Using data to inform recruitment, retention, and support strategies during diligent recruitment planning and implementation

Collecting and analyzing data about your current foster, adoptive, and kinship families provides essential insights into your agency’s ability to meet essential needs. When fully leveraged, this data can inform the type of recruitment, retention, and support strategies needed. Ultimately, these data-driven approaches can guide your diligent recruitment efforts and improve permanency outcomes for children and youth in care.

Effectively using data

Ask any child welfare professional about their data, and you’ll hear a range of methods and perceptions. However, one common sentiment stands out: knowing how to best use data to influence recruitment and inform family retention efforts can be confusing. What is considered an ideal data collection and analysis method for one child welfare agency may not be effective for another. What truly matters is that data-driven strategies address your agency’s specific recruitment, retention, and support needs.

Many child welfare agencies are eager to use data to guide the who, what, when, and where of their efforts. This often then leads to the broader question: how can you ensure your data is used to its fullest extent? According to a report by James Bell Associates (1), this question is a common one, as many agencies report uncertainty about how to effectively use data to enhance program functioning and outcomes. The report goes on to highlight child welfare agencies across the country that successfully utilized both qualitative and quantitative data to assess their strategies and improve data effectiveness by defining clear goals and measurable criteria for their data.

To effectively determine what data-driven strategies can help meet your diligent recruitment goals, it is essential to take several steps, including:

Gathering a team to help identify the data you need to collect to inform your practice
Prioritizing data collection that directly addresses the needs of the children and youth served by the agency and determine how this data will inform decision-making
Exploring how you will analyze your data and the collection process by collaborating with thought partners from various departments including IT, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), and lived experts, such as youth and kinship, foster, and adoptive families
Utilizing a race equity lens to address identified areas
Engaging community partners to help identify gaps and share data when applicable
Choosing an appropriate data collection method, whether it is a spreadsheet program or an automated system, that aligns with the needs of the staff responsible for gathering the data
Defining the goal of collecting the data and ensuring that the outcome is measurable
Considering factors such as ease of use, compatibility with existing systems, and the ability to generate meaningful insights

Beyond anecdotes: One county’s example of learning to use their data to drive practice

Let’s observe a case where a state-run, county-administered child welfare system benefited from how it used data.

The dedicated county child welfare team focused on recruiting, developing, and retaining foster families, as well as supporting those approved for kinship care and families dually approved to adopt. This small but determined team accomplished remarkable work by engaging families, building relationships, and supporting caregivers of children and youth, many with unaddressed needs.

The team’s ground strategy included various approaches. For example, it hosted holiday parties, support groups, regular respite, and annual events like cookouts and foster parent appreciation days. The team tailored training programs according to feedback from foster parents and covered such topics as fetal alcohol syndrome, birth family relationships, mental health crises in children and youth, and cultural responsiveness. It conducted a variety of information sessions at the offices, within focused communities, and virtually during the pandemic.

These efforts positively impacted stability for children and youth in the agency’s care. Stability included fewer moves and overall well-being for the children and youth, who joined kin and foster families prepared to support them to return home. Other families moved forward with open adoptions of children and youth they had fostered from the first day they entered care. Despite this success, the team relied solely on anecdotal reporting to inform its strategies and needed more objective ways to measure.

Eventually new leadership joined the team’s agency and introduced performance measures for meeting local diligent recruitment goals. Fortunately, the team already had data that it could use. Initially, there was concern about the source and reliability of data, methods of collection, and the implications for future recruitment and retention efforts. The team opted to proactively meet with others within the agency as thought partners to determine how it could use that data to create methods for capturing additional metrics. A quality assurance specialist from the division helped analyze the data and create processes and procedures.

Based on its greatest needs, the team decided to develop ways to measure progress in four areas, including:

Inquiry to licensure process (to evaluate how long it takes to license a family)
Retention of foster families (to identify when and why families leave)
Continuity of services (to assess how well its families could accommodate keeping siblings together and keeping children and youth in their schools and communities, as well as to assess the percentages of children who were joined with kin)
Placement stability by level of need (to gauge the capability of its families to meet children’s needs effectively)

In their search for data-driven success within its measures, the team initiated a comprehensive review of its current data collection methods. This included analyzing spreadsheets containing information on approved foster families, inquiries, information sessions attendance, pre-service training, and home study completions to approval/licensure. By integrating this data, they could assess the time for the inquiry to licensure process, which proved crucial for addressing retention rates of prospective parents. The data revealed that delays were due to the home study process, leading to the hiring of contractors to help write home studies, thereby expediting the licensure process.

Additionally, the team identified gaps in its intake form, such as missing demographic information like race and ethnicity. After addressing this issue, the team observed a higher attendance of families of color at virtual sessions and decided to continue virtual options post-pandemic to foster diversity and match the demographics of children in care. This information also guided the team as to where it should focus their recruitment efforts.

The team also included details such as language spoken at home, neighborhood schools, pets, experience with fostering teens, children and youth with behavioral challenges, experience with parenting medically fragile children, and LGBTQIA2S+ affirming status. This comprehensive information enabled better family-child matching.

To determine placement stability by level of need, the team members meticulously recorded key details about the child’s entry and exit from foster or kinship care, enabling them to identify disruptions and assess overall placement stability. The team used their state’s assessment tool to evaluate the needs of children and youth against their placement stability, which informed necessary training for foster and kinship families.

By conducting surveys with current foster and kinship families, the team identified support needs and satisfaction levels, leading to the implementation of after-hours support services and specialized training for families. Additionally, the team introduced a training program designed by experienced foster families to support new families.

Ultimately, team members set up annual performance measures, seamlessly integrating data they were already collecting on potential and current foster parents into ongoing analysis of their practices. This strategic approach bolstered the team’s diligent recruitment goals and plan, paving the way for improved outcomes for children and youth.

Kickstarting data-driven journeys

This county agency demonstrates the potential value of data about prospective and current families, and their actions show how that data can inform and guide practice. Analyzing collected data involves examining what it reveals and, equally importantly, what it doesn’t.

The county’s initial data collection and resulting analysis will continue to benefit the agency and those it serves, as these measures will reveal insights about whether diligent recruitment goals are being met and will also inform future changes in practice.

Further analysis for the team may include:

What other data-driven strategies will it need, based on what the data tells them?
Where might the team involve youth voice?
Was stability different for the older youth in care with unaddressed needs?
How will data utilization impact permanency outcomes for the children and youth in the agency’s care?
What does the data indicate about permanency outcomes specifically for overrepresented populations within the agency’s care?

Embracing your agency’s data offers powerful insight into the effectiveness of your recruitment, retention, and support strategies. By collaboratively analyzing this data, your agency can identify effective measures that enhance diligent recruitment planning and lead to improved outcomes for children and youth in care.

Would you like to take the next step in enhancing your diligent recruitment planning or implementation? Request technical assistance today.

1. James Bell Associates (2019). Diligent recruitment of families for children in the foster care system: Challenges and recommendations for policy and practice. Washington, DC: Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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Using data to inform recruitment, retention, and support strategies during diligent recruitment planning and implementation

October 3, 2024

Effectively using data

Beyond anecdotes: One county’s example of learning to use their data to drive practice

Kickstarting data-driven journeys

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