Background
A Way Home Washington is a Seattle based non-profit that partners with government and philanthropic organizations to prevent and end youth and young-adult homelessness across the state. There are an estimated 13,000 to 15,000 young people in Washington state who are surviving homelessness alone and require extra support to find housing and a path forward.
A Way Home Washington does not accept any government funding directly, and instead they advocate for more funding for local communities and service providers. In order to do this advocacy work, they rely on survey and performance data to prove the efficacy of the programs they create and support.
Challenge
To secure funding for the communities they support, the organization wanted to leverage a large national survey data set to create data-informed visuals in support of local programs. They needed to pull succinct and compelling stories around the impact of COVID-19 on 18–24-year-olds in Washington state.
Other organizations have performed analysis at the national level. However, there was no analysis available for Washington state specifically. In addition, the survey data was encoded and not structured in a way that was compatible with front-end BI tools, or readable.
Solution
Keyrus utilized Tableau Data Prep and Tableau Desktop to transform and visualize the survey results. The first step was to build a workflow in Tableau Data Prep to optimize data for ingestion to Tableau desktop. This included unioning several disparate survey result files and joining survey data to mapping files to transform coded data to human-readable variables.
Next, Keyrus created a suite of five dashboards to analyze business questions such as:
How has COVID-19 affected young adults’ mental health?
How were young people’s education plans disrupted and what were most common reasons for disruption?
Did young people grow more or less confident about paying rent over the course of the pandemic?
Results
With the new suite of Tableau dashboards, A Way Home Washington has definitive data-driven answers to their business questions and custom visuals to present to their stakeholders. The Tableau prep workflow and connected dashboards are reusable and scalable, allowing the client to add to their data set as more weeks of survey results become available.
The insights derived in these reports will allow the organization to present findings to government agencies as well as other non-profit groups in order to gain funding for the populations they support.