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Organization: Episcopal Community Services Philadelphia
Solution:
Insights From: Ashley Brunk | Published: May 14, 2026 | 
9 Mins
Summary:
Philadelphia-based ECS replaced their fragile ETO/Bonterra reporting system with CaseWorthy CORE, moving from weekly Excel exports to daily, near real-time data refreshes. Built on Microsoft Fabric, CORE’s low-code dataflows and reusable semantic models gave ECS’s non-technical team faster reporting, stronger data quality, and organization-wide access to actionable insights.
From Weekly Exports to Daily Insight
How Episcopal Community Services Uses CaseWorthy CORE to Unlock Real-Time Impact
Episcopal Community Services (ECS) of Philadelphia is a leading anti-poverty agency serving primarily low-income communities in West Philadelphia. To drive better outcomes, ECS needed faster, more reliable insight into program performance and emerging economic mobility solutions. When legacy tools began slowing them down and breaking under the weight of their reporting needs, ECS turned to CaseWorthy to modernize their data pipeline and move from weekly exports to daily, near real-time insight.
The Challenge: Stalled Innovation and Fragile Reporting in ETO/Bonterra
Before CaseWorthy, ECS relied on ETO for data collection and used ETO and Power BI for reporting. ETO handled point-in-time QA checks, while Power BI was used for deeper analysis.
As reporting needs grew, this setup became a bottleneck for ECS. Reporting in ETO was cumbersome and inflexible, and even with training staff could only build limited, rigid reports. Moving data into Power BI required large Excel exports that frequently failed, so reports were only updated about once a week. After ETO was acquired by Bonterra, ECS saw little innovation, spent more time maintaining the system, and increasingly felt constrained by its data entry and reporting limits. This ultimately led them to look for a more modern, integrated platform.
Why ECS Chose CaseWorthy CORE
ECS began configuring its CaseWorthy instance in July 2023 and had all users live by July 2024. As a data-driven organization already familiar with Power BI, they were immediately drawn to CORE’s architecture and its close alignment with the Microsoft ecosystem.
Direct Connection to Microsoft Fabric
CORE’s native setup in Microsoft Fabric gives ECS a direct connection between CaseWorthy and their analytics environment. This approach reduces friction in moving from data collection to reporting and supports more timely, reliable insight.
Powerful, Accessible Data Engineering
CORE’s dataflows, semantic models, and data manipulation features mirror Power Query, so the tools feel familiar to ECS’s team. Staff are not fluent in coding languages, so being able to visually transform, clean, and join data without writing M code was essential for adoption and long-term sustainability.
One Place for All Their Data
ECS regularly combines internal CaseWorthy data with external sources such as Cityspan, Microsoft Forms, and SurveyMonkey. CORE connects to these Excel-based sources in SharePoint, which makes it straightforward to build unified models that blend internal and external data for reporting and analysis.
Partnership and Implementation Support
As one of the first CORE alpha customers, ECS worked closely with CORE engineers through live introductions, early video trainings, and many small-group and one-on-one working sessions. This collaboration helped them quickly rebuild complex Power BI reports, stand up their new reporting environment, and learn tools like Power BI Report Builder for paginated reports.
For ECS, CaseWorthy CORE is more than a new reporting tool. It is now the foundation they use to centralize data, modernize their analytics stack, and align reporting with how their programs operate in the real world.
How ECS Uses CORE Today
Centralized, Reusable Data Models
ECS uses CORE as a central data layer for reporting and analysis. They build reusable semantic models and dataflows that support multiple reports instead of creating a separate dataset for each one. The team estimates they now have roughly one half as many semantic models as reports, which significantly reduces time spent rebuilding similar logic for each use case. This central repository of internal CaseWorthy data plus external sources such as Cityspan, Microsoft Forms, and SurveyMonkey is accessible in one place for both standard reporting and ad hoc questions.
Integrating External Data Sources
ECS integrates several key external datasets into CORE, including: Cityspan attendance and student data for after-school programs, delivered as Excel files to a reporting email and stored in SharePoint.Microsoft Forms responses and SurveyMonkey survey data, also saved to SharePoint as Excel files.Using CORE, ECS connects securely to those SharePoint locations with organizational credentials and uses dataflows and Power Query to clean, combine, and align external records with CaseWorthy client data. The ability to reuse these dataflows across multiple reports makes that effort highly scalable.
