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Massachusetts Micro-Grant Program Case Study
When Massachusetts received funds from the American Recovery Plan Act to create new grant opportunities, the Office of Business Development (MOBD) team did not hesitate to support a partner agency in its micro-business grant outreach. The primary targets were socially and economically disadvantaged groups, historically underrepresented groups, and underserved markets.
The challenge was two-fold – the struggle to identify eligible small businesses and the impending grant deadline. That’s how EconoVue helped Massachusetts “find the needles in the haystack fast.”
Read more about their challenges, outcomes, and lessons learned.
After the Pandemic, Nevada’s Department of Employment and Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) recognized they needed to change how they did business to improve employer outreach.
DETR’s program first focused on how best to serve unemployed veterans, specifically veterans with significant barriers to employment. There was a dual responsibility to pinpoint the right career pathway for the veteran and quickly identify businesses more likely to hire those with significant barriers to employment.
With the early momentum from the veterans’ job placement program, the State increased program efficiency and effectiveness across other programs requiring employer engagement, including rapid response, local job fairs, and proactive business outreach.
Read more about Nevada’s challenge, solution, and broader impact.
SELACO WDB Sector Strategies Case Study
The Southeast Los Angeles County Workforce Development Board, known as SELACO WDB, represents eight cities – Artesia, Bellflower, Cerritos, Downey, Hawaiian Gardens, Lakewood, Norwalk, and Paramount. SELACO WDB is one of seven workforce boards serving Los Angeles County, serving over half a million constituents daily.
Every two years, SELACO WDB re-evaluates the top 5 sectors experiencing growth and the next ones on the horizon. The challenge was to have the best information available for targeted outreach based on individual sector strategies.
Read more about their successful approach to sector strategies.
WANB COVID-19 Micro-Grant Case Study
The Workforce Alliance of the North Bay (WANB) spans California’s Lake, Marin, Mendocino, and Napa counties. All counties offered micro-business COVID-19 Relief Grants through the local small business development centers (SBDCs) and economic development organizations. The grant provided $2,500 to eligible businesses regardless of the size of the office.
The challenge was to quickly narrow down a target audience for a competitive COVID-19 micro-grant program outreach based on the rigorous eligibility requirements for micro-businesses.
WANB worked closely with all County SBDCs to assist in identifying candidates for outreach and cross-promoting the program through social media and E-blast with flyers from various County organizations.
Read more about their challenges, the grant program, and early outcomes.
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A large, densely-populated State challenged itself to pivot from reactive rapid response efforts to a proactive business engagement approach – across all the local workforce boards (WDBs). Most rapid response efforts were associated with businesses with less than 50 employees and, therefore, mostly invisible because of not being required to file a WARN notice.
A proactive business engagement strategy would allow the State to identify businesses beginning to contract – well before closing – with the time needed to prevent layoffs, save jobs and the company if possible, or assist the impacted workers with rapid re-employment.
The challenge was two-fold. Enabling a statewide shift from reactive rapid response to proactive business engagement – and quantifying impact from something that is not typically measured (i.e., layoff aversion/jobs saved).
Read more about their challenges, solution, significant cost avoidance, and other measurement opportunities.
The Montana Department of Labor and Industry (MTDLI) always recognized that businesses were integral to the success of the Job Service Operations Bureau (JSO). But local offices across the State struggled to effectively create individual business engagement outreach strategies. The JSO Business Strategy Team designed and implemented a quarterly, statewide Campaign in a Box program. Targeted outreach to specific industries and workforce sectors fuels the Campaign in a Box business outreach. This ensures a consistent statewide message that could be delivered by all local offices, regardless of office size.
Read more about their challenges, unique program, and success measures.
A Workforce Development Board (WDB) in an expansive County in Northern California needed to develop a systematic approach to proactively engage with the 13,000 businesses across all districts. This geographically diverse County presented unique challenges for regular, face-to-face meetups with local companies. The County also wanted to ensure the Business Service Teams (BSTs) resided near the business communities they served. BST’s mission is to engage with a business once and build strong relationships with those businesses. The goal of this specific WDB project was to assign business leads to the BSTs by geography and priority sectors. This is to ensure regular outreach to the most vulnerable businesses in the County.
The County utilized EconoVue, a data visualization platform for accelerating business engagement, built on the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud. The County first conducted a benchmark analysis of all businesses by location, sector, size, risk, growth, and diversity to understand the overarching demographics and dynamics of their communities. EconoVue provided critical insights such as business health, a context for what is happening at the business, and contact information, such as an address, telephone, and email, in seconds. This insight enabled the County to reach the right contact with the first outreach, identify companies no longer in business, and achieve program equity across diverse sectors and companies.
Tracking engagement is critical for the County to evaluate the performance-based outcomes for our business service team and vendors. Tracking the resilience of the businesses supported after six to eight months is equally essential. BST outreach and independent interviews help understand improvements in business health. Most importantly, tracking is a continuous effort.
The County has achieved outstanding results so far from this systematic approach – despite the business disruption caused by the Pandemic. In the first three quarters of this year alone, the County BSTs have met all their goals. “Our management team has been amazed at the team’s performance and commitment to the community. As a result, almost 80% of the jobs lost during COVID have been restored in the hospitality industry. Moreover, job growth in the County has come back to 3% since previous years.”
Read the complete case study.
EconoVue™ is your window to business and workforce insight.
Founded in Silicon Valley in 1999, and now based in Arlington, VA, EconoVue, Inc. is a woman-owned small business with a single mission: to help our clients visualize data and gain actionable insight into the past, present and future of their local and regional economies and workforce.
Originally founded as The Urban Explorer, Inc, a boutique consulting firm designing interactive GIS tools for economic development, land use planning and urban design, we heard a common theme from our customers: “Help us analyze today and help us predict tomorrow.” We found ourselves replicating the same steps of geospatial economic analysis studies, so rather than reinvent the wheel every time, we decided to invent it just once and automate the process via a single platform, and EconoVue™ was born.
The millions of businesses that comprise the U.S. economy and workforce are constantly in motion. Our agile approach to solution design is highly collaborative with the “end-user”, constantly evolving to meet the growing needs and creativity of our clients as they try to extract insight from data chaos.
Working with our data partners, public sources and our great collaborative clients, we continue to expand EconoVue™ to meet new needs, including Economic Development, Transportation and Custom Analysis. Our design philosophy is to produce innovative, actionable data insight tools, in a modular application platform that is iterative and easily adaptive to meet the ever-changing information needs of our clients.
