Moving the Needle on Unemployment: xChange
The unemployment rate of the East Side which is 14% compared to the City of St. Paul’s rate of 7%. Working to combat this, the Employment xChange is a coalition of more than 10 nonprofit organizations that support jobseekers on the East Side of St. Paul. As a collaborative, the xChange builds relationships with both employers and nonprofits to build the capacity of the East Side in order to move the needle on the unemployment.
Needs Assessment Phase
Collectivity was asked to complete a needs assessment with the Employment xChange to discern what operations and technology improvements could be made in order to best serve the needs of the coalition, as well as their primary contacts at their nonprofit partner organizations which are employment counselors that provide direct services to people looking for work.
Needs Assessment Phase with xChange facilitated by Collectivity
During the needs assessment phase, we discovered operational insights at multiple levels:
Needs of the coalition (ex: communicate publicly, track jobseeker information that is not assigned to a partner, make referrals to partners, communicate range of services that their partners provide, relationship management with employers)
Needs of the nonprofit partners that are serving job seekers (ex: current state process of assisting a job seeker)
The shared challenges and opportunities facing partners in the coalition (ex: onerous compliance requirements, required databases that organizations are unable to extract information from)
The following are examples of what we provided in the needs assessment phase:
Workflows to help individuals and their teams get on the same page about current state processes in their organization
Ideas about short term and long term solutions that could save time and money
A prototype dashboard for the collaborative to ‘try on’ meaningful metrics to articulate their impact as partners together
The process was designed to build capacity throughout the needs assessment phase. At the conclusion of this phase, Collectivity presented a summary report of the top recommendations we believed hold the most promise for strategic and operational capacity building for the coalition. Our analysis is rooted in the purpose, strategic direction, and realistic financial and people constraints facing our nonprofit clients. The Senior Leadership Team discussed these recommendations, and selected the highest priority project to implement.
Implementation Phase
We not only helped assess what the biggest return on investment would be for the xChange as a coalition, we assembled the team needed to get that recommendation implemented. The top priority the Senior Leadership Team of the xChange surfaced was the need for a public website.
Armed with an inventory of key functionality needed from the assessment phase, Collectivity formed a process and approach to get this project done. Because we understand the value and complexity of working with multiple stakeholders, we designed an Project Team involving website users to help inform the development and design of the site to ensure the final product was rooted in the needs of employment counselors, job seekers, and employers. The result is this public facing website that tells the story of the xChange and offers key tools to specific stakeholders that need them most.
At Collectivity we are grateful for the incredible work our clients are doing in advancing economic equity in our state, and find it a privilege to use our background in organizational strategy, operations, and technology to assist a coalition like the xChange in supporting collective action in the East Side.
