Sample case study: A Year in a Tribal Heritage Office

The office at a glance

A small cultural and heritage office handled 78 consultations, added 212 items to its Collection, managed 6 grants worth $686,000 and ran a program of 20 volunteers in one year. It did this with nine office staff, several of them part time: a cultural resources officer, a museum director, a language administrator, a grants coordinator, a records secretary, an office manager, a school administrator, an IT support person and a hardware deployment manager.

Before ECO: assumed baseline

Tribal offices do strong work with small staffs and limited tools. In this example, the office ran on inboxes, paper, spreadsheets and memory. The table shows the assumed starting point, based on conversations with tribal offices across the nation, not a detailed survey.

What the office put in place

The office moved its daily work into one private system the Nation controls, part by part, over the first two months.

1. Letters and requests: consultations, matters, research requests and contacts in one place, each with its due date, and a help desk for members' questions to the office.
2. Today and Deadlines: one morning list of everything due across the office.
3. Places and field work: the Atlas with a background map, routes and areas, and map files in and out; monitoring logs with costs; invoices made from the logs; and finds reported to the office straight from the field.
4. Collection and museum: catalog, storage locations, inventory rounds, loans, conservation, and items and copies returned from outside institutions.
5. Projects and people: projects with plans and a Gantt chart, the volunteer program, training and standards, and the Work board with applications and TERO hiring records.
6. Funding and reports: grant awards, match, programs and attendance, staff time and miles.
7. Governance: council records and the Nation's own protocols on the records they govern.
8. Language and learning: classes with lessons in audio, video and documents, assignments, quizzes and a gradebook.
9. Across the office: email reminders, e-signatures, spreadsheet import and export, and a public page that shows only what the Nation chooses.

Results over the year

Late consultation answers fell from more than half to almost none, and the office counted $36,248 of volunteer time toward grant match that would otherwise have gone unclaimed. The chart below the table shows consultation answers month by month.

Time saved: about 390 staff hours, or ten working weeks

On the assumptions below, the office saved about 390 staff hours in the year, worth about $23,400 at an assumed $60 an hour, including benefits and overhead. Volumes come from the system. Consultation time is recorded; the other minutes per task are assumptions an office should replace with its own.

Not counted here: time lost to missed messages, and history lost when staff change.

Recorded, not estimated: time per letter

Staff logged their time against each consultation and matter all year, so the saving on letters is measured. Average time per answered letter fell from 2.98 hours in January and February to 1.26 hours in September to November.

Had all 66 answered letters taken the first months' 2.98 hours, they would have cost 197 hours; they took 131. Matters followed the same path: 3.13 hours each when opened in January and February, 1.21 hours in September to November.

Risks avoided and gaps closed

Nothing depended on one person's inbox or memory: 139 dated items from every part of the office sat on one Deadlines list, so work did not fall between staff. Each row below is something the system held up before it became a problem.

Member engagement

Before the network opened in January there was no way to count any of this. In the first month, 44 members were active in an average week and the language pages had 143 visits; by November, about 145 members were active each week and the language pages had 3,106 visits a month.

The office approves every word before it reaches members, and oral histories carry their consent: signed, verbal, none or withdrawn.

Collection growth

The Collection grew from 26 recorded items to 238 in the year: most from the archive digitization project funded by the IMLS award, and 18 proposed by members and accepted by the office. 212 now have a catalog record, 209 a storage location, and 56 are open to visitors.

Additions climbed from 9 in January to 14–25 a month from April, as the digitization work got going. 13 items are held under the Nation's protocols and 6 are kept private, so the system holds them without opening them.

TERO and local jobs

The Work board put 13 openings from 10 Tribal employers in front of members. Members applied 37 times, and 7 were hired. On the office's 3 TERO contracts, 13 of 21 hires (62%) went to Nation members or other Native workers, above the office's 60% target.

Only applicants are named, and only to the office staff who run the Work board. The numbers-only report carries no names.

Grant applications

The office won 6 of the 11 applications funders decided, 55%, bringing in $686,000 of the $1,036,000 decided. Every application passed the Nation's own approvals before it went out: 65 recorded decisions by Administration and Council.

Each award is linked to its application, so the reporting dates, match and spending in Grants and reporting trace back to what was promised.

Training and standards

27 staff and volunteers completed 135 trainings in the year, 127 confirmed by the office, and support tickets fell from 18 in the first two months to none in December as people learned the system from its own manual.

The parts people still asked about after reading them (Consultations, Today and this week, Admissions, Programs and Grant applications) are where the manual and training get improved next.

