How Rebuilding Together Improved Its Impact Reporting

The generations of today want to change the world for the better. They want to be a part of a movement for social good, and they want to support the nonprofit organizations that are taking action in the things they care about. When people do their research to find out which organizations to support, one of their top priorities is learning how much impact the nonprofit has made.

And good impact reporting goes beyond just numbers and statistics. For instance, if you are a nonprofit that provides home repairs to those in need, you’re reporting metrics on how many volunteers your organization has, how many homes you’ve repaired or how many communities you serve — but you’re also looking at specific metrics like how the home repairs have changed lives or how the home repairs have improved the recipients’ safety.

Caroline Blakely

One nonprofit that does an exemplary job at impact reporting is Rebuilding Together, a nonprofit organization that has a mission of providing home and community repairs to those in need. On its website, you can find impact metrics like eight in 10 homeowners shared that home repairs from Rebuilding Together “have made a positive difference in their lives and kept their problems from getting worse,” and nine in 10 homeowners who received repairs anticipate “they can safely live in their homes over the next decade and beyond.” In an interview with NonProfit PRO, Caroline Blakely, president and CEO of Rebuilding Together, attributes the organization’s success in impact reporting in something it calls the Rebuilding Together Success Pack, a platform that enables the organization to collect information in a standardized fashion and report out its impact.

“The CRM system allows our affiliates to now sign up, get trained and actually use the success pack. The system helps us a lot in three very important metrics: volunteer management, program management and donor management,” Blakely said.

The data collected on the CRM system has helped Rebuilding Together report the impact it's making on its community with key metrics, but it also allows the organization to look at donor information so that it can better serve its constituents.

Nick Contino

“The Rebuilding Together Success Pack is alongside Salesforce's Nonprofit Success Pack. The Success Pack is essentially a managed package that we provide to our affiliates that you install much like an app on your phone, and it's a collection of the impact measurements and demographic information that we need,” Nick Contino, senior director of IT at Rebuilding Together said. “It's all standardized and allows us to install that into the affiliate’s own system, and then we train the affiliate to collect the data in a standardized way so that we can get reports from all of our affiliates. We can aggregate that data, and then provide those impact measurements.”

He continued, “Before we had that standardization, it was much more difficult. It took months to get that data, whereas now we will get that data in minutes.”

Since implementing the CRM system, not only has the organization been able to gain insight on a number of data points and metrics, it has also saved its affiliates hours of administrative time to have this type of package available to them. To date, Rebuilding Together has 126 affiliates across the country.

To learn more about Rebuilding Together, click here.