The Contingent—Mobilizing communities to transform the child welfare system with Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Child welfare media coverage tends to be a drumbeat of bad news. According to Ben Sand, more than a dozen states are facing class action lawsuits for failing to ensure a child's safety in the system. Add to that, the shortage of foster families and the system's inefficiency create a mandate for improvement for state agencies. The result: communities in need have lost trust in the system.

After the grassroots success at the local level with Every Child across Oregon, The Contingent was asked to take on the foster family recruitment for the entire state. This presented a rare opportunity to enhance the robust relational approach on the ground in a unique public-private partnership with a digital solution that could reach Oregonians far and wide. They wanted to seize the opportunity. 

In 2019, The Contingent started working with the Tech for Social Impact team at Microsoft and Wipfli, a Microsoft Cloud Partner Program member, to develop efficient, scalable IT infrastructure and systems to power community mobilization. Their community engagement model evolved alongside technology architecture development, utilizing new technology capabilities. They created predictive models that integrated community engagement activities and assigned costs to them, improving strategic community engagement efforts while achieving better outcomes.

As the pandemic impacted everybody's lives and every other state saw a decrease in families inquiring about becoming foster families, Oregon's numbers continued to rise. The Contingent's Every Child Initiative aims to increase the recruitment and retention of families willing to open their homes to children in crisis. Adoption inquiries rose by 12.4% last year, with 35% coming from individuals who self-identified as people of color or multi-racial—a key factor when aiming to have ideal, strategic placement for children.

The Contingent's use of the Microsoft platform has transcended all its initiatives. Through a wide range of initiatives designed to serve community members in crisis, The Contingent won an award for the most innovative response to COVID-19. In addition, the organization's agility has captured the attention of many, which resulted in the federal government sending a delegation to Oregon to review The Contingent's Every Child Oregon Foster Care Initiative. This led to talks with leaders from eight different jurisdictions across the United States. Today, The Contingent has expanded nationally, bringing its Every Child initiative to Arkansas and Indiana.

According to Sand, “We believe we have a scalable solution; thanks to the tools we developed in partnership with Microsoft and Wipfli. Were it not for our investment in Microsoft’s Cloud for Nonprofit, including Dynamics 365, Azure, Power Pages, and Power BI, we would not have been able to do what we did during the pandemic.”

And as Peter Kim, Executive Director of Technology at The Contingent, expanded, “We have a wonderful partnership with Wipfli. Based on their cross-industry experience, our partner Wipfli brings a level of expertise to our development efforts that is a tremendous value add. They complement our in-house talent with a proven track record of successful implementations. Their agility is a great fit with the fast-moving operations at The Contingent.”

Finding the “Golden Thread” during child welfare services expansion to new states

When it comes to child welfare, every state is different. For example, Oregon is a single-entity state approach, meaning that Oregon’s Department of Human Services (DHS), with its 60 locations, is responsible for the foster care system. Arkansas has a hybrid system where child welfare is handled partly by the state of Arkansas and partly by private agencies. In Indiana, The Contingent is working exclusively with private agencies.

The differences in the makeup of child welfare agencies across the states presented a challenge to The Contingent. Simply executing their Oregon playbook wouldn’t work. Each state’s childcare system is complex and often fragmented, sometimes resulting in confusion for potential foster parents due to different messaging from various agencies. Additionally, it is common that some communities in a state are underserved while others have multiple agencies covering the same communities.

To overcome these challenges, The Contingent team spent months on relational groundwork, identifying stakeholders, listening to concerns, and learning about what worked and what didn’t. Then, it was about building relationships and trust to understand how The Contingent could add the most value. They learned that most of the local organizations involved in foster care had deep roots and great relationships in the community but needed more technical capabilities and infrastructure to scale their operations to get enough foster care leads.

The Contingent developed a comprehensive digital strategy and suite of tools to serve local needs, called “The Community Collider.” Their strategy starts with a wide-reaching digital ad campaign that captures and tracks leads of people interested in supporting child welfare activities. The leads and conversation rates are then tracked and fed into Dynamics 365, which foster care agencies can access through a dedicated portal. The Contingent then provides world class customer service as individuals and families learn more about child welfare. Once a family is ready, agencies are then responsible for managing and engaging with the leads provided by The Contingent. Agencies are also accountable for updating the development of the leads and associated outcomes. 

“The challenge for the state of Arkansas was to see in what areas they had foster care needs and emerging capacity of newly certified foster families,” noted Kim. “With The Contingent’s tools leveraging Power BI capabilities, you can now see the hotspots where the need is and who is in the certification pipeline. That’s a game changer,” Kim added.

These leads are a critical asset for private agencies, as their funding depends on successful placements. Previously, the states lacked transparency and visibility on all activities in one place. With the help of rich data visualizations from Power BI, the portal enables states to see both public and private agency performance. This is critical in allocating budgets more effectively. According to Ben Sand: “The end goal here is that we want to have more than enough homes for children. We can see where the leads are going and how those leads are matriculating. It creates a learning environment where organizations are sharpening their business models to increase the efficacy of their certification process.” Ultimately, everybody wins.

Surfacing the ideal, most strategic foster care placement

The Contingent is on a mission to find the most suitable and strategic home for children and youth. While finding a loving and safe home for every child is essential, it is not enough. The ideal home is culturally responsive, where foster parents share the same mother tongue and can keep children in the same school district and local community. However, finding these homes has historically been a huge challenge.

The University of Chicago has done groundbreaking research and gap analysis that revealed a surplus of foster care capacity in one county and underserved needs in others. They also identified the attributes of successful foster families, including income, age, family size, and consumer behavior. 

The Contingent partnered with the University of Chicago to identify common attributes of successful foster families. This allows them to buy "lookalike" data that can be fed into Dynamics 365, enhanced by Azure machine learning services, to surface potentially successful foster families in other zip codes with needs. These potential foster families can be reached with personalized emails, direct mail, or texts via the Dynamics 365 Marketing app. The goal is to find suitable foster families in the child's local community to increase the likelihood of stability and success for both the child and the family.

"Our biggest challenge right now is there's more opportunity than capacity. We've got to increase our capacity as an organization. So, we're quickly becoming a technology organization in a way that we never imagined in 2019. Our biggest gap at this point is the capacity for ingenuity. But if we can close that gap, and I'm confident that we can, I think we can transform the child welfare system," Sand emphasized.

Looking ahead, The Contingent is excited to continue the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit journey. "We're going to get back in the lab in the next six months and ask what we can do using the Microsoft platform to keep kids with their parents and leverage all of our learnings for what we built after children are removed to serve them well. We're trying to skate to where the puck is going," Sand explained.  He is especially excited about the power of artificial intelligence. From developing templates that can help to automate and accelerate routine tasks to bespoke propensity models for donor forecasting. Sand recognizes several transformational child welfare use cases that harness the value of AI and can help amplify their vision nationwide.

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