Summary: Goodwill Kentucky needed a concise way to distill their government affairs work. A live Quorum dashboard became a standing item in Goodwill Kentucky’s executive meetings. With a simple weekly notes cadence feeding it, leaders can self-serve what matters — sentiment, meetings, and alignment — so their GA team spends less time repeating context and more time moving issues forward.
The Challenge: Scale, Speed, and Executive Clarity
Goodwill Kentucky is an independent Goodwill affiliate that covers a wide range of issues, from criminal justice reform to housing to public benefits. Considering the fact that the Kentucky state legislature introduces over 1,000 bills a session, it’s a lot for a lean team to take on.
“This is part of the reason Quorum is so important to us — we are tracking a lot of policy issues down to the local level,” said Adam Haley, Director of Policy and Strategy. “It’s hugely helpful to get data very quickly and track movement on the issues we’re working on.”
The challenge comes down to what to do with all that data. Not only does Haley and his team need to act quickly, but leaders also expect concise metrics and progress.
The Solution: Make Quorum Dashboards The Agenda
Haley hard-wired a Quorum dashboard into leadership’s routine. “I have a regular meeting with our C-suite to update them on what’s going on in public policy and we have a standing agenda item… which is a link to a dashboard in Quorum that I created for them.”
Between meetings, executives don’t have to wait for a recap. “They can check that at any time and say, ‘This is what sentiment around this issue looks like. This is how many meetings we’re taking. This is who our supporters, who our detractors are.”
The input side is just as deliberate. “I block out time on my calendar at the end of the week…I take my notes and I put them all in Quorum.”
The Effect: Less Explaining, More Deciding
Haley frames the value simply: the dashboard eliminates noise. “I’m able to use Quorum as a tool to distill it down to what’s most important and cut out all the noise. Here’s what we’re actually doing. Here’s what’s moving.”
It also safeguards institutional memory. “If I’m gone tomorrow, Goodwill’s institutional knowledge of what’s going on in the policy space doesn’t die with me… It all exists somewhere else. We’ve created systems and processes so there’s no single person who houses all of this information for Goodwill.”
Goodwill Kentucky is also able to act more quickly when something sudden happens in Frankfort. When bills change last minute, Quorum’s patented AI assistant, Copilot, helps the team compare amendments without losing the plot. Copilot “takes the amendment and compares it to the original document and tells you, ‘This is what changes actually got made… and this is how it impacts what the bill does overall.’” Of course, Haley still reads the bills — especially the critical ones — but AI “helps me make quick comparisons and points me in the right direction.”
The result is a cleaner story across the organization. Leaders of a large and complex nonprofit stay focused on what’s moving, while the GA team moves faster across 120 counties and 138 legislators.
Key Takeaways
- Consider an auto-updating dashboard so leaders can self-serve KPI statuses.
- Log everything in one place to preserve institutional knowledge beyond any one person.
- Use data to distill progress and reduce re-explaining so conversations focus on what’s important.