OASIS

St. Louis, MO

About OASIS

OASIS is a national educational organization dedicated to enriching the lives of adults age 50 and older through lifelong learning and service. Offering stimulating programs in the arts, humanities, health, technology and volunteer service, the organization brings people together to learn, lead, and contribute in their communities.

OASIS' Approach to Performance Measurement

OASIS uses a performance measurement system aimed at facilitating data accessibility and analysis at its educational centers located throughout the United States. Directors of each center have access to the organization’s centralized database, into which they enter information about the participants in their programs and their volunteers. The database also includes data on participants’ opinions about the quality of OASIS’s programs, which is generated through evaluation surveys given to a random sample of OASIS members.

To learn from this data, directors of local centers can easily generate reports that show how the center measures up in relation to previously agreed upon objectives for the year. In addition to using the reports to guide day-to-day decisions at their local operations, center directors discuss these reports every six weeks with staff from the organization’s national office. This provides an opportunity for each center to assess its current strengths, identify opportunities for improvement, and predict trends. The national office also reviews reports generated from the database as part of an auditing process that ensures that data are collected and entered accurately.

The Benefits

Implementing a performance measurement system has helped OASIS staff to better understand their day-to-day operations and fulfill their objectives. Having access to the aggregated information from the database has enabled local directors to move beyond educated guesswork and successfully assess their performance. Prior to implementing its current performance measurement system, OASIS had found that center directors’ targets and objectives tended to over- or under-estimate their centers’ capacity and potential. Relying on actual numbers gave each center a clearer picture of their capacity and has resulted in more accurate goal setting. It has also helped to encourage a collaborative relationship between the national office and the local centers.

As a result of the participant surveys (introduced in fall 2009) that contribute to the organization’s data pool, OASIS will be able to measure the broader impact of its services. For instance, including questions about health indicators in their survey, and then comparing responses with the courses in which the respondents have enrolled, will provide OASIS with a better understanding of the impact of their various course offerings on the lives of their beneficiaries.

Keys to Success

• Encourage your team to become involved in the performance measurement process by making collected data easy to access and report. The accessibility of reports from OASIS’s centralized database has proven essential to the success of its performance measurement system. Before OASIS made these reports readily available to its centers, the wealth of data collected by the organization often did not end up getting put to use.
• Hold regular reviews of the performance measures with your team to be certain everyone understands the meaning and usefulness of the data for planning business strategies. These reviews should focus staff on understanding how performance indicators change over time as strategies are put in place.
• Seek streamlined methods of collecting data. Sometimes organizations need to find ways to collect data that are not easily available. While developing its current performance measurement system, for example, OASIS determined that, in order to assess its progress in carrying out its mission, the organization needed to know the number of low-income older adults enrolled in its classes. OASIS did not want to require its participants to disclose household income information, so the organization found an alternative: gathering household zip codes from each person who registered for a class as a proxy to identify those who lived in neighborhoods that qualify as low income. Using zip codes allowed the organization to estimate participant income from readily available census data.
• Continuously ensure the accuracy of the data you collect. By recognizing the importance of auditing its performance measurement system, OASIS has been able to identify inconsistencies and make significant improvements to its methodology.

Additional Resources on Performance Measurement from OASIS

• OASIS Sample Internal Report: Drawn from OASIS’s database, this report shows how OASIS’s national office can easily assess its progress relating to membership, class participation, community outreach, and outreach to poverty-area populations.
• OASIS Evaluation Survey: This survey provides an example of the kinds of questions that can enable an organization to assess the quality of its programs, their long-term impact, and to get a better understanding of the needs of its participants.
• OASIS Sample External Report: Shows how OASIS is sharing the results of its participant survey with external stakeholders.