Knowledge Keepers

Ten elders and knowledge holders were recognized for their knowledge, with 44 honoraria totaling $8,500 paid in the year. Each keeper's record says what they hold, whether and how they may be asked, and every payment, so the office can show funders and council how elders are compensated.

Occasions this year: language class visits, oral history sessions, advice on consultations, teaching at the youth camp and briefings to the council. Keepers' records are sensitive: only people given the Knowledge Keepers role can open them.

Nothing leaves without the Nation's say

Every request to use or open the Nation's material was decided by the office and recorded, including 3 research requests declined and 2 protocol access requests declined.

Who may see what is set by role: 17 roles held by 19 people, each role limited to its own part of the office, with 31 changes to access logged. Researchers who take conditions owe results back by a due date, which sits on the office's Deadlines list.

What it would take otherwise

Most small Tribal offices cannot afford separate tools for this work, so it is done by hand, and that is where the risks in this study come from. The table shows, for each area, what a typical separate tool costs a small office in a year and what doing it by hand looks like. Prices are published subscription prices, current at the time of writing, for an office this size. ECO takes no payments and holds no card details, by design.

Across all these areas ECO also gives email reminders, e-signatures, spreadsheet import and export, and a public page that shows only what the Nation chooses. Mapping software is often free to federally recognized Tribes, so that line may cost nothing in practice. Two areas have no ready-made tool at any price, consultation tracking and a TERO registry, so Tribes usually pay to have them built. On ownership, most tools leave ownership with the customer, but many take a lasting right to use what is entered, and some pass it on or use it in their marketing. ECO's right to use the Nation's content covers only running the Nation's network, and ECO never uses it for anything commercial.

The full cost: separate tools or ECO

Subscriptions are only part of what separate tools cost. The table adds what an office also pays to set them up, move its records in, train staff, keep about 15 tools running, connect them, and build the two tools no one sells.

ECO's cost is heaviest in the first year, while ECO sets the office up, loads its records, trains staff and gets it running. After that the office runs the system itself, and support drops to as needed.

The first year costs about the same either way. From the second year, ECO costs about $23,000 a year less than the typical separate-tool route, before any as-needed support. Over three years that is about $45,000 to $63,000 less, and the office has one system its staff know instead of 15. An office can also start with 4–5 hours of support a week, which makes the first year $75,400–$84,500. 100 users is the starting point; as the community joins, the office adds members at $9.99 a month (Conductor) or $14.99 a month (ConductorPro, with more capacity), averaging $12.50. None of this counts the $76,000 a year in value shown below, or the staff time it takes to run separate tools.

What a funder asks for

The figures a Tribal office reports to its funders came out of the year's daily work, without a separate count before each report. The measures below are the kinds each funder commonly asks for; each award's own terms say exactly what to report.

What the records show

In place of quotes, these statements are read straight from the office's own records; each can be checked against the page named beside it.

• On time: 66 consultation letters answered. The on-time share of answered letters rose from 45% in January and February to 94% in September to November; 5 open letters are past due and flagged. (Consultations)
• Nothing lost between staff: 76 letters, calls and meetings and 36 outside contacts are kept in one shared record, not in personal inboxes. (Matters, People and organizations)
• Risks raised early: 139 dated items from every part of the office were tracked on one list, including overdue loans, conservation checks, council actions and expiring trainings. (Deadlines)
• Collection accounted for: missing items at inventory fell from 8 of 62 in April to 4 of 190 in the fall, and the Collection grew from 26 to 238 items, 212 of them with a catalog record. (Collection, Registrar)
• Community time counted: 1,231.5 volunteer hours approved, $36,248 counted as grant match, and 8 entries corrected before they reached a funder. (Volunteer program)
• Funding in view: $686,000 across 6 awards, with $97,993 of $153,500 in required match already met. (Grants and reporting)
• Field work paid for: $16,339 invoiced to agencies from 44 monitoring logs. (Monitoring)
• Reach: 589 people attended 42 programs; 154 of them were youth. (Programs and attendance)
• Safe volunteering: all 7 student volunteers tracked for guardian consent; the one without it shows as not ready. (Volunteer program)

Also from the records: about 145 members active in an average week by November, up from 44; 265 words contributed by members; 775 stories told.

What the year was worth to the office

The year's records gave the office about $76,000 in value it could put to use: volunteer time counted toward its share on grants, field work billed to agencies straight from the monitoring logs, and staff time saved. This value is separate from the cost comparison above and is not counted in it.

