Case Study: City of Durham achieves data-driven, accountable performance management with ClearPoint Strategy

City of Durham - Customer Case Study

The City of Durham sought to become a more data-driven local government and needed a way to manage and communicate its first-ever Strategic Plan (adopted 2011) across departments and to residents. The City of Durham initially selected ClearPoint Strategy to create an outward-facing dashboard and to manage hundreds of performance measures, but adoption faltered: staff reverted to Excel, there was no ownership of the performance program, and employees couldn’t see how their data was used to inform decisions.

ClearPoint Strategy was re-implemented (upgrading to ClearPoint 10.0) alongside organizational changes—an Office of Performance and Innovation, a designated Performance Manager, standardized data-entry processes, training, and director-level accountability—to consolidate 22 spreadsheet files (100+ tabs) and 500+ measures into one system. The ClearPoint Strategy solution enabled public dashboards, tighter budget alignment (requiring data to justify funding), fewer and better-targeted initiative requests, tangible cost-avoidance decisions (for example, not funding additional communications officers after demonstrating a 95% response level), greater transparency, and external recognition such as an ICMA performance award.

City of Durham

Shari Metcalfe

Performance Manager