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Organization: Women Against Abuse
Insights From: Maria Giraldo Gallo | Updated: July 28, 2026 | 
11 Mins
Summary:
Women Against Abuse (WAA) is Philadelphia’s leading domestic violence service provider and the only organization in the city offering a fully integrated continuum of care, from a 24/7 hotline to emergency shelter, transitional housing, community-based case management, legal representation, and school-based prevention education.
WAA served 11,701 adults and children in FY26 (up from 10,592 in FY25, and down from a peak of 12,143 in FY24 as government contracts tightened), all while navigating a rising share of domestic-violence-related homicides in Philadelphia and ever-tightening confidentiality requirements. Under Maria Giraldo Gallo’s leadership, WAA’s evaluation and learning team has expanded its use of ClientTrack across new programs, rebuilt key funder reports, integrated Power BI dashboards for leadership, and is preparing to launch a shared hotline environment with three partner agencies across the city.
Fifty Years of Fighting Domestic Violence, Powered by Better Data
How Women Against Abuse Uses ClientTrack to Support Survivors, Prove Impact, and Advocate Across Philadelphia
11,701
adults and children served in FY26
10,000
hotline calls answered per year
12 New Beds
added since our 2023 case study
Women Against Abuse (WAA) began in 1976 as a volunteer-led hotline. Fifty years later, WAA is the city’s leading domestic violence provider, running two confidential emergency shelters, transitional housing, a legal center, community-based case management, prevention education, and the Philadelphia Domestic Violence Hotline. The organization served 11,701adults and children in FY26 and answers about 10,000 hotline calls a year in collaboration with its partners, offering a full continuum of care that is unmatched in the city.
Since WAA’s first CaseWorthy case study in 2023, a lot has changed:
- Ameya's Place, one of only two domestic violence shelters in Philadelphia, underwent a $3.6 million renovation that preserved this vital resource and allowed the organization to expand on it to serve 33 more people each year.
- A Domestic Violence Homeless Coordinator role situated within the city’s centralized intake center at Appletree Family Center is accelerating referrals and streamlining help for those in need.
- The Legal Center's experienced team of attorneys are achieving life-saving protections for survivors, and working with law enforcement, the courts, the District Attorney’s Office and other city systems to improve Philadelphia's response to intimate partner violence.
- Economic empowerment and relocation supports continue to be a strategic priority as case managers partner with survivors to increase their income, apply for jobs, and cover utilities and first month’s rent as they move out of shelter.
- WAA is deep into rebuilding how the city’s DV hotline captures and shares data across four partner agencies.
The Challenge
More Need, Flat Funding, and a Rising Confidentiality Bar
Even as overall homicides in Philadelphia have declined, the share attributable to domestic violence has grown. At the same time, most of WAA’s revenue comes from government contracts that have stayed essentially flat while costs have risen. “Sustained, community-driven support is more critical than ever,” says Joanna Otero-Cruz, Executive Director and President of Women Against Abuse. “And we are strategic and thoughtful about how we spend every dollar invested with us, ensuring that we’re using our resources as effectively as possible to achieve the greatest impact for survivors. ClientTrack is part of that approach, allowing us to work smarter, equipped with more data and insights.”
That funding pressure translates directly into how the Evaluation and Learning team (E&L) must operate. Evaluation at WAA is funded mainly through administrative support, meaning WAA’s unrestricted dollars have to cover the cost of the team itself. Every hour saved on reporting is an hour the team can dedicate to measuring the impact of programs. E&L is continuously supporting staff with training and strategies to better tell the work they do through refined data input and outcomes.
Confidentiality expectations have continued climbing too. Shelter locations are unpublished. The Legal Center is walled off from every other program in ClientTrack, with only the small evaluation and learning team able to see across environments. Files are redacted before every monitoring visit.
And the reporting landscape keeps shifting. Customized funder report definitions change and evolve, requiring the organization’s data tracking software to be nimble and adaptive. As the Executive Team reassesses strategic priorities within a constantly changing landscape, the organization needs a system that can keep pace as it continues to learn and grow.
Why CaseWorthy
A Platform Flexible Enough to Match Every Program’s Rules
WAA operates programs that legally cannot see each other’s data. The Legal Center needs a firewall from residential services. The Prevention Team requires its own environment. The hotline operates across four collaborating organizations. Confidential shelter data cannot flow into the same tables as public education attendance.
ClientTrack by CaseWorthy was built for exactly that kind of program complexity. It offers HMIS-compliant standards and role-based security, environment-level separation for programs that need firewalls, and enough flexibility to build custom reports and workflows for state and federal funders.
When WAA needed a report rebuilt to match the exact definitions of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence (PCADV), the CaseWorthy team was able to scope and deliver it as a custom project. When the DV homeless coordinator role was revamped, the team could refine data tracking needs inside the same platform. When indirect services like newsletter engagement, volunteer hours, staff and cultural initiatives, and victim satisfaction surveys needed a home, ClientTrack’s functionality was already there.
How Women Against Abuse Uses ClientTrack Today
One Platform Across an Expanding Continuum of Care
Since 2023, WAA has deepened its use of ClientTrack across nearly every corner of the organization. Case managers and direct-service staff enter their own client data, which Giraldo Gallo describes as giving them ownership of their story: “When they type the data, they’re telling their story of what they do.”
