The Returning Citizens Consortium had just been awarded a Kauffman Foundation planning grant to drive collective-impact, systems-change work around reentry in Kansas. One of Kauffman’s requirements was a data management plan: how the consortium would collect data, what it would measure, and why.
The problem was that the data didn’t live in one place, or even in systems that could speak to each other. The consortium spans about thirteen member organizations: workforce boards, the state corrections system, nonprofits providing supportive services, and the public agencies handling everything from unemployment to Medicaid enrollment. None of it was connected. As the consortium’s lead put it, Kansas workforce boards can’t even connect to the state’s own unemployment system, let alone to outside organizations.
On top of that base layer of returning-citizen data sat an entirely separate need: a way for employers to connect directly with reentering individuals, plus credentialing and certification tracking for both sides. A lot of stakeholders, a lot of puzzle pieces, and no existing infrastructure to hold any of it. The consortium knew it couldn’t do it alone.
We started by listening, not pitching. Before proposing a single piece of technology, we joined the consortium’s team meetings, asked questions, and committed in writing to sitting down individually with each of the thirteen member organizations to understand what their data needs looked like from their own perspective.
That mattered because every member saw the problem differently. A state agency, a workforce board, and a frontline nonprofit each have their own view of what’s most important. The work was teasing out, across all of those conversations, which needs rose to the top as shared priorities for the group as a whole, rather than building to any one organization’s wish list.
From there we authored the data management plan itself: the indicators of progress, the data sources at intake, release, and post-release, the storage and privacy architecture, the compliance posture across HIPAA, FERPA, and CJIS, and a modular technical plan that mapped to the consortium’s own three-pillar model of Work Ready, Mind Ready, and Life Ready. The plan was built to be phased, so the consortium could sequence what to build first as priorities and funding came into focus.
We understood from the start that the data represented people, not just numbers. We’d done comparable work with veterans reentering civilian life, and that grounding showed up in how the plan was built: around the real challenges of the people behind every data point.
The data management plan became the spine of the consortium’s implementation funding proposal, defining more than forty progress indicators across employment, trauma, social, and residency domains, and scoping a phased, modular platform the consortium could fund and build in stages. It gave the group something it didn’t have before: a single, defensible plan for how a fragmented set of systems and organizations could be made to work as one.
The work didn’t end when the plan was submitted. Months later, when a potential funder came back with new questions about metrics, the consortium turned to us again, unprompted, for input. We came back with questions and ideas the team hadn’t considered, including reframing certain measures as ranges rather than static numbers. That kind of ongoing thought partnership, rather than order-taking, is what the consortium’s lead pointed to as the difference.
Note: the data portal has not yet entered implementation; the consortium’s implementation funding decision remains pending. This study covers the strategy and planning phase. A follow-up study will document the build once implementation begins.
Strategy is where it starts. Here’s the same understand-first approach on a delivered system, with a senior accountant’s week handed back.
