From Gut Feeling to Policy: How Onafhankelijk Leven Learned to Leverage Data
Onafhankelijk Leven, a Belgian non-profit, made an enormous digital leap a few years ago: from a system dating back to Windows 95 to a new CRM, and from on-premise servers to the cloud. But having data available is one thing — steering smartly with it is another. Project coordinator Lennert Lanssens explains how the collaboration with Xudo structurally changed the organization’s operations.
The challenge: data without direction
The transition to a new CRM system (Zoho) was a necessary step for Onafhankelijk Leven to stay up-to-date and future-proof. But the new system brought a new challenge.
“After the data migration, it wasn’t straightforward to make a meaningful analysis. We tried building dashboards ourselves, but we couldn’t see the forest for the trees. We needed vision and structure to determine what we actually wanted to know.”
— Lennert Lanssens, Project Coordinator
Objectively measuring ‘busyness’
Xudo was brought in to unlock the CRM data and translate it into clear KPIs. The biggest impact? Hiring policy. Where decisions were previously based on the subjective feeling of ‘busyness’ among staff, they now steer on occupancy rates per region.
“We used to ask our coaches: how busy are you? That’s hard to estimate. Now we use hard numbers and see the capacity per region and per coach. Based on that data, we hired seven new people. Because ‘It’s busy’ suddenly became tangible.”
The dashboard as a mirror
The dashboards also play a central role in the daily planning and follow-up of the more than 20 coaches who are out in the field every day. Every three months, the coach reviews the numbers together with their manager. Not as a control mechanism, but as a mirror.
“We now spot anomalies in planning very quickly. If we see that a coach has unusually high travel time, we can redistribute cases or adjust the approach. The dashboard is actively used as a starting point for conversations about efficiency and job satisfaction.”
In the driver’s seat
What made the collaboration with Xudo unique was the focus on self-sufficiency. Wouter built the data dashboard for coaching, but also provided training for team members to work independently afterward.
“As a non-profit, you don’t have the budget to hire an expensive consultant for every change. Wouter helped us maintain the system ourselves and even build new dashboards for our member monitoring and helpline. The fact that we can now do this in-house, with some help from AI tools, saves us thousands of euros.”
Advice: data first, tools second
Lennert has important advice for other organizations facing a digital transformation:
“Start with your data, not the tools. Talk to someone like Wouter first about what exactly you want to know and how your data needs to communicate, before you buy expensive software.”
“We started our journey with Xudo with a thorough KPI exercise. It was a huge added value that Wouter knows both the business intelligence and the technical side inside out, because he executes it himself. He could instantly indicate whether something was technically feasible or within budget. That allowed us to make decisions faster and fine-tune things. And that kind of efficiency is — especially in non-profit — worth its weight in gold.”
About Onafhankelijk Leven
Onafhankelijk Leven is a Belgian non-profit that advocates for the rights of people with disabilities. The organization provides expert advice and coaching for the choice, organization, and administration of personal support. The team of 46 people, including 22 coaches, supports over 3,500 members with their complex administrative and care needs.