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CLIENT CASE STUDY

Boys & Girls Clubs of America: Creating a roadmap for improving processes

BGCA worked with Accenture to assess the organization’s business processes.

Overview

For more than 150 years, Boys & Girls Clubs of America have been helping kids reach their full potential. The organization’s mission is, “to enable all young people, especially those who need us most, to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens.” Boys & Girls Clubs annually serve nearly four million young people, through membership and community outreach, in some 4,000 Club facilities throughout the country and BGCA-affiliated Youth Centers on U.S. military installations worldwide.

Opportunity

Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) wanted to transform the organization from a network of local clubs to a cohesive, consistent network that provides greater quality—and quantity—of positive impact on communities.

The organization has a history of success in making a difference in communities, but it needed a clearer way to measure that success, and create a future roadmap for improving business processes and saving costs. For example, they were missing opportunities to attain larger grants because they were not able to track and measure results. Every affiliate had its own tool and process for collecting data. And these affiliates each have 1-15 Club locations that roll up under them, so the information-sharing challenge ran broad and deep.

BGCA chose Accenture to conduct an assessment to identify, quantify and prioritize opportunities for strengthening the organization’s capacity to deliver on its mission goals.

Solution

Accenture launched a nationwide survey to access current challenges within various business functions within BGCA, and calibrate the organizations’ appetite for change. In parallel with analyzing the survey results and reviewing BGCA’s current technology and services investments, the team conducted site visits. The Accenture team interviewed directors, IT leadership, chief program directors and headquarters staff across 12 BGCA chapters of varying sizes and geographic locations to understand how they do their jobs—and how new tools and processes can support them to perform those jobs even better.

Through this analysis, Accenture identified five key opportunities to streamline services and technologies to help BGCA leverage economies of scale and save costs. Accenture brought knowledge of current trends in shared services to shape and define how they could be applied to BGCA. Accenture recommended BGCA focus on:

  • Donor Management/Fundraising

  • Accounting

  • Procurement

  • Technology

  • Membership Management/Outcomes Reporting

BGCA and Accenture agreed that these main focus areas could help drive more funding to the mission and bring more efficiency that would ultimately impact the children the organization serves. Accenture also assisted by helping BGCA to prioritize these initiatives based on what would help drive down costs and increase revenue while being realistic on what could be accomplished in the next one to five years.

Results

Accenture delivered a set of recommendations that defined the shared services and shared systems implementation efforts that BGCA could take to optimize impact across the nation. The top initiative recommended was a Membership Management and Outcomes Reporting System. This organization-wide reporting database measures outcomes across the organization—a capability the organization was critically lacking.

BGCA acted on this recommendation and implemented a new Membership Management and Outcomes Reporting System. More than half of BGCA Clubs are already using the system, and just over a third more are in the process of getting up to speed. BGCA expects to have 90 percent participation of all Clubs by the end of 2013.

The system is enabling transformational results, including:

  • Insight. Enhanced ability to apply for and track grants funding, specific goals and targets.

  • Visibility. The system provides a window into weekly metrics, such as attendance and demographics.

  • Accuracy. Leadership has access to meaningful, real data-driven insights, rather than assessing progress based on word of mouth.

  • Confirmation. The data allows the organization to demonstrate and communicate the collective impact of BGCA programs and services.

  • Benchmarking. This year, BGCA used a number of national questions across all locations to compare data year over year. They can use the insights gleaned to share best practices from leading Clubs. Furthermore, for the first time, BGCA Clubs can see the results from the goals they set for the year, and track their progress at an individual club level.

Additionally, BGCA now has a means by which they can view annual survey information and look more granularly at Club data and outcomes. The survey is now online and enables the Clubs themselves to access their data via dashboards and reports to see how their kids are doing and benchmark them against other clubs of similar size in other geographies. Going online enabled the organization to double the number of survey participants, from 40,000 student participants last year, to 80,000 this year.