The client

The MedSurplus Alliance (MSA) is a cross-sector alliance that works collaboratively to improve access to quality donated medical products, through accreditation, capacity-building, management and technology solutions, and leadership. MSA is a program of The Task Force for Global Health. Collectively, Task Force programs have a real impact by solving massive health problems. They work with partners to eliminate diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries and transform health systems, so that in the end, all people can realize their right to living a healthy life.

The project

The goal of the project was to help MSA build a resilient supply chain to be able respond efficiently and effectively at critical times such as pandemic spread as well as normal situations. Three main deliverables were envisioned.

• Optimal Network Design - MSA did not own a logistics system and used third party offerings. They wanted to build a logistic network to move inventory around and increase the scope of service.
• Optimize Inventory Strategy - MSA wanted to create predictive models to forecast different medical supply, equipment and device demand across the network and develop an optimal inventory plan.
• Flexible Processes - Upon developing network design and inventory models, MSA wanted to build a set of action-oriented dashboards to bring full visibility into current state, and develop processes to lead to desired actions.

Volunteers

1. Oswaldo Almonacid Rivas
2. Diego Delgado Caseres
3. Sebastian Granda Altamirano
4. Christian Ramirez Luna

organization-public-health organization-international project-process-improvement project-data-analysis project-logistics

Nashville Zoo

The client

The Nashville Zoo is a progressive and dynamic zoological park serving Middle Tennessee, southern Kentucky, and hundreds of thousands of tourists who travel to Nashville every year.

Two projects

The zoo’s Education Department was working on a comprehensive evaluation methodology for all their programs to measure knowledge, attitude, and behavioral change among participants. They wanted help in improving the data analysis and the overall program evaluation process. The project was done in two phases. The first project involved defining metric that would help the zoo make strategic decisions about improving programs and also provide information to funders, and assessing the data needed. In the second project, the volunteer helped develop a data pipeline from Google Sheets (where the data was stored) to software that could be used for visualization.

Volunteers

1. Paul Jurek

organization-conservation organization-education organization-animal-welfare project-data-analysis project-decision-analysis project-data-management


Remerg

The client

The mission of Remerg is to stop the revolving door of recidivism, one resource at a time. Their vision is a world where people released from incarceration are able to restart successfully and never go back. They connect people released from prison and jail to resources and information they need, when they need it. By doing so, Remerg.com fosters agency, supports success, and ultimately helps to reduce the rate of recidivism in Colorado.

The project

Remerg uses Google Analytics for their website. They sought guidance in how to use it, what information they could extract, and how to interpret that information.

Volunteers

1. Venroy Porter
2. Laurent Poulain

project-web-analytics organization-community-support


Young Audiences

The client

Young Audiences of New Jersey & Eastern Pennsylvania (YA NJ/EPA) inspires young people to expand their learning through the arts. They do this by bringing arts experiences by professional teaching artists directly to students; making the arts accessible regardless of socioeconomic background, geographic area, and ability.

The project

YA NJ/EPA was faced with a difficult decision on whether or not to continue a fund raising event that required considerable staff time to organize. Did the expected revenue offset the opportunity costs of having the staff work on other efforts? There were mixed opinions on the Board of Directors. Working through a structured process with Pro Bono Analytics volunteers expert in decision analysis allowed the Board to reach an agreement on the best path forward.

Volunteers

1. Xixi Chen
2. Matthew Gorman
3. Michael Kennedy
4. Jack Kloeber
5. David Krahl
6. Naga Kundeti
7. Emilia Silebi
8. Yunsheng Xiao
9. Peiran Zhao

organization-arts organization-education organization-youth-development project-decision-analysis