The DV Homeless Coordinator role now tracks its own numbers inside ClientTrack, sitting at the intersection of residential programs and the city’s homeless services system. Case management after exit is captured under a dedicated service code so WAA can track whether housing placements were successful once clients transition from their 90-day shelter stay. Medical advocacy referrals from hotline callers are logged in alignment with PCADV definitions for the first time. Indirect services tracking has grown into a long list that now includes staff initiatives, cultural events, volunteer hours, newsletter engagement, and VS3 (victim satisfaction) survey distribution and response.
A Custom PCADV Report That Matches Funder Definitions Exactly
WAA commissioned a ClientTrack by CaseWorthy project to rebuild the state funder report from the ground up, going through every single definition to match PCADV’s rules. “That’s really a game changer, at least for my staff,” Giraldo Gallo says. “Now we don’t have to spend as much time fixing the data or doing extra manual steps.”
A Hands-On Support Partnership with Admin as a Service
WAA leans on CaseWorthy’s Admin as a Service team for a set number of monthly maintenance hours. The organization’s account representative and community operations admin work alongside Giraldo Gallo to identify improvements, prepare for compliance changes, and roll out new features. WAA’s community operations admin, Carrie, has been a standout partner. “She’s always available and genuinely interested in the work we do,” Giraldo Gallo says.
Her advice for other agencies buying admin support: be intentional about how you spend the hours. “Keep track of things by email between meetings, and use meeting time to work collaboratively on updates. Building the relationship with your account representative and admin really helps when it comes to new implementations.”
Power BI Dashboards That Put Data in Leadership’s Hands
In 2023, WAA’s team named Power BI as a next-frontier priority. Three years later, the evaluation and learning team runs three data refreshes per month, pulling de-identified extracts out of ClientTrack and building dashboards for different audiences.
A Theory of Change dashboard supports the leadership team. A board and executive dashboard tracks enrollments, positive housing outcomes, census and bed occupancy, demographics, income, and connection to public services. The advancement team can pull grant-writing data directly from Power BI without ever needing ClientTrack access or seeing any personally identifiable information. And Power BI pulls in data from outside ClientTrack too, including the hotline’s telephone provider, so leadership can see multiple sources side by side.
The impact reaches beyond internal reporting. “When our executive team meets with elected officials or advocates for DV policies to pass, they need that data at their fingertips,” Giraldo Gallo says. Analyzing hotline geography by ZIP code also helps the prevention and advancement teams identify neighborhoods where domestic violence may be underreported or where awareness of services is lower, so outreach and advertising can be targeted where the need is greatest.
A Shared Hotline Environment Coming Soon
The most ambitious project underway is a new hotline environment inside ClientTrack that will replace aggregate reporting with a shared, caller-level database across the four organizations that answer Philadelphia’s Domestic Violence hotline: Lutheran Settlement House, Women in Transition, Congreso de Latinos Unidos, and Women Against Abuse. The project involves an API integration between ClientTrack and the hotline’s telephone provider. It will give WAA and its partners significantly greater analytical capacity by allowing them to follow a caller's journey, ensuring consistent high-quality care.
Impact
Time Back for Staff, Better Data for Funders
The clearest impact has been time back for staff. The rebuilt PCADV report eliminated manual reconciliation steps. Push-button reporting continues to save the days of Excel work that Giraldo Gallo’s predecessor described in 2023. Case managers own their own data entry, and the evaluation and learning team can spend its time on quality and analysis instead of copy-paste.
Data quality shows up in monitoring visits, too. Better data has helped WAA retain funding and prepare for the frequent monitoring that comes with government contracts.
Quality of service is measurable in ways it was not in 2023. WAA now tracks VS3 (victim satisfaction) response rates over time inside ClientTrack. When PCCD, the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, transitioned VS3 from paper to digital and response rates dropped across the sector, WAA was able to identify the drop quickly, work on it, and lift response rates back up. This was so successful, WAA was invited by PCCD to share the strategies it used with other agencies in the state.
Real-time data has also reshaped how WAA advocates publicly. ClientTrack data flowing through Power BI shows leadership where callers are coming from, which ZIP codes are underrepresented, and where to focus prevention outreach and advertising. It arms the executive team with the current numbers they need when meeting with elected officials or funders and it lets the advancement team pull grant-writing figures on demand.
What’s Next
Deeper Adoption, Modular Training, and a Stronger Confidentiality Toolkit
WAA’s near-term roadmap is clear. The shared hotline environment is the next major launch, and it will unlock a new tier of analytical capacity across the city’s DV response. Power BI will keep growing as an advocacy tool. And Giraldo Gallo is building out a modular training library, recording short role-specific videos in WAA’s internal learning management system so that as ClientTrack expands, training can scale without pulling her team off higher-value work. Every new hire still meets with the team in person before receiving access, to preserve data quality.
Featuring Insights From
Maria Giraldo Gallo serves as Director of Evaluation and Learning at Women Against Abuse, leading a small team responsible for reporting, compliance, and data strategy across the organization’s residential, legal, hotline, prevention, and community-based programs.
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