Read it in two parts. Money the office could claim: $52,587 of match and billing it had the records to show. Capacity: 390 staff hours, about ten working weeks, back for the Nation's own work. The cost of the separate-tool route is in the section above and is not added here.

Also included

• The Nation's data stays the Nation's. Everything entered belongs to the Nation. ECO owns only the software and claims no ownership of what the office or its members put in. Nothing is sold, served to advertisers or used to train any system. Whenever the Nation asks, ECO prepares a full export of its records in files that open without ECO. See the data sovereignty page.
• What members get. Historical figures, a Word of the Day, mentoring, virtual events and messages from leaders at milestones. Each member decides who sees their own content, and one sign-in covers the Nation's network and a private family network, kept separate under the Nation's protocols. These are why members keep coming back and the network grows.
• A podcast and a free library. The office can share its own episodes with members, with no ads and no outside host holding the audio, and everyone can read the library's e-books at no cost.
• Museum screens and devices. 3 gallery screens show items opened to visitors, and 40 office devices are tracked for connectivity grants.

Method, assumptions and limits

• Source: the Redwood Bend demo network, one calendar year of records, January to December. Active members are counted from page use per member per day. Language pages are Teach, Program, Teachings, Tribe words and Language. Word of the Day figures are replayed from the feature's daily rule, which keeps no log. All records were created for demonstration and are labeled DEMO or SAMPLE.
• Baseline: the "before" picture is assumed, based on conversations with tribal offices across the nation. January and February stand in for the office's first months.
• Time saved: volumes are from the records. Minutes per task and the $60 hourly cost (pay plus benefits and overhead) are assumptions; an office can use its own.
• Recorded and estimated: time per consultation letter and per matter is recorded in Time and costs (220 entries); time on other tasks is estimated.
• Inventory: each round is compared with the items in the Collection when it started, at their locations that day.
• Costs: separate-tool prices are published prices and rates, current at the time of writing, for an office this size. Outside IT hours and custom-build costs are estimates, because little is published for offices like this one. ECO's costs are its standard Tribal office rates; each office's proposal sets its own.
• No quotes: no statements are attributed to people; the statements above are read from records.

About the museum module

The museum module built into ECO was reviewed against several dedicated museum collections systems, and for an office of this size it is capable and comparable to them: catalog records, object entry with receipts and deeds of gift, an accession register, storage locations with QR labels, phone-scan inventory, loans, valuations, rights requests and a full change history.

It follows the same industry standards those systems use, including Spectrum collections procedures, Nomenclature 4.0 object names and Dublin Core export, and builds on them with what a Tribal office also needs: protocols set by the Nation, consented oral histories, language names with pronunciation, and community participation in naming and describing items.

About the Office assistant

A small Tribal office of one to three staff covers the phones, email, grants, council and community requests. The Office assistant, part of My Office, takes the routine drafting and tracking off their desks, so staff get hours back each week for language and culture work. It is new since the year described above and is not counted in any figure in this case study.

What it handles for a small office

• Inbox replies. Staff paste an email or a member's question, and the Office assistant drafts a reply from the office's own approved answers, hours, contacts and programs. Anything it cannot answer is marked "needs a person", never guessed.
• Meeting minutes. Rough notes become a draft agenda and minutes in the office's own template, with action items turned into tasks with owners and dates.
• Grant deadlines. One calendar of grant deadlines, with reminders to the assigned staff member 30, 14, 7 and 1 days ahead.
• Grant report drafts. A narrative and numbers filled in from the projects, volunteer hours and in-kind value already recorded in ECO, for the grant and period chosen.
• Consultation letters. Acknowledgement and follow-up letters drafted from the consultation tracker, with the agency, project and deadline already in place.
• Scheduling. Suggested volunteer and event schedules from the volunteer roster and the events calendar.
• Monthly council report. The month's projects, grants, consultations, events, volunteer hours and member requests brought together in one report.

How it is kept safe

• Draft only. A staff member approves, edits or discards every draft. Nothing is sent, posted or filed on its own, and it never decides enrollment, money, council matters or eligibility.
• Respects the Nation's protocols. It works only with records the signed-in staff member may already see, and never reads or quotes restricted, sacred or protocol-limited material.
• Data stays the Nation's. Drafts are kept in the Nation's own network, nothing is used to train any system, and every action is logged (who, what and when) for the Org Admin to review.
• Off by default. The Org Admin turns it on for the network and chooses which jobs are on.

See the Office assistant page.