Dataflows and Low-Code Transformation
Dataflows have become ECS’s most-used tool in CORE. The team uses them to clean and manipulate data, combine or split columns, and create calculated fields through an intuitive, visual interface. When they want to, staff can inspect the underlying M code, but they are not required to write code to perform sophisticated transformations. For a team that needed low- or no-code data engineering while still achieving enterprise-grade capabilities, this combination has been a major upgrade.
Sample Reports
From Intermediate Outcomes to Integrated Referrals
ECS has already rebuilt a substantial number of reports in CORE, serving different operational and strategic needs.
Intermediate Outcomes and Change Over Time
One mixed-mode Power BI report focuses on intermediate outcomes for a specific program, tracking participant-level change across multiple domains and assessments. With CORE, ECS can: Filter to only the first and most recent assessment for each participant, excluding interim assessments, to measure true change over time.Move from individual-level change to aggregate trends, thanks to earlier filtering and transformation in dataflows.Use measures in both semantic models and reports to support more nuanced analysis. The ability to do this work in CORE dataflows, rather than stitching it together with fragile exports, has made these longitudinal analyses much simpler.
Integrated Referrals Reporting
ECS also uses a directly queried Power BI report to track referrals, combining internal CaseWorthy referrals with external referrals captured via Microsoft Forms. Dataflows combine internal and external sources into a single overarching table.Daily refreshes mean referral volume, patterns, and bottlenecks can be monitored in near real time.Measures built within the report enable specialized calculations specific to referrals management.By consolidating previously siloed referral channels, ECS gains a clearer picture of how participants move through services.
Who Uses Data and How
While the reports themselves are consumed internally by both CaseWorthy and non-CaseWorthy users, the data points they contain travel far beyond the data team.
- Program and executive leadership use CORE-driven reports to monitor performance and make operational decisions.
- Advancement and development teams pull metrics for grant applications, proposals, and funder reporting.
- Marketing and communications are beginning to use CORE data as a starting point to identify participant stories and highlight impact in the community.
ECS recently launched a three-year strategic plan that includes increasing ECS’s visibility in the community, and they plan to deepen training for Advancement and Communications so those teams can directly explore and surface data from CORE-based reports.
Impact: Why CORE Is a Major Upgrade
When asked to summarize CORE’s biggest value, ECS points to both the underlying architecture and the day-to-day experience.
Near Real-Time Visibility
- CORE refreshes data daily, giving ECS ready access to current information every morning when they log in.
- Instead of waiting for weekly refreshes or manual updates, staff can spot changes such as surges in services over the course of a week, not just four times a month.
Faster Report Building and Ad Hoc Response
- Rebuilding Power BI reports in CORE has been faster because the team can reuse semantic models across multiple reports.
- The centralized repository and flexible dataflows make it easy to answer last-minute data requests for funders or leadership by reusing existing models and applying new filters instead of starting from scratch.
Stronger QA and Data Quality
- Paginated reports built via Power BI Report Builder give ECS a powerful way to recreate and improve upon the QA reports they previously held in ETO.
- These QA reports support timely assessments and cleaner data, which feeds more reliable insights back into leadership decisions.
As ECS’s Data Management and QA Specialist summarized, CORE’s setup in Microsoft Fabric, its direct data connections, robust dataflow customization, and daily refreshes have been a major upgrade in how the organization cleans, manipulates, and analyzes data, and they enable the team to examine impact in near real time so they can respond more quickly to emerging community needs.
Lessons Learned and Advice for Other Organizations
Drawing on their experience as a CORE alpha customer, ECS offers a few practical recommendations for agencies considering CORE:
- If you already use Power BI, set aside time to review your existing reports in depth with the CORE team, including what each report shows, which data points it uses, and what transformations are needed. This helps you choose the right architecture from the start.
- If you are new to Power BI, lean on CORE’s training, office hours, and resources for dataflows and semantic models, and consider third-party learning for Power BI fundamentals. Ask the CORE team for example reports so you can see what is possible.
- For all organizations, be intentional about how different user groups, such as caseworkers, data teams, leadership, and non-CaseWorthy staff, will access and interact with reports over time. Treat the relationship with CaseWorthy as both a technical and strategic partnership so you can build a sustainable, scalable reporting environment.
Featuring Insights From
Ashley Brunk
Ashley Brunk is the Data Management and QA Specialist at Episcopal Community Services of Philadelphia, where she oversees data infrastructure and supports data-informed decision making. With experience in program design and monitoring and evaluation, she brings a systems-focused approach to strengthening data quality and organizational learning. Ashley earned an M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. from Bates College and holds a Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP) Certification – Associate from DAMA International. She is driven by a strong commitment to equitable access to opportunities and resources, using data as a tool to support more effective and inclusive programs.
