Numbers game

One of the functions that is necessary in this sort of work is keeping up with numbers. We need to be able to show our funders that we are indeed serving the people we claim we are . . . and we need to be able to track our own services and contrast them by the needs we are seeing. For example, I'm currently writing a grant for some money to pay for professional counseling for adult clients who can't afford counseling or don't have adequate insurance coverage.

Accepting the numbers agencies like mine submit takes a little faith and a little bit of a critical eye. I remember a few years ago, a similar agency reported that they fielded 1,500 crisis line calls but only assisted 7 clients. Or when an agency in a community with a total population of 20,000 says that they provided victim services to 2,000 new and unique victims in a year. Or, when an agency in a community of 500,000 only served 3 victims of sexual violence in a year.

One of the questions we constantly ask ourselves is: how do we report accurately the number of people we serve and the units of service we offer. Some agencies will say "we provided shelter to 1,200 people last year" when their shelter sleeps 7. Or, another agency said they provided support group services to 5,000 people in the course of 52 weeks. Clearly, these organizations are leading folks to believe that units of service and individuals served are the same thing.

In my agency, we work hard to be clear in our numbers. We have developed a report from which all funder reports are pulled . . . and when the funder's report leaves us feeling as if it doesn't adequately express all we do, we give them a copy of our internal reporting. It is a two second report . . . that fits on one sheet of paper. One part reflects the individuals served, categorized by type of victimization. When we have an individual who has experienced multiple victimizations, we count them for the primary abuse that first brought them to our agency. If someone stops contact with us, and several months pass before contacting us again, if there has been a new victimization, they get counted as if they are a whole new person. We do this not to bolster our numbers but to reflect the amount of violence in our community.

The second part of the report shows the units of service. In a month, we may serve 12 new victims/survivors but answer our crisis line 28 times. One client who is seen in the ER typically has, at minimum, 3 crisis line calls, an er call, a follow up call, and one or two "information and referral" services.

We also report how many calls are taken outside normal business hours to demonstrate that even when personnel aren't physically in the office, services are offered and used.

And, lastly, we don't have a computerized client record system. Yet. If we were to purchase such a system, we would also have to put it on a machine that is not connected to the internet or networked with our other computers. I would rather use paper and pencil than ever have to call clients and tell them that our records were hacked. The question we haven't resolved yet is how long do we keep client records. I'm starting to think that 10 years is long enough . . . but I have a sneaking feeling that if we shredded records, the next week something would get requested by the courts.

Which opens a whole new box of worms. Because we do not do professional therapy in our office, I don't feel that we need to keep extensive notes on clients or assessments. Our client records really give us the demographic information we need for reports and brief, factual, notes on the crime. I have had the courts request our files before . . . and because we don't keep extensive records on individuals . . . our client records have never been judged by a Judge to be worth sharing in a trial. I think this is one of the great advantages of a small, grassroots type organization.