- Canopy Children’s Solutions embedded the voices of children and families as a core KPI, reframing feedback from a corrective measure into a tool for growth, collaboration, and healing.
- By combining email, SMS, and in-person surveys (including child-friendly designs like smiley scales), Canopy created an accessible, trauma-sensitive feedback process tailored to diverse client needs.
- With CustomerGauge, Canopy achieved a 99% child safety success rate in HopePath for Families, NPS consistently above 83, and a 24-hour feedback response cycle that reinforced trust and accountability.
- Staff at every level embraced client feedback as essential to care delivery, resulting in stronger trust, alignment, and motivation driven by affirming feedback and shared values.
- Canopy is expanding its CX program to new solutions, enhancing data analytics, and integrating feedback with therapeutic outcomes to drive deeper insights and stronger community impact.
Canopy Children’s Solutions (Canopy), a century-old nonprofit dedicated to supporting the well-being of children and families across Mississippi, has long served the state’s most vulnerable populations through a continuum of solutions.
Canopy implemented a compassionate, multi-channel feedback strategy, making the client voice of the children and families they serve a key performance indicator (KPI) across all programs and solutions.
This client-centered approach not only improved processes but also transformed the organization’s culture and impact.
The outcome was a 99% success rate in keeping children safe in critical solutions, along with stronger trust, transparency, and satisfaction from the children and families they serve.
💡Key Results Using the CustomerGauge Platform:
99% success rate in child safety outcomes through their HopePath for Families solution
100% response rate for in-person feedback
11% digital survey response rate (with a 15–20% target underway)
Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) consistently exceeds 83 across solutions
24-hour follow-up to address feedback
To explore Canopy’s journey and the role of a thoughtful Customer Experience (CX) strategy in mission-driven work, we spoke with Jody Herring, Director of Measurement, Learning, and Evaluation, and Schyler Watson, Evaluation Coordinator of Canopy Children’s Solutions.
The Challenge: Listening Empathetically While Serving Diverse Needs
For an organization like Canopy, serving children and families often in moments of crisis, collecting feedback isn’t as simple as sending out a survey.
With solutions spanning schools, residential care, and trauma-sensitive services, each client’s experience is deeply personal and often emotionally charged.
Traditional methods risked being intrusive or misaligned with families’ realities. Internally, staff were initially hesitant, unsure whether feedback would be used as a tool for accountability or criticism.
At the same time, Canopy needed to unify client insights across a diverse network of solutions and locations, each with its own data systems and operational rhythm.
The challenge wasn’t just technical — it was cultural, emotional, and deeply human.
The Solution: A Thoughtful, Client-Centered Feedback System Using CustomerGauge
In 2020, Canopy reimagined client feedback as a compassionate and strategic tool for listening, learning, and improvement.
CustomerGauge was selected for its ability to customize its platform to the unique needs of a mental health and child welfare organization, rather than offering a generic solution. For example, Canopy has leveraged CustomerGauge’s smiley face scale option for surveying younger clients in Therapeutic Foster Care.
This has made it much easier for young children to offer their feedback, as well.
❤️ Beyond the Metrics:
- Cultural Transformation:
Staff at all levels now see the client voice as essential to care
Teams are motivated by affirming feedback and community appreciation
Leadership and frontline staff alike are aligned around shared values
- Service Enhancements:
Immediate solutions to facility concerns and communication barriers
Client-driven improvements tailored to specific solution needs
Stronger family trust and deeper staff engagement
- Human-Centered Feedback:
Families feel heard, respected, and cared for
Quick, thoughtful responses show families that their concerns matter
Youth participate more fully thanks to age-appropriate designs
Trauma survivors receive care in ways that honor their healing process
Canopy implemented a multi-channel engagement strategy designed to meet families where they are, both physically and emotionally.
Perhaps most significantly, Canopy embedded NPS as a KPI across all levels of the organization. This move redefined feedback as a measure of care quality and alignment with Canopy’s mission, rather than an evaluative tool.
Jody added,
“We realized that it’s not just about the NPS score — it’s about actually hearing from people and collecting enough responses to understand their experience. That shift really changed our perspective.
We also noticed that the families we're currently serving respond much better to text messages; I know I do, too. Many of them don’t even see emails, so we moved to a model that combines SMS with email. We also added an in-person survey option.
Now, when someone is face-to-face with a staff member, they can be asked directly to complete the survey. It’s just a simple three-question survey that takes less than 30 seconds. This approach has helped us boost our response rates."
By combining email and SMS surveys with in-person feedback opportunities, they created a flexible and accessible system for capturing client voices. In-person surveys, in particular, offered a more immediate, human-centered approach.
Each program was thoughtfully customized to reflect the distinct experiences of the children and families it served.
From specialized schools and therapeutic counseling to intensive residential care and in-home support, Canopy meets children and families where they are — whether that’s navigating mental health challenges, working to stay together through Child Protection Services, or finding permanency through adoption and foster care.
One of our core values is that the voice of our children and families always comes first, and CustomerGauge enables us to do so in a non-invasive way. CustomerGauge has been wonderful to work with in developing programs and surveys specific to our organization; they're not just cookie-cutter from other organizations.
You can tell how good a company is when you start to talk through all the different levels of an organization, and people like it and buy into the flexibility of it.
Their work includes innovative, trauma-informed programs such as the Mississippi Youth Program Around the Clock (MYPAC), HopePath for Families, the Child Advocacy Center, and Therapeutic Foster Care.
Together, these solutions reflect Canopy’s commitment to helping children not only survive but thrive. Canopy reframed feedback collection from a potentially corrective process to one focused on growth, collaboration, and shared accountability within all parts of the organization.
Additionally, teams across solutions were empowered to co-design their survey timelines and goals, fostering deeper ownership and alignment.
For example, families participating in the HopePath for Families solution received monthly check-ins aligned with their case milestones, while school-based programs issued quarterly surveys with advance notice to caregivers.
“We were excited because we love the way CustomerGauge is willing to meet us where we are and ask, ‘How can we help you?’ and that makes all the difference,”
said Jody.
Staff were encouraged to see feedback as a reflection of how well clients felt seen, heard, and supported.
Helping Clients Through Better Feedback: Canopy’s 2025–2026 Strategy
Canopy's goals for the next two years reflect their commitment to expanding and deepening their feedback capabilities, with plans to implement comprehensive feedback systems for new solutions that will serve thousands of additional children plus their families.
The organization is working to complete specialized surveys for both the South Mississippi Child Advocacy Centers and Therapeutic Foster Care solutions, ensuring that even their most sensitive therapies and care have appropriate feedback mechanisms.
Advanced data initiatives will provide more sophisticated analytics capabilities, as well. The organization plans to develop detailed comparisons of email, SMS, and in-person survey performance to optimize its multi-channel approach.
Solution-specific dashboards will offer better data visualization and program management capabilities. In contrast, the integration of CustomerGauge data with their internal “Hope Scale” assessments will provide unique insights into the relationship between client satisfaction and therapeutic outcomes.
The organization is exploring pop-up surveys and other innovative feedback collection methods while working to enhance dashboard customization for solution-specific insights, too. They aim to create even stronger correlations between satisfaction measures and outcome data, providing evidence-based insights that can guide program improvements and demonstrate impact to funders and stakeholders.
For Canopy Children’s Solutions, these goals are more than metrics; they are milestones on the path to deeper connection, stronger programs, and lasting impact for the communities Canopy serves.
Discover Canopy at mycanopy.org.
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