Morano asks about measuring outreach success

One of the things I struggle with as a council member, as chair of this committee, as somebody that plays a leading role in some other entities within the city council,

is wondering what the best way to reach people is and whether my outreach efforts are successful.

Sometimes it's easy to see if you see 9,000 people commenting on a social media post.

It's really...

reaching somebody, but there's all sorts of people that aren't on social media.

How does DVS know whether outreach efforts are succeeding, whatever the outreach efforts are, whether they're related to LGBTQ plus veterans or some other veteran cohort?

We are seeing a DVS, for example, from last year to this year, specifically from February and on, that there has been an increase on

data in the sense of who we are outreaching, how we have referred individuals.

However, what we are trying to do is upgrade our systems when it does come to, for example, if we are referring individuals at DVS, we are upgrading that system.

What does it mean once that individual is referred?

What was the outcome with that specific individual?

In a sense, we also want to have like a case management system in place to be able to support the veteran in the long term, not just a one try.

I'll let Nicole elaborate further on that too.

I think to your point, it's easy to see more in the numbers, right?

People are subscribing to the newsletter.

We're getting views on social media.

I think for us, what that has been translating to is more people being engaged with us.

So in our series of roundtable, we're seeing more engagement directly from advocates.

In our VAB meetings, we're seeing the high.

number of participants than we've seen.

So I think for us, it's leveraging and really playing around with social media and with our newsletter, because that has been translating to more people showing up.

And also with the partnerships that we are doing, again, they're very intentional, the partnerships and the events that we are doing at DBS.

For example, we're doing an event.

We need to understand why we're doing that event.

How many people we have outreached at that event, how many people attended that event, how many people did the intake process.

For example, I'm developing that intake form that I want to, but again, I want to work with various other veteran groups so they could help us finalize that intake form.

But also is like once they're referred, again, like we're following, we're making sure that there's

that there's a follow-through with that referral.

But what we are seeing is that a lot of the partnerships have already existed at DBS is that we just needed to revamp those partnerships.

Speaking of partnerships, I know you alluded to a few of them, including the Veteran Advocacy Project and the Stonewall Veterans Association.