Civica Involve : City Of Greater Geelong Case Study

Youth development staff save 45 hours a week with better digital tools

Moving from manual processes to Involve’s efficient digital tools has saved the Department of Youth Services 45 hours per week – hours that are now spent helping more young people and making better decisions. Greater Geelong’s 20+ youth development staff work with 35,000 young people from a range of backgrounds. The team used to gather feedback during their appointments and fill in a Google form with their data. Other staff would then download the data into Google Sheets or Excel to create reports. This manual and time-consuming process led to errors, duplication and, worst of all, less time for engaging with young people

Transforming paper processes

Data input, transfer and report construction took a lot of resources. Logjams, frustration and delays were common. And despite the large time commitment, the information was often inconsistent, unreliably formatted or missing entirely.

Not being able to segment the data meant the team couldn’t get a complete picture of the needs of their audience.

Discovering the capabilities of a new system

After switching to the Civica Involve Pulse app, the youth services team’s feedback gathering became much easier – and much more useful. Using their unique user profiles on mobile, smart devices or desktop, staff could upload engagement information through a questionnaire. This allowed their work to be safely tracked and provided specific qualitative and quantitative data.

Ongoing support helped everyone get on board with the new platform. The Civica Involve Customer Success team created a bespoke training video for current and future Geelong youth services staff, showing how to create an account, capture a response and submit data. Team leaders also had training on their extra responsibilities. The Civica Involve technical team updated the dashboards as the city team became more familiar with the system and their needs changed.

Insights to drive initiatives forward

It wasn’t just data collection that improved. The Civica Involve analytics suite allowed the team to identify trends and patterns and reach their KPIs. Colour coding let staff quickly see how they were progressing.

The new platform has a host of functions that help the department become more effective. Geographic data lets the team filter results and make better decisions. Real-time updates for ongoing work, and shareable dashboards let the whole council see what’s going on.

Productivity triples and staff become empowered

By December 2019, the team documented 42,000 interactions on the platform, a move from two to six interactions per day. At the same time, the team have saved 45 hours of staff time per week. The dashboard is visible in the lobby of the building to highlight this impressive progress.

The result of this is more effective staff who make better decisions for local young people. Team members are more empowered, having better oversight of projects, quickly responding to change and developing new programs as the need arises.

Now the Department of Youth Services are going one step further, rolling out feedback campaigns via emails sent directly to the youth council and local young people.

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