Explaining Value to Stakeholders

Search Developmental Center tells its story to funders, peer organizations, family members and guardians of its program participants. The organization communicates its value to stakeholders through an annual report, agency newsletters, and website.

Telling our story to our employees, Board and program participants: We communicate with out employee, Board and program participants using a variety of methods which have been, over time, embedded in our operational structure. These include:

-Quarterly Management Reports culminating in an Annual Management Report

-Annual Accessibility Improvement Plan and six month Progress Report

-Three Year Strategic Plan and annual Progress report

-Periodic Quality Assurance Survey Reports

-Annual Quality Improvement Plan

Operationally, in conjunction with the various reports, several employee and particiant-focused planning events and committee meetings are held throughout the year that serve the purpose of sharing information about the organization’s value with employees, participants and the Board, as well as planning for quality improvements, making management decisions, and long range positioning. Those include:

• The annual quality improvement planning meeting- at this meeting program participants and employees are given information about the organization’s progress on the previous year’s quality improvement goals, the organization’s demographics, participant and stakeholder satisfaction with the services provided and numerous performance indicators. Employees and particiapants also use the information to formulate quality improvement goals for the upcoming year, as well as the accessibility improvement plan.
  
• Consumer council meetings- Peer advisory groups, make up of the individuals receiving Search’s services, meet at all group homes and adult learning centers monthly. The councils serve many purposes, chiefly as opportunities for our participants to exercise choice and control over their services and lifestyles. They are also valuable venues for sharing information about the value of our organization’s services.
  
• Board meetings and the annual Board retreat- This is where the Strategic Plan is created and monitored, setting Search’s policy-level direction over a three year period. These meetings include focused conversations, using the AMR/QMR data, regarding Search’s program areas of highest value, as well as those program areas that require improvement.
  
• Various organizational committee meetings- Committee meetings, where all levels of staff are represented, are used to carry out the organization’s business operations and communicate information about the organization’s performance and value. Committees also provide useful oversight over the organization’s performance in key areas. Those include: community inclusion, organizational employment, community employment, healthcare and intake (enrollment). Committees include: human rights, behavioral health, quality assurance, vocational, intake, medical services, corporate compliance, employee education, program and support services and the executive services committee. The executive services committee members include key personnel such as the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operations Officer, and Division Manages fro all programs and is the ‘clearinghouse’ for the work product of all the other committees.
  

Performance results are published and distributed in the Quarterly Management Report, Annual Management Report and are distilled into a variety of other formats throughout the fiscal year. This information is used to develop the Annual Quality Improvement Plan, Three Year Strategic Plan, and the Annual Accessibility Improvement Plan. The information is also used by management and administration to make ongoing decisions regarding service delivery and business operations.

How the Organization Developed its Current Process to Measure and Report Effectiveness

 At first, we relied heavily upon the standards published by CARF, the Rehabilitation Accreditation Commission. We are mandated by the State of Illinois to be accredited, and in an effort to meet this requirement we used the CARF standards on outcomes management in designing our own system. It is a process that took several years to become 100% integrated into our ogranization’s operational structure. Interestingly, the difficult part was not establishing the process to measure and report information on our performace. The hard part was what to do with all this information, how did this new capability fit in with our pre-existing management structure. Simply put, we had to decide who was going to get the information and how it was going to be used.

In determining our ‘metrics,’ we focused upon our three core services, Supported Living, Adult Learning, Community Employment, and a set of foundational business operations. Again, this was not difficult to do. But it did take some work to accomplish, mainly developing the infrastructure to do what we needed to do to measure our preferred quality indicators.

The final process was to determine specifics about the indicators we had chosen. In other words, if we are tracking how often people go out, how often is enough to meet the kind of quality expectation our participants expect. To do this we took into account input from our participants and employees, as well as what would be realistic. You don’t want to choose something you could never realistically accomplish within the time frame of your measurement. You also don’t want to set a target that is so easy it presents no challenge. For the supported living program we came up with a measure of the % of participants having 8 community outings or more as the minimum measure of success. An organization has to be willing to adjust its measures and metrics too. If things are going along and the organization sees that it is not meeting the measure it has set, they need to determine whether the problem is a matter of poor performance or that we started with an unrealistic target.