The Institute for Justice and Opportunity at John Jay University

The Institute provides pathways to education, coaching and help navigating higher education for individuals who have been involved with the criminal justice system. Their services and supports to their program participants are extensive and deep, ranging from facilitating a number of different types of referrals to troubleshooting barriers to access to celebrating a participant’s graduation day.

In 2022, The Institute became our pioneering client for aNote. They have so many different interventions and services that using a traditional database design - even with a lot of work streamlining the processes in Framework - became too much of a burden for staff. They took the radical step of throwing out all of the forms and focusing instead only on the extensive and details service notes that the staff could always be relied upon to keep, working with us to create a custom tagging system that allows staff to simply tag their notes as they enter them.

From implementing aNote, the Institute went from about a 20% compliance rate from staff entering all necessary reportable data to over 80%. Since data is the lifeblood of nonprofits and grant funding, this represents a tangible shift in every part of the Institute’s ability to deliver services, and most important to us its front line staff are much happier and feel better supported in working with the data system.