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Organization: Ohio Valley Goodwill Industries
Population Served:
Solution:
Insights From: Melissa Ford
Video Testimonial:
Summary:
Ohio Valley Goodwill Industries uses CaseWorthy across its workforce development, housing, and veterans services programs in Cincinnati. As Manager of Case Management Systems Integration, Melissa Ford has spent the past year and a half driving system adoption across her team, improving data consistency and operational efficiency in programs serving individuals with disabilities and barriers to employment and housing.
Who is Ohio Valley Goodwill Industries?
Ohio Valley Goodwill Industries is a Cincinnati-based nonprofit focused on helping people overcome barriers to employment and housing.
The organization provides a wide array of services, including:
- workforce development programs for individuals with disabilities and other employment barriers
- HUD housing programs
- houses 15 men in an on-site veterans’ dorm
- assistance via food pantry that primarily serves employees but is open to the public
Through partnerships with local re-entry organizations, Ohio Valley Goodwill also supports job placement for people who have been previously incarcerated. Across all of those programs, the organization provides more than 190 distinct services each year.
Melissa Ford, Manager of Case Management Systems Integration, oversees the organization’s use of CaseWorthy. Her role focuses on getting front-line teams comfortable in the system and making sure the platform supports both day-to-day case management and the organization’s broader mission and KPIs. Ohio Valley Goodwill has been implementing CaseWorthy for roughly a year and a half across its housing, veterans’ dorm, and workforce development programs.
The Challenge
Outgrowing Paper, Spreadsheets, and Tick Marks
Before CaseWorthy, their previous case management software only tracked the basics, like who was in a program and when they came and went. Everything else ended up on paper, in Excel, or in an aging Access database. Every department counted services in its own way.
For example, walk-in services were tracked by hand. When someone stopped by for a two-minute conversation or a quick phone number handoff, a staff member would mark a tally on a notepad. At the end of the month, leadership had to round up those tick marks from across the organization and try to come up with the numbers line.
The food pantry made the cost of that approach especially clear. The access database not only required significant time for data entry, but it was doing the math incorrectly, causing inefficiencies and extra work when reporting to the local food bank.
Outside reporting carried the same kind of risk. VA reviewers wanted detailed case notes on the men in the veterans’ dorm and HUD reviewers wanted consistent service data across case managers, which meant pulling folders, hand counting, and stitching spreadsheets together ahead of every visit.
The Solution
Building One System for Many Programs
Rather than continue patching a fragmented stack, Ohio Valley Goodwill chose to standardize on CaseWorthy across workforce development, HUD housing, and the veterans’ dorm. Melissa worked directly with CaseWorthy’s engineer and project manager during launch to design configurations that fit specific workflows, including a custom service record for the food pantry. The organization prioritized three things from the start:
- Digital records accessible to anyone who needed them,
- Consistent service tracking across departments, and
- Reporting that did not require IT support to fulfill every request.
Staff adoption became its own design problem. When the implementation began, every user logged into the same default dashboard, and the response was not enthusiastic. Melissa watched team members open the system, see too many menu items they did not recognize, and freeze rather than risk clicking the wrong button.
She and her team responded by building role-based dashboards. Each role surfaces the five or six things that person actually needs on a given day, and even two case managers in the same department can have dashboards tuned to their daily tasks. “We were able to remove that frozen thought in their head of, ‘I’m not going to do anything because I’m afraid I’ll mess it up,'” Melissa said. She has a name for the problem the old approach created: access paralysis. Giving every user access to everything, she found, was the fastest way to ensure nobody touched the system at all.
Centralized Data and Consistent Reporting
The most immediate change has been simple but significant: the work is digital, in one place, and available to anyone who needs it. Staff who used to handwrite notes and then retype them now start in the system.
While certainly not exhaustive, some of the most notable changes to the everyday workflow included:
A case manager meeting a client at a different location can open the same record they were working on the day before.
Service counts have moved from tick marks and parallel spreadsheets to a single source of truth.
Leadership can pull totals broken down by department, program, service type, or month in a few clicks, and the organization no longer has to choose between under-capturing services and double-counting them.
The team built a process for recording indirect services, the short interactions with people who are not formally enrolled in any program. (Those used to be tick marks too!)
Configuration saving time and stress:
Ohio Valley Goodwill configured the new workflow inside CaseWorthy on its own, without needing a software change that would affect other customers. Compliance reporting has changed just as noticeably. For VA reviews, the team now generates a clean PDF booklet of case notes directly from CaseWorthy and sends it digitally before the on-site visit. HUD reviewers see the same consistency: because every case manager records services in the same place, the totals add up across the team.
