Organisation’s Mission

Offploy is a social enterprise formed by ex-prisoners to help those with convictions secure employment and lead a positive life.

Formed in 2016, Offploy supports people with criminal convictions into meaningful, mentored and sustainable employment. This helps the UK fill its chronic skills shortage, reduces reoffending and makes society safer. They provide supported CV writing as well as access to training, and signpost and support candidates with job interviews.

The Challenge 

When we were first approached by Offploy in 2018, all of their data was collected on spreadsheets. This meant that they had no way of seeing the relational nature of the information they stored, such as which candidates had attended which courses. In turn, this was causing a lack of visibility of the journeys that individuals had undertaken with Offploy and their unique stories as told through their engagement with the service. There was no way of viewing a candidate's full experience as one coherent picture in order to assess the impact of their engagement on their mental wellbeing and employment prospects.

Before we worked with Impact Box to develop our Salesforce system, we had a chain of endless and unorganised spreadsheets. It seemed like every new action within a project needed its own spreadsheet. The fact we were juggling 14 projects meant there was obviously quite a bit of data to sift through. It wasn't effective or motivating for our team.

Jacob Hill, Managing Director, Offploy

Our Solution

Offploy had already identified Salesforce as the platform they wanted to use and turned to us to help us customise it for their needs. We started by sitting down with Offploy to understand the journey their candidates go through, from initial referral through to programme completion and follow-up monitoring. Once we had grasped the stages, we set about developing Salesforce to allow them to track each step of a clients engagement and display it in a way that was visually-compelling and intuitive.

Visual paths provide users with a clear overview of how a client is progressing

Secondly, we tackled being able see or report on the extent of a candidate's engagement with the service by adding the ability to log interactions held between Offploy staff and individual candidates. For the first time, this enabled Offploy to see how regularly candidates had been attending sessions and engaging with their offer.

Simple graphs show at-a-glance metrics for each candidate's engagement

We also developed ways to easily log job applications, interviews and employment against each candidate, allowing Offploy to track the number and nature of candidates' attempts to secure lasting employment, as well as the percentage success rates. Alongside these stages of the journey, email automation was implemented so that, as candidates progressed, Offploy could send updates to the individuals who had initially referred them, providing real-time feedback to the referrer.

Salesforce has been customised to allow easy tracking of employment outcomes for candidates

Having discussed with Offploy the key metrics feeding into their monitoring and evaluation, we built calculations into system to automatically indicate each candidate's level of risk against the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale and other empirical thresholds. This provided Offploy with the ability to view improvement over time, from baseline to endpoint, therefore allowing them to assess the impact of their intervention on these measures.

The Impact

• Offploy staff now have a clear overview of the extent and nature of candidates' engagement with the programme, including how many sessions they've attended, how many jobs they've applied for and how many interviews they've been invited to

• Offploy's key performance indicators are all recorded in one place, allowing them to report more robustly and conduct in-depth analysis, such as how different levels of engagement and attendance might impact on wellbeing scales and job success rates

• Referrers appreciate the live feedback they receive on how their candidates are progressing, helping to encourage them to make further referrals to the programme

Since working with Impact Box and Salesforce we have now been able to condense our essential processes into one central location. The more we work with Salesforce the more we find it is able to do and Impact Box are guiding us through the best way to make changes every step of the way. I am excited to take even more of our organisation onto Salesforce and will look to Impact Box to once more, lead the way.

Jacob Hill, Managing Director, Offploy