Youth Homelessness Outcomes Tracker and Danger Zones and Stepping Stones Assessment Tool

The Brief

Homelessness charity Depaul needed a tool that would help them assess the progress that their clients were making toward their aspirations and goals, and in doing so measure the effectiveness of the services Depaul provides to them

The Client

Depaul UK has worked for more than 30 years to support people facing homelessness. They are a homelessness organisation with specialism in supporting young people.

Our Solution

After performing a rigorous assessment of existing off-the-shelf outcomes assessment tools it was decided that only a bespoke solution tailored to Depaul’s specific requirements would suffice to give the insights they need to perform such evaluations. With extensive collaboration and consultation, Outlandish created the Youth Homelessness Outcomes Tracker (Y.H.O.T) and following its success the tool was developed into a second product, The Danger Zones and Stepping Stones assessment tool

We developed the tool in phases, starting with a beta version of the tool, with a reduced but fully functional feature-set, delivered in time for testing by a university over the next six months, we then rolled this out to Depaul caseworkers and their partners. The responsive design houses a simple to use WordPress backend where Depaul workers can upload and edit both questions and answers, and view all clients. All of the responses are recorded and progress is plotted on a line graph so that both workers and clients can easily recognise how their responses have improved or decreased with each questionnaire. Depaul can use their unique user IDs from their case management platform within the tool and therefore keep track of their clients progress within their case management CRM.

The tool is user focused for both Depaul workers and their clients with bespoke options such as viewing the results for a specific questionnaire as two pie charts, one for answers pertaining to intrinsic capabilities, and the other for destination outcomes. The segments of the pie charts differ depending on whether the score for that segment is high, medium or low. Similarly, internal, external, and overall aggregate scores for a questionnaire submission can also be viewed as pie charts alongside each other.

The success of the Y.H.O.T. led to the Danger Zones and Stepping Stones Tool. This second product was developed following Depaul’s five year research into temporary accommodation for young people. The digital tool uses similar functionalities as the Y.H.O.T. but the questions are served within the temporary accommodation framework, assessing the levels of risk and support required. It is based on the same unique ID set up, again allowing Case Workers and Partners to track clients in one integrated CRM.

The Tech

The youthhomelessness.org website houses both the public-facing website and the two client monitoring tools. It is built on a vanilla (gutenberg) wordpress site, with custom admin pages for administering and running the tools.

Access to the backend admin pages are controlled via roles and permissions, along with posts to posts associations with organisations for their third-party partners, to ensure the client data is isolated within each organisation. There are three levels of user:

Administrator: No restrictions in the backend
Worker: Assigned to an organisation, and can access the tool(s) associated with the organisation
External admin: Same as a worker, but can additionally manage the organisation’s tools settings, the list of worker users for the organisation, and view the aggregated client data

The tools themselves are written in angularJS (v1.8), making use of chartJS and related plugins for the graphs