We are trained social science researchers who enjoy working with staff, board members, community stakeholders, and others to develop strategy, learning, and dissemination tools such as program evaluations, organizational equity assessments, and program briefs to answer questions and guide organizational actions. We partner with you to produce accessible and useful recommendations, case studies, issues briefs, and other items to support your decision making, and we have a strong network of designers and data visualization experts that support us in making sure we are bringing information to you in ways that you can put into practice immediately.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
From 2024-25, we engaged in partnership with the Women’s Funding Network in a Gates funded equitable funding evaluation to analyze the impact of bringing women’s fund leaders and large scale national funders together. We're creating a data network and analyzing the short term impact to create a long term impact strategy. We are working closely with an advisory council of women's fund leaders of all sizes. At this stage in the process we worked closely with them to redesign the evaluation framework and have completed a landscape assessment.
We partnered with the Education Trust-West to train eight of their grantees on evaluation design and analysis for their individual impact reports. We are providing both training and 1:1 support on evaluation planning, data collection methods, data analysis, and data storytelling so that each nonprofit organization gains knowledge, experience, and confidence in measuring their program’s impact, culminating with an impact report they created with our support by summer 2024.
Throughout 2023, we partnered with the Southern California College Access Network to conduct the first ever research on the representation of historically underrepresented communities in student government in all three public college systems in California. In our data gathering, analysis, and report, Represent All, you’ll find how we designed a participatory framework in which we engaged with both a committee of student government representatives and another composed of student government staff members. The committees enhanced our knowledge of the landscape of student government in California, and also ensured we had the participation, perspectives, and input of key stakeholders of the study.
From 2021-2023, College Futures Foundation contracted us to advise them and their statewide network grantee cohort with a developmental evaluation. The foundation sought to increase engagement, connection, and purpose among the grantees and to coach the two facilitating organizations on their facilitation, project management, and roles in the cohort. Our work resulted in the network of grantees reporting a tremendous increase in buy-in for the