Project Summary
The Office of the Colorado Child Protection Ombudsman (CPO) provides a clear channel between Coloradans and the agencies and providers responsible for protecting children. The CPO independently gathers information, investigates complaints, and issues recommendations to child protection agencies, service providers, and the state legislature.
Measuring these activities and their impact is challenging due to the complexity of the child protection system. To address this, the Colorado Lab is partnering with the CPO to strengthen its data collection, management, and analysis processes. This work includes developing an organizational Theory of Change, mapping current data to potential measures aligned with the Theory of Change, supporting decision making to update their data system, and designing user-friendly processes for data extraction and analysis to inform continuous improvement.
By the end of the project, the CPO will have processes to support continuous improvement efforts, external reporting, and communicating the value of the work they do. This will enhance their efforts to support Coloradans in collaboration with institutional partners in the child protection system.
Steps to Building Evidence
This work focuses on Step 1 and Step 2 of the Colorado Lab’s Steps to Building Evidence. It helps the CPO clarify and communicate how its efforts connect to child protection outcomes in its Theory of Change (Step 1). It supports continuous improvement by identifying the data necessary to monitor the activities aligned with the Theory of Change and their associated outputs (Step 2).
Actionability
This project builds the capacity of the CPO to use data to support communication and continuous improvement across its strands of work (client services, communications, and policy collaborative). It enables the CPO team to identify trends and patterns in the cases they investigate more efficiently. As a result of this work, the CPO will have measures (or plans to collect measures) aligned with the Theory of Change, improved systems and processes for data collection and management, and sustainable methods for analyzing and reporting on measures for both internal and external use.
Get Involved
For more information about working with the Colorado Lab, see Government and Community Partnerships or Research Partnerships.