.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} For a numbers person like Mary Gottschalk, it’s unnerving to observe how health and human services agencies have operated without a complete picture of their finances.

“I come out of a finance background, and I don’t know how you run a business without knowing where your money is coming from, where it’s going, and how effective it is,” said Gottschalk, a Des Moines consultant who specializes in the nonprofit sector. “We don’t have that information in Iowa with respect to health and human services.”

Now, through an initiative led by Gottschalk known as the Better Money Project, a new software system just completed for United Way of Central Iowa can provide that big-picture view. Currently set up to detail the $1.1 billion in annual human services expenditures in Polk County, it has the potential to become a statewide model to provide the same type of analysis for any county.

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The Web-based system, funded by $145,000 from a collaboration of public and corporate donors, was developed by West Des Moines-based ABC Virtual Communications. The corporate contributors to the project include Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., Principal Financial Group Inc. and Wells Fargo Financial, joined by contributions from the Greater Des Moines Community Foundation and United Way. A $100,000 grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation provided funding for a preliminary feasibility study.

The project, formulated by community leaders who included Martha Willits, Johnny Danos and others, actually predates the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s Project Destiny human services task force report from November 2003. That report outlined steps the community needed to take to address a fragmented health and human services delivery system.

“I described that job as looking for needles in haystacks, and I didn’t know how many needles or how many haystacks,” said Gottschalk, whose career prior to advising the nonprofit sector included working for Citigroup Inc. as a commodities analyst and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines as its chief financial officer.

With the Better Money Project, “what I discovered was that the financial information about human services is as fragmented as the delivery system. By the time I got the job done, it was a year later and it was two years out of date. So I made a proposal to develop an integrated information system, to do what I had done, but to do it real-time.”

The system, which enables users to instantly produce reports ranging from overviews to analyses of specific programs, has the potential to be a key planning tool, said Shannon Cofield, executive director of United Way of Central Iowa, which owns the software.

“The ultimate goal of this Better Money Project tool is that it will encompass enough information so that we will learn where our dollars are going, to analyze where the gaps are and where we might need to shift our resources,” she said. “It’s not so much a tool for the public as it is for human services providers, at the funding level and also on the program level.”

From her preliminary review of some of the data, Cofield said she was surprised by the relatively small amount of funding provided overall for early childhood education – a total of $18.5 million last year – given the recognition of its importance to children’s later success. By comparison, core education programs in Iowa received nearly $300 million in funding last year.

On average, United Way represents approximately 10 percent of most health and human services agencies’ budgets, whereas government sources make up about 60 percent, with the remainder from private contributions, fund raising and other sources, Cofield said.

“So we have to work together to achieve community-level outcomes,” she said. The value of having the Better Money system will be that agencies will “know where we’re at and we know where they’re at.”

Because the system uses a data-mapping approach to pulling in information from existing databases, Gottschalk said, it can be easily used within any of Iowa’s other 98 counties to compile reports without a lot of effort required to adapt the system.

United Way of Central Iowa will be a lead agency in marketing the program to any of the other 32 United Way chapters in Iowa that want to use it, Cofield said, as well as to other community organizations. State legislators should also have a big interest in using the system, she said.

Now that this system has been developed, Gottschalk said, “I’ve got a huge education process to go through now in teaching people that you can make better decisions if you know the way the money is spent is in line with the community’s priorities.”

For more information about the Better Money Project, call Mary Gottschalk at 633-9258, or e-mail her at mcg9258@msn.com.