MPS Assists Friendship Place

This summer, MPS consultants Ben Eden and Shannon McGuire worked with Friendship Place, a DC-based nonprofit whose mission is to empower people experiencing, or at risk of homelessness, to obtain stable housing and rebuild their lives. This well-regarded NGO runs several programs, including the Family Connect Program, which helps at-risk families. The MPS team worked with staff and clients of Family Connect to help improve their program metrics.

Over a three-month period, Ben and Shannon gathered information to identify the needs of the Family Connect Program and to make their program metrics more effective.  The MPS team honed some of the processes that were in place, and developed recommendations, such as conducting all interviews with clients with the help of an electronic survey; making their exit survey mandatory; and reframing the interview process to make it more conversational, while providing greater comfort to clients.

Ben explains that, “With limited personnel, Friendship Place had a crucial need to strike a balance between managerial and client work. Shannon and I identified several mechanisms to increase efficiency and capture more accurate data so they could better serve their clients. Creating tools and metrics to support data-driven decision making and program performance analysis is important for any organization, especially one with a consistently-changing and substantial number of clients.”

MPS has signed on to do more work with Friendship Place, this time for a follow-on project in their development department that will help refine and expand their corporate fundraising. Meanwhile, Ben and Shannon are excited to watch how the Family Connect program improves in the coming weeks and months.