Retention rates

Background
YMI which is an acronym for Young mother’s organization is an organization which is dedicated to helping mothers who are young with little or no support. The founder herself by the name of Kamille Bundy was also a young mother. So, as a young mother herself she understands the plight of young mothers. The organization is run entirely by volunteers and unpaid interns, so it was paramount that everyone within the organization takes his/role serious for efficient and effective running of the organization. My role in the organization was that of a data manager in the administrative committee of the organization. I was responsible for analyzing retention reports of the volunteers, total and individual hours of the volunteers and coming up with reasons for low retention rates and how to improve the retention rates.

Retention rates: Text

Data Cleaning and preprocessing

Most of the data with respect to volunteer hours resides in an application called homebase. So, the data is downloaded in a csv (comma separated value) format. It is then opened in Microsoft excel where empty rows are removed, columns that are not needed for the analysis are also removed.

Onboarding surveys as well as offboarding surveys are given to participants who are onboarding and offboarding respectively. Questions regarding their experience with the organization and how best to run the organization are part of the questions asked in the surveys. This data is in text format, so to that end it is cleaned with the programming framework called python with the use of libraries such as numpy, pandas and scikit learn. The number of offboarders and onboarders as well as those retained within the organization for every month are collated in Microsoft excel.

Data Analysis and visualization.

The retention rate for every month is calculated and analyzed as a percentage. The retention rate is visualized in a column chart format to know volunteers who left the organization and those retained. With respect to volunteer hours, a bar chart is plotted to know the individual hours of volunteers who logged hours. Since not all volunteers logged hours, a pie chart is plotted to know the percentage of volunteers who logged hours and those who didn’t. To buttress, a pie chart is plotted to know the number of volunteers who didn’t log hours by committee. Data mining is conducted on the survey answers filled out by offboarding and onboarding volunteers.

Recommendation

Since the organization is solely run by volunteers, it means the strength of the organization is determined by the number of the volunteers and passion of the volunteers to put in more zeal in the running the affairs of the organization. Most of the volunteers who offboarded suggested more inter committee relationship as this foster coherence and higher level of communication in the organization which in turn could increase the retention rates. This suggestion was taken into cognizance and suggested as a recommendation, and it did increase the retention rates.

View Visuals

Retention rates: Text