Marco Botha started with one program and two prompts. A year on, Open Play runs 10+ loops — closing a blind spot that used to hide student drop-off for months. It even surfaced the unexpected: a water leak in the field, caught the same week.
A rigid M&E template shipped youth-program data to HQ — a drop-off, or its cause, could hide for months.
10+ loops read the data on arrival — problems surface the same week, and a funder report takes two prompts.
Marco began with one program and kept going. Loops are not surveys — each one collects clean, reads on arrival, and feeds the next decision. Open Play now runs more than ten and recently aggregated ten program reports for a funder in one pass.
Open Play’s old M&E template shipped youth-program data to HQ and waited. The cost was not the tool — it was learning about a drop-off, or a leak, months too late. Move the sliders; the figures are illustrative.
Open Play ran its youth programs on a rigid M&E template. Staff spent substantial time collecting the data and sending it back to HQ, and a good analytical person was hard to find — so the numbers arrived late and thin.
The real cost was the blind spot. The team would not learn about a student dropping off for months — a true SROI cost — and even then, never the why behind it. By the time a problem surfaced, the moment to act had passed.
Marco Botha — the Executive Director, hands-on — started with a single program instead of a months-long setup. In his words: “It just took 2 prompts and my report was ready.”
Loops are different from surveys: each one collects clean at the source, reads on arrival, and informs the next move. He built another, then another. Open Play now runs 10+ loops and keeps growing.
The blind spot closed: what used to hide for months now shows the same week. And an unexpected outcome proved the point — the loop surfaced a problem no one was looking for. “We found a water leak in the field immediately through this data — it would have been a huge loss for us had we not been using Sopact.”
Marco recently aggregated ten programs into one funder report himself — 1,102 sessions and 1,536 hours across four facilities, broken down by activity, coach, and gender parity. He uses the new data filters to organise submissions by activity date, the clear view of collection compliance he needs from the field, and the Assistant removed the last chore: he no longer has to reference every source column to ask a question.
