Aligning Impact with Investment: Demonstrating Return on Investment

We live in a world that is increasingly focused on outcomes. In a resource-constrained environment with rising economic inequity and persistent socioeconomic challenges, legislators, funders, and the general public want to be sure that money spent is achieving results. Demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) that a program generates is a powerful way to make the case for continued funding.

• Monroe Community College’s CNA program was initially piloted at Finger Lakes Community College, in the same region. Program leaders worked with employers, who were paying for part of the training and had committed to improvements in job quality, to analyze trends in worker retention and turnover. In the first year, retention increased from 47 percent to 76 percent. In the second year, it increased to 83 percent, saving employers more than $30,000 on turnover and training annually. With these data from the pilot, the director moved to Monroe Community College with the goal of expanding across the region. Currently, there are 10 employers engaged in the CNA program. Employer partners have hired more than 550 program graduates to date, who are earning an average of $17 to $18 an hour.
• Broward College invested $1 million of its own general funds in seeding the Broward UP program, which has yielded nearly 50 times that amount in additional public and philanthropic funding. However, the college took its ROI analysis further and commissioned an independent study of the benefits generated to individual program participants and the general public. Florida TaxWatch’s analysis found a total benefit of roughly $13 to the state for every $1 invested in the program. And it found an impressive economic development and labor market impact at the individual and societal level, including: a $71 million boost in personal income in the six zip codes targeted by the program, an increase of more than $200,000 in lifetime earnings for individual participants, and more than $500,000 in added annual tax revenue as a result of increased spending on taxable goods and services by newly-employed program participants. Based on this analysis, Florida TaxWatch recommended that policymakers use the Broward UP framework as a model for the rest of the state by supporting partnerships between higher educational institutions and local organizations to offer comprehensive workforce development services.