Boston-based nonprofit FUEL Education was founded in 2009 with the core values that higher education is attainable for all, regardless of income, and that family engagement is crucial to students’ educational achievement. Working with community partners who have college access/success and family engagement as core components of their missions, FUEL Education provides knowledge, resources, connections and financial incentives that empower parents to propel their children into higher education. Successful FUEL Education families not only save for their children’s postsecondary ed-ucation and gain knowledge about the college process, but also make informed decisions with their children when choos-ing a college and financial aid package.

Soon after FUEL Education was established, the organiza-tion’s program leaders realized they needed a centralized, web-based data system to streamline their administrative and evaluation data collection processes, as their spread-sheet-based data collection and manual mail merge reporting processes were tedious, time consuming and unreliable. Additionally, FUEL Education needed a means to seamlessly share and integrate data across a growing network of part-ners. In 2010, just a year after their founding, FUEL Educa-tion implemented Efforts to Outcomes (ETO®) software with funding support from the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation to serve as their comprehensive data management and reporting system.

FUEL Education

Customer Case Study

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• Delivers college access and savings program through 7 community partners in Boston, Chelsea and Lynn, Massachusetts.

• Since 2009, more than 600 parents have saved over $525,000 for more than 700 students through FUEL Education.

• More than 150 of FUEL Education’s stu-dents are persisting through college and their average college persistence rate is 92% as of Fall 2013.

• The organization’s first class of students completed college in 2014.

Program Snapshot

Photo credit: Ron Pownall. Pictured: Hanifa Nasuuna and daughter Bahiya Nasuuna. Hanifa completed the FUEL Education program in 2013. Bahiya is now a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Developing and Refining the FUEL Education Program Model

Because FUEL Education implemented ETO software at a very early stage of the organization’s development, the data system and principles of performance management played a key part in the development and refinement of FUEL Education’s program model. In one example, ETO software aided the organization in distinguishing between outputs and outcomes as they developed their theory of change and logic model. Additionally, while FUEL Education defined and established program outcomes, milestones and metrics, the data evaluation team worked in tandem within the ETO system to ensure their data inputs would provide actionable intelligence that programs could use to inform service delivery.

ETO software has also aided FUEL Education in the development of key program elements including their college access and finance cur-riculum for parents. While FUEL Education’s program development was informed by research on children’s savings accounts for low-in-come families conducted by the Center for Social Development at the University of Washington, the organization developed the curriculum at a time when there were not many external research findings or benchmarks to reference and incorporate into their curriculum design. With workshop attendance and survey data collected in ETO software, FUEL Education was able to determine the most successful frequency, content, and delivery style for each work-shop, as well as identify the most common knowledge gaps that were necessary to address through the workshops.

In another example, ETO software was key to determining the college savings match amount provided to parents participating in the program as a savings incentive. Using ETO data, FUEL Education conduct-ed an internal study to identify the most effective savings match percentage that is meaningful to changing long-term savings behaviors, as well as factors that influence workshop attendance. Through this study, FUEL Education found a 1:1 college savings match was more likely to motivate parents to save more than $500. With this data, FUEL Education was able to persuade its partners and funders to provide a 1:1 savings match. FUEL Education continues to study these factors periodically, and adjusts their match amount accordingly, allowing the organization to continue to attract families to their program and initiate college savings.

“We have come a long way, and we are glad that we had ETO software to grow with us and help us define and record our milestones.”

–Yiming Shuang, Senior Manager of

Program Operations, FUEL Education

A Financial Aid Workshop Knowledge Gained report provides a snapshot of survey responses by program partner, allowing FUEL Education to provide quality assur-ance across all program locations.

Performance-Driven College Access Program FUEL Education’s data-informed begin-nings permeated through the organiza-tion, fostering a culture of continuous im-provement in regard to internal structure, community partner relations, and data quality, in addition to program delivery.

After developing their program model, FUEL Education revisited their internal structure and their partner selection crite-ria to optimize program delivery.

Rather than training outside organiza-tions to deliver their program, FUEL Education hired and trained facilitators to deliver the program, opened savings accounts and maintained communication with families through each community partner location. The adjustments not only contributed to smoother program delivery and partner training protocols, but also resulted in improved parent engagement—FUEL Education saw an increase in workshop attendance among parents and program facilitators reported that meetings with families were more successful. FUEL Education also report-ed improvements in data quality as a result of the shift. Additionally, rather than detracting from their larger mission and allocating resources toward delivering an additional program, FUEL Education’s community partners were instead able to focus on the FUEL Education program as a whole, and concentrate resources on referring and recruiting families.

Today, FUEL Education delivers their program through seven community partners in three cities: Boston, Chelsea, and Lynn, MA. Across all of the program partners, program facilitators track family demographics, monthly savings, work-shop attendance and surveys, pre and post program surveys to track baseline knowledge and knowledge gain, student college enrollment, and program enrollment and dismissal data within ETO software. FUEL Education also uploads data from attendance tracking tools, such as Eventbrite into the ETO system. This data is supplemented with student post-secondary matriculation data through National Student Clearinghouse and parents’ bank savings data, entered to ETO software through batch upload, which helps FUEL Education gauge the long-term effectiveness of their programs.

Since their founding, more than 600 parents saved more than $525,000 for more than 700 students through FUEL Edu-cation. FUEL students are on track to far surpass state and national averages for continuing enrollment in college. 92% of FUEL Education high school graduates are enrolled in postsecondary education as of Fall 2013.

FUEL Education provides each family with a FUEL Education Family Statement, which provides a snapshot of progress toward savings goals and workshop attendance. The report is automatically populated with data from ETO software with no manual entry or counting required.

Continuously Improving & Becoming Evidence-Based

Though FUEL Education has found a formula for success and is producing positive outcomes for families, the organization has remained committed to continuously improving their approach to college access.

In the short term, FUEL Education plans to implement ETO Engage to enhance their ETO data system. ETO Engage is an ETO add-on that enables organizations to use email, text messaging and phone calls to provide individual or group communication to program clients and other individuals. Prior to ETO Engage, FUEL Education used an alternative commu-nications platform, but was limited by the platform’s capabilities and had to do additional administrative work as the data was sep-arate from their main ETO data system. With ETO Engage, FUEL Education will be able to send two-way communications to individ-uals and groups to provide meeting reminders, follow-up com-munications, links to surveys, and more, which are automatically documented within the ETO data system alongside case notes.

FUEL Education expects ETO Engage’s texting feature to be partic-ularly useful for their program, as many of the families in their target population are low-income immigrants who do not have home computers and rely heavily on mobile communications.

Additionally, the organization plans for ETO Engage to be a key component in their new savings program for families with pre-high school students. Regular communications via email, text and phone will be crucial to engaging parents before their children enter high school.

FUEL Education is also actively working toward achieving their long-term goal of becoming a replicable, evidence-based model for college access and savings programs, and to be a model of best practice for other college savings programs. FUEL Education is currently participating in a three-year independent study of their Chelsea program to determine the efficacy of parental engagement on students’ educational outcomes. The study will conclude next year.

“We are very excited that ETO has launched the new communica-tions system ETO Engage, which will help us streamline our com-munications efforts and tracking. We are a very small nonprofit with tight budget, so it’s crucial to have an efficient system like ETO that is compatible with other tools we use to engage our clients.”

–Yiming Shuang, Senior Manager of

Program Operations, FUEL Education

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