Organisation’s Mission

Circle Collective is a charity and social enterprise that operate streetwear stores based in Hackney and Lewisham that work to get young people experiencing barriers into permanent, life-changing work.

Working in London’s most deprived boroughs across East & South East London, the programme combines the opportunity to gain work experience and customer service skills in the streetwear shop whilst attending frequent CV workshops, barrier breaking employability skills sessions and networking opportunities with the charity. Most of the young people they support struggle to get a job because of a lack of experience. To overcome this, all participants do shifts on the shop floor of the streetwear store to give them real work experience. Profits from the store are then reinvested back into the charity.

The Challenge 

Circle Collective were finding it increasingly difficult to keep track of programme delivery across two stores using just spreadsheets. For staff, data entry was cumbersome and reporting was also time-consuming. This meant that, as well as struggling to track the journey of each young person on the programme, Circle Collective were also finding it hard to easily generate the kind of data requested by funders. Crucially, as a small organisation, they had a limited budget for developing a replacement system.

We knew we had been collecting extremely important and relevant data for the work that we do with young people but as the majority of it was either paper based or on spreadsheets, it was a huge task to bring this all together and create reports for current and potential funders, as well as having an up to date understanding of our performance levels.

Matthew Lewendon, Director of Operations, Circle Collective

Our Solution

We started by looking at the spreadsheets that were currently being used and talking to the Circle Collective team about the challenges they face in using them. We also delved into the kinds of metrics they needed to report on. 

With this information, we were able to design a simple implementation of Salesforce that allowed staff to easily record information about each young person participating in the programme. We also focussed on developing simple views that allowed staff to understand where each young person was in the journey at a glance. Finally, we developed easy-to-use dashboards that contained all of the required reporting metrics.

Dashboards give staff access to key metrics at the click of a button

Staff are prompted to populate key information used in reporting to prevent data quality issues

Lists give staff an overview of all young people they are working with and where they are in the journey

The Impact

• Staff spend less time entering data and creating reports

• Data quality has improved so that consistent information is now recorded for all young people

• This consistent data means that Circle Collective can generate insights from analysing the data that they could not easily do before (e.g. exploring the correlation between number of shifts and likelihood of entering full-time employment at the end of the programme) which is essential for funders and partners, existing and potential

By working with Impact Box, we have been able to refine our data and the way we capture information from the young people we work with, and develop a safe and concise way to collect and present this information. We now work in a real time environment and every member of the team can cut the information to their own needs. Before having Salesforce set up for our needs, these tasks that take minutes would have taken days. As a charity with very limited resource it has made a huge difference.

Matthew Lewendon, Director of Operations, Circle Collective