For the last 15 years, Philadelphia Youth Network has been able to support over 100,000 youth in a variety of initiatives and experiences from 14-year-olds in an internship to 19 to 21-year-olds entering college. The thing that I find most meaningful and valuable working here at the Philadelphia Youth Network is our mission. We work with the most valuable asset there is, and that's the young people.
As an intermediary, our main focus is leveraging resources. If we can become more efficient and more strategic about the amount of resources we use to support youth, we can increase our impact. Prior to getting Toad Data Point we were tasked with the challenge of integrating many different sources of data manually.
We didn't have the ability to forecast some key metrics regarding our system. Oftentimes they had to be probed while systems were in progress and assessed. By using the software we're able to get up to the date, up to second real time information about our systems that we never had access to before. It allowed us to think differently, operate differently, and actually be different as an organization.
The data we look at is very complex. If you think about youth lives, they're complex in general. So when you're going to be collecting information about youth and their experiences, naturally the data is going to be sophisticated as well. Toad Data Point allowed us to work with complex as well as simple sources. It supported us in what we needed to do. It wasn't more complex than it needed to be. It's basically a Swiss army knife of everything database related.
You can manage all of your databases with one tool. Toad Data Point allows you to do everything from your simple query analysis and your cross connect analyses to automation tools that let you create your report, schedule them, deliver them. It allows you to look at information, create what if scenarios about your data, really lets you explore the information that resides in your systems to move that from storage to actual application.
We have better visibility into our data streams. We know more about our youth, the way they're being served, and the way they're utilizing our services than we ever did before. If we didn't have Toad Data Point it would mean operating inefficiently. It would mean using staff for things that Toad can automate versus them focusing their experience and their expertise elsewhere.
Not only did we improve data quality, we're able to improve our ability to use the information in ways that were unknown to us before using Toad Data Point. The Philadelphia Youth Network is more data driven and that now our decisions are based on solid information we can see where it hits our systems. We know when to expect the information now, where as before we looked for it when it was missing. Toad allows us to see the data almost before we even need it.
Toad Data Point helped us to imagine differently about our work. The fact that we had access to data, the fact that it was automated and didn't require so much time freed us up to really explore, what does excellence looks like in our landscape?
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