YES Indy: Youth Employment Dashboard and Outcomes Tracking

YES Indy: A Youth Employment Dashboard for Provider Budgets and Outcomes

YES Indy is EmployIndy’s youth employment program in Indianapolis, delivered through a network of community providers that work with young people on job readiness, education, training and getting hired. I built its youth employment dashboard myself, in Google Sheets. Every provider reported its spending and its outcomes every month, and EmployIndy needed to see both across the whole network without someone rebuilding the totals by hand.

Youth employment dashboard: results at a glance

• 11 providers on one dashboard, each with its own contract budget tab
• About $2 million in provider budgets across 6 funding streams, tracked in one view
• 17 outcome measures, from application to 365-day job retention
• Room for up to 10 contract modifications per provider
• In one full program year, the dashboard showed the network serving 668 young people against a combined contract goal of 635
• Remaining funds and percentage spent for every provider, calculated automatically

Service Provided

Custom dashboard and reporting structure, built in Google Sheets while on staff at EmployIndy

About YES Indy

The program funds community providers to serve young people with job readiness, education, training, work experience and job placement. It focuses on disconnected youth, young people who are out of school and out of work and need a way back into both.

Each provider holds its own contract, and a single contract can draw on more than one funding source. Some of the money came as grants, and some came as reimbursements, where the provider spends first and is paid back after submitting its costs. Contracts also change during the year through modifications, which are formal amendments to a provider’s budget.

Why I Knew This Problem So Well

Before I built the dashboard, I worked on YES Indy from the program side. As program manager and then associate director for EmployIndy’s opportunity youth work, I led grant-making and administration for YES Indy across more than 10 providers. I ran the request for proposals that providers applied through, evaluated the responses and made funding recommendations to leadership. I analyzed how each provider and the grant as a whole were performing so we could report back to the funder, and I built a website where providers could share what was working so the network could learn from itself.

That meant I had lived the problem. I knew which questions leadership and the funder would ask, and I knew how much digging it took to answer them when the numbers were spread across a dozen files.

The Problem

Every provider had a budget, a monthly spending history, contract changes and a set of outcomes it had agreed to reach. Across 11 providers and 6 funding streams, that added up to a lot of moving numbers. Answering simple questions, like how much is left in each contract or how many young people have stayed in a job for 90 days, meant opening every provider’s file and adding things up by hand. Every time someone did that, there was a chance the answer would come out a little different from the last time.

What I Built

One monthly update sheet

Providers’ monthly reports were collected in Airtable, and the dashboard workbook had a tab set aside for them with its own short instructions: run the report for the month, export it, remove EmployIndy’s own row and paste in only the provider rows. The dashboard read from that tab, so the monthly update came down to a single paste instead of retyping every provider’s numbers.

Each provider got one row, and that row followed the full path a young person might take through the program: total clients served, then application, enrollment and assessment, and job readiness, through high school equivalency, work experience, advanced training placement and completion, post-secondary placement and completion, job placement counted in two tiers, and job retention at 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days.

A tab for every provider’s contract

Each provider had its own tab built from the same template. Spending was entered across twelve monthly columns and seven budget lines: personnel and fringe, direct participant costs, work experience, staff development and travel, indirect cost, administration and overhead, and profit. For each line, the tab calculated the budget, the amount spent to date, what remained and the percent of the budget used.

Columns beside the budget held the original contract and up to 10 modifications, so a change to a contract sat right next to the budget it changed. Every tab also carried the same instruction at the top: if a provider does not have one of the funding sources, hide that section instead of deleting it. Keeping every tab identical meant the formulas feeding the dashboard never broke, no matter which provider’s tab someone was working in.

A dashboard that adds it all up

The dashboard pulled every provider’s budget and remaining balance for each funding stream into one place and calculated the percentage spent across the whole network. Below that, it added up the outcomes from the monthly update tab, showing each provider’s contracted goal next to what it had reached to date, with a network total and a percentage for every measure.

A third section did the same for employer engagement activities, 7 of them, from career talks and prep sessions to mentoring, site tours, job shadows and apprenticeships. A note on the sheet summed up the design in four words: all of this auto-tabulates.

Feeding the bigger picture

The YES Indy numbers also flowed into EmployIndy’s program performance dashboards, where youth employment sat alongside the organization’s other programs. Leadership could see YES Indy in context without asking anyone for a separate report.

What It Made Possible

• A network-wide view of spending and outcomes for 11 providers in one place
• Contract changes tracked alongside the budget they changed, with room for 10 modifications each
• Monthly outcome reporting in one consistent format for every provider
• Reporting that came from the same numbers every time
• Progress against goal visible at a glance, such as 668 young people served against a contracted 635 in one full program year

The team kept updating the dashboard after I moved on, and that is the result I care about most. A tool that keeps running without the person who built it is a tool that fit the work.

What I’d Build Today

Today this would be an Airtable base with providers, contracts, modifications and monthly reports as linked tables, a form for each provider’s monthly submission, and dashboards that update the moment a report comes in. See custom dashboard creation.

Related case studies and reading

• Case study: Live Wilder Studio: an Airtable dashboard fed by Dubsado
• Read: How to Build a Grant Tracking System for a Small Nonprofit
• Read: Signs Your Nonprofit Has Outgrown Its Spreadsheets

Reporting to funders from five different spreadsheets?

I build custom dashboards that pull program data into one view. See how I work with nonprofits.