Goal tracking removed another persistent source of reporting errors. When a case manager marks a goal step complete, CaseWorthy calculates the progress percentage automatically. Two of four steps reads as 50 percent, every time, without anyone having to do math on uneven denominators.
Finally: Accurate Reporting Capabilities for Food Pantry
The food pantry has been one of the clearest wins of the implementation. Working with CaseWorthy during launch, Melissa designed a custom service record that links each pantry visit to the household’s TEFAP documentation. The system will not save the service unless the TEFAP is on file.
That rule does two things at once: It guarantees the right documentation is collected before food leaves the pantry, and it ensures the reports Ohio Valley Goodwill owes its local food bank pull from accurate underlying data, broken out by family size and demographics, exactly the way the food bank needs to see it.
Faster Grants and Stronger Funder Conversations
Ohio Valley Goodwill recently brought on a dedicated grant writer, and the centralized data in CaseWorthy has accelerated that work significantly. Melissa and the grant writer pull program data together, and several grants have already been turned around in two or three days. In the previous environment, two or three days would have been the time required just to gather the data, before any writing began.
Looking Ahead
Asked to sum up CaseWorthy’s overall impact in a single thought, Melissa was frank and straightforward: “It would just be efficiency,” she said. “It allows our staff more time to work with the individuals, and less time worrying about paperwork. They start right in the system, and anyone who needs it can access it right away, anywhere.”
With the foundational pieces in place, Ohio Valley Goodwill expects to keep building on what it has already configured, refining role-based dashboards as new staff and programs come on board and adding more custom service records like the one designed for the food pantry to support new partnerships, funder requirements, and programs in the years ahead.
Featuring Insights From
Melissa Ford is Manager of Case Management Systems Integration at Ohio Valley Goodwill Industries in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she oversees the adoption and optimization of CaseWorthy across the organization’s workforce development, housing, and veterans services programs. She joined Ohio Valley Goodwill after more than 12 years with the Dan Beard Council, Boy Scouts of America, where she served as Field Director and Membership Executive. Melissa is passionate about removing barriers for individuals with disabilities and others facing challenges in employment and housing.
Frequently Asked Questions
We track everything in spreadsheets and paper files. Is migrating to a new system really worth the disruption?
We definitely understand the concern. In the end, having everything in one source of truth is more than worth the challenges of the transition. Before CaseWorthy, Melissa's team recorded program starts and exits in software, but everything else lived in Microsoft Office or on paper, with different departments, and even different individuals within the same department, counting things in different ways. Within a year and a half of implementation, the organization's 190,000+ annual services were made accessible to anyone who needed them with just a few clicks.
Our staff is resistant to new technology. How do you get people to actually use the system?
Ohio Valley Goodwill tackled this head-on by addressing what Melissa calls "access paralysis," when a system has so many options that staff freeze up and don't want to touch it for fear of making a mistake. Their solution was to build role-specific dashboards that surface only the five or six tasks each staff member needs on a daily basis. The result: staff went from avoiding the system to feeling comfortable and confident using it every day.
We have multiple programs with different reporting requirements. Can one platform really handle all of them?
Ohio Valley Goodwill runs housing, a veterans dorm, workforce development, and a food pantry, and each one has its own funder and reporting requirements. CaseWorthy handles VA case note reporting, HUD program compliance, local food bank demographic reports, and internal KPI tracking all within the same platform. Rather than toggling between systems, staff enter data once and pull it in whatever format each funder needs.
How does this actually help with grant writing and funding?
Before CaseWorthy, gathering data for a grant application could take two to three days on its own. Now Melissa's grant writer can pull everything she needs directly from CaseWorthy and turn around a completed grant application in the same two to three days, start to finish. The accuracy and speed of data access has directly contributed to winning new grants.
What about compliance audits? We can't afford errors in our reporting.
Ohio Valley Goodwill partners with both the VA and HUD, both of which conduct detailed on-site reviews. CaseWorthy eliminated the manual folder-pulling, hand-counting, and spreadsheet math that created error risk in the past. Now case notes print directly from the system, goal completion percentages calculate automatically, and the only manual step is making sure data gets entered, limiting the opportunity for human error.
Can we customize the platform for a very specific workflow without involving IT or waiting on the vendor?
One of Melissa's favorite aspects of CaseWorthy is the ability to build custom solutions in-house without requesting changes that affect every customer. Her team built a food pantry intake workflow that automatically links required documentation to service records, so a service literally cannot be recorded unless the right paperwork is on file. That was built and deployed by her team, not by CaseWorthy's engineers, and it solved an accuracy problem that had caused them to underreport their impact for years.
