The Chinese American Service League (CASL) is a human services organization that has served the immigrant community for over 40 years. www.caslservice.org CASL’s comprehensive programs have connected families and individuals in the greater Chicago Chinese community with the vital support they need: providing educational and cultural foundation for children, ensuring seniors live full and independent lives, enhancing education and workforce training, helping immigrants achieve citizenship, and securing their community’s housing and financial well-being.
In 2018, CASL upgraded its legacy case management software to Salesforce with the help of Chicago-based Provisio Partners. After a successful implementation, CASL’s Chief Operating Officer, Jered Pruitt, said, “We can now see where we are creating positive impact and where we are not, and this requires us to be nimble in adapting our programming.”
CASL needed a comprehensive view of their services.
Adapting became particularly important after going remote in March 2020. CASL was able to strategically pivot to assess and address client needs using data and to plan for permanent adaptations based on lessons learned while working remotely. Through Salesforce data collection, they learned that from March 17th, 2020 – when CASL went fully remote – to July 2, 2020 they provided 446,563 hours of service to 5,476 individuals. 
A Visual View of Impact
CASL wanted help to show the number of services they were providing to clients and what impact they were having. In response, Provisio created dashboards for each of their departments based on the services offered in those departments. For example, in the High School program, they offer academic training to students. They want to gather data to show if there is a correlation between number of attended days compared to average GPA. Will students with higher attended days have higher average GPAs? Now they have the data to see aggregated client trends, allowing them to explore diverse funding opportunities.
Being fully remote during the implementation of CASL’s CRM Analytics‘ dashboards provided some unexpected benefits to the process. During configuration, the Provisio Partners team was able to meet more often with CASL to show the configuration of each dashboard in incremental pieces, gathering feedback at every stage and adapting based on that feedback. During the mentoring sessions, Provisio used screensharing and recorded each session so that CASL could use the videos for training purposes or a resource when they configure additional dashboards in the future.
Comparing Social Determinants of Health to Promote Change
CASL reengaged with Provisio Partners to help them achieve their current goal: to compare their clients’ Social Determinants of Health to Chicago’s general population. Through the data they receive, they can understand many important factors that affect their clients’ health, such as: number of smokers versus non-smokers, level of education, whether individuals have primary care providers, and how many residents live in one house. This information will empower CASL to track what positive impact their services have had and where they can expand and improve their services. Provisio helped CASL utilize CRM Analytics, a tool that allows them to visualize side-by-side comparisons between their clients and Chicago residents as a whole. These images can help stakeholders truly understand where help is needed.
Key points CASL has discovered:
- Almost 15% of CASL clients do not have health insurance coverage compared to 8% of Asian residents in the Chicago area.
- The higher percentage of CASL clients who do not have health coverage largely come from younger age groups: 43% in age group 0-18 (compared with only 3% from citywide data) and 22% in age 19-64 (compared with 14% from citywide data).
- In terms of health services utilization, only 29% of CASL clients have visited a dentist in the last 12 months compared with 65% among Asians in the Chicago area.
Today, CASL has the full picture of how their programs and services impact each participant. CRM Analytics’s capabilities transformed CASL’s data into visual representations to make it more comprehensible and actionable. CASL is now able to track their success and how they can better support their community when looking at Social Determinants of Health.
Successful Partnerships Lead to Successful Implementations
Working with CASL again was a fantastic opportunity for Provisio Partners. “Our partnership and journey with CASL over the last three years has been impactful, and we’re delighted to play a role in their use of data analytics to better the community”, said Travis Bloomfield, Managing Partner & CEO of Provisio Partners. It’s exciting to see a service organization, like CASL, able to live their mission to its fullest through the power of Salesforce.
Jered Pruitt said, “Because of the strong partnership between Provisio Partners and CASL, we have been able to transform our organization into a nimble provider that can easily pivot to changing client, household and community needs – positioning CASL as a national leader in data-informed practice and prover of impact.”
Marjorie lives in Saint Louis, Missouri. She received her Master’s degree in English from Truman State University. Her responsibilities at Provisio Partners include content creation and technical writing.