Family Support Center manages the Coordinated Entry (CE) system in Thurston County. This is the one, centralized application process for homeless adults to get supportive housing anywhere in town, prioritized by a vulnerability score. However, the CE team inherited a database that was messy and overwhelming for the people who needed to update it. There were also critical errors in the data, meaning people at the top of the waitlist were missing from reports and being overlooked for an apartment that they should have been the very next in line for.

FSC urgently needed a change. They set out to overhaul their database so they could pull accurate records, truly prioritize the most vulnerable populations, and make it faster and easier to keep things up-to-date.

The data cleanup required a deep understanding of how local organizations ranked and tracked people in need of housing. We began with weekly, in-person work sessions with CE data coordinator Alison and her team, who showed us step-by-step what they needed. We closely investigated the problems they were having and worked through them together in real-time. Over the course of a year, we made steady, incremental improvements alongside Alison until the data was completely transformed. Along the way, she learned how to make customizations of her own and traveled all over Olympia to do hands-on training with other social services organizations. 

The project had a real impact on both the people using the database and those in need of housing. For those on the waitlist, the application process was smoother at every step of the process. People got into housing in the right order and weren’t disappearing into the spreadsheets. The project also revealed a flaw in how people fleeing domestic violence were listed in the database, which we addressed by adding an extra layer of security to protect their information. 

For staff, the platform became easier to navigate. They could access their program information quickly without time-consuming workarounds. In the past, some local organizations avoided using the CE system entirely because it was so unreliable and difficult, but Alison worked tirelessly to get everyone on board with the new setup.

Better data also meant that Family Support Center could clearly demonstrate the impact they were having in the community, which helped them secure more funding to expand and continue their work. On top of that, as a direct result of the work Griff and Alison did on making the database more accurate and usable, Thurston County became the fifth in the nation to meet the data quality standard for Built for Zero, a national data-driven homelessness project.