Key Performance Indicators
All of CTOP’s organizational development work with our grantee partners is in pursuit of our north star, which is to help young people change their lives by successfully reconnecting to education and gainful employment on a pathway to self-sufficiency.
Before organizations can consistently produce these outcomes for young people, they must build their capacities and competencies to be able to do their work effectively, reliably, and sustainably, which requires an organizational investment of time and energy measured in years, not weeks or months. And because the obstacles that our young people face are extensive and complex, our grantee partners often work with young people for multiple years before they are ready to graduate successfully from their programs. For both of these reasons, we do not expect partners to generate the kinds of long-term outcomes we ultimately care about in the first few years of our work together, but we are starting to see those outcomes now.
The number of CTOP target population youth who graduate and, for the following 12 months, are actively engaged in education or employment. This KPI provides the ultimate measure of our grantee partners’ success and the value of our partnership with them because it tells us whether a program has actually helped the young people it serves by changing the trajectory of the graduates’ lives.
In aggregate, across our grantee partners, the number of young people attaining this critical milestone in 2024-25 was 173 – which represents 86% of all young people who graduated from their programs in the previous year.
The number of CTOP target population youth enrolled in core programming who graduate from the program successfully. For all of our grantee partners, their definition of program graduation requires that a young person has graduated high school, enrolled in post-secondary education or educational training, or secured employment, which means that CTOP’s KPI of the number of young people graduating from our grantee partners’ programming reflects not simply an output but a critical outcome.
This KPI means that a young person has participated in the full range and duration of core services and has attained one of the education or employment outcomes previously noted. Young people who leave before completing the full scope of programming and/or who fail to enroll in an education pathway or become employed employment clearly have not benefitted as intended and therefore are not included in this metric. Thus, like the previous KPI, this KPI tells us how well a program is helping the young people it serves – and gives us an indication of whether it may have helped them meaningfully.
In 2024-25, the number of young people graduating from our grantee partners’ programming was 277, up from 201 in 2023-24.
The number of CTOP target population youth enrolled in core programming in active program slots.
As a proxy for how many young people currently being served by a program are likely to graduate, and to subsequently sustain their education or employment 12 months following program graduation, CTOP uses a KPI called the active program slot. To be considered in an active program slot, a young person must meet the program’s enrollment criteria and receive the kinds and levels of services and supports that the organization’s theory of change identifies as required to ensure that young person ultimately achieves its promised long-term outcomes. In contrast to looking at the number of individuals served by a program, which is commonly used as a metric in the social services sector, the active program slot metric tells us what young people are actually getting from a program, and can therefore serve as an indicator of whether they are likely to truly benefit from it by enrolling and sustaining in an education pathway or the workforce and graduating from the program to change their life trajectory. In essence, this KPI tells us whether an organization is helping the young people it serves in real time.
You can learn more about the rationale behind the active program slot metric and how CTOP applies the concept through this report.
CTOP also tracks two additional KPIs to have a better understand how our grantee partners are creating social value:
The number of CTOP target population youth receiving services from a given core program but not at a quality and dosage level required to qualify in an active slot. This metric counts the number of CTOP target population youth who are participating in a core program but are not receiving services at the quality or dosage required to be considered in an active slot. While this is indirectly reflected in the percentage of youth in active slots, reporting it explicitly highlights gaps in service delivery and helps grantee partners to use data to identify which young people are not receiving the support needed to achieve long-term outcomes in education and employment. By making these gaps visible, partners are better equipped to make data-driven improvements, re-engage these youth, and help them progress toward graduation and on a path to economic self-sufficiency.
The number of CTOP target population youth enrolled in your core programming who leave prematurely or in any way other than graduating. This KPI tracks the number of young people enrolled in a program that leave before graduating or completing the core elements of the program needed to sustain the intended long-term outcomes, excluding “neutral exits” such as moving out of the service area or passing away. By monitoring this number, grantee partners can assess whether they are truly fulfilling their mission and serving the young people in Connecticut who are often overlooked by traditional youth-development programs. Understanding why young people leave unsuccessfully allows programs to address shortcomings and improve their ability to help every participant reconnect to education and/or employment.
To learn more about our KPIs and how CTOP calculates them: