Challenge: The San Diego Workforce Partnership struggled to use data to identify gaps in communities that may not have access to resources to help job seekers find meaningful work.

Solution: The Workforce Partnership uses Domo to automatically connect all its data sources together for increased access to insights.

Impact: Thanks to Domo, the Workforce Partnership is able to better allocate its resources down to the neighborhood level.

San Diego Workforce Partnership works smarter with Domo.

Work is more than just a paycheck. Work is a source of economic mobility, community investment and personal dignity. As one of the hundreds of workforce development boards across the country, the San Diego Workforce Partnership is dedicated to helping both job seekers and businesses build a workforce that will meet not just the economic needs of San Diego County, but its societal needs. 

“A lot of our self-worth in our country is based on your job,” said Chris Cruzcosa, data analyst at the Workforce Partnership. “We help bridge the gap between government policies and action to give marginalized groups, like the homeless or minority communities, the ability and opportunity to support themselves and their families in a way that gives them dignity and self-worth.”

Thanks to its size and diversity of programs, the Workforce Partnership is one of California’s leading workforce development boards. It leverages federal, state and private funds to create, manage and support programs that help the region’s disadvantaged populations gain the skills they need to meet the needs of the region’s employers. In today’s tight labor market, the Workforce Partnership’s six career centers throughout the region are critical for helping employers attract and retain untapped talent.  

“What really makes our organization different is that our CEO has doubled down on innovation,” said Shannon Moran, chief information officer at the Workforce Partnership. “A major part of that is providing the resources to build out a modern business intelligence platform, which Domo is a major part of.”

Democratizing data.

According to Moran, most workforce development boards are small organizations that often struggle to use data to serve job seekers and community stakeholders. Many use state-owned data systems that are difficult to use and integrate with other resources. As a result, they must rely on time-consuming manual reporting in order to manage cases, apply for grants and meet compliance requirements, significantly reducing the amount of time left over to understand where they can focus their resources to do the most good.  

Given her past experience using Domo at other organizations, Moran said that the Workforce Partnership chose to invest in Domo in order to give the organization the ability to dig deeper into the data and enable the organization’s success.

As a non-profit, it was also critical that the Workforce Partnership invest in a system that helps the organization maximize its ROI. “It was important to not build something so complicated that it would require all these specialized resources,” Moran said. “I was very careful to bring in something I knew I could support and largely implement regardless of changes in our revenue, while still providing a world-class solution.”

Same data. New insights.

The Workforce Partnership uses systems to track federal, state and philanthropic funding, along with Salesforce and a state-provided system for case management. The Workforce Partnership also relies on numerous data sources from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other government resources to identify areas of need. Thanks to Domo, they have been able to automate its disparate data systems to create a single source of insight. 

Using Domo’s Magic ETL, Cruzcosa says users are now able to easily connect all these data sources while better visualizing how they connect to better understand how the data works together.

“Our staff has tried over the years to do this type of work,” Cruzcosa said. “We’ve had people who’ve been here for 15 years who have said they’ve never seen the data shown in this way, all together, apples to apples, in the same place and in the same format. That’s a testament to the fact that what we’ve implemented here has been transformative for the whole organization.”  

Moran said that one of the key reasons they selected Domo was its wide variety of native connectors. With these connectors, staff can focus on the data instead of figuring out how to access it.   

“Our main goal was to take the manual piece out of the equation for our users and have them move beyond looking at outputs to analyzing the data to tell some neat stories,” Moran said. “Domo lets us give back time to our users to leverage the data. It opens up a lot of doors to provide a more holistic view of our clients as they interact with our programs and services.”

Putting data on the map.

Domo gives the Workforce Partnership new insight into the needs of San Diego County so that it can allocate its resources at a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level.

For example, Cruzcosa uses Domo’s Flex Map app to help his business users better visualize the community’s needs across each city council district. Users can see at-a-glance the location of a career center in each district, the number of people served, job placement stats and neighborhood access to resources like childcare or broadband internet that are critical to improving employment opportunities. Cruzcosa remembers the first time he showed the map to his team.

The Workforce Partnership also uses Domo to centralize its customer experience data that it collects through sources like RingCentral. Managers can now access this data using a dashboard to ensure job seekers get the support they are looking for. By utilizing data in new ways, the Workforce Partnership has been able to reposition itself to better meet the needs of the county’s changing workforce.  

“We’re trying to build a culture of data stewards and data analysts all throughout the organization,” Moran said. “To do so, you have to get people to meet, interact and collaborate over data. We are moving from an organization that just reports on outcomes to one that is really having conversations about the data in terms of what really worked and what we’re trying to accomplish. The most interesting thing about our work is seeing how it reflects in our communities. Having a tool like Domo allows us to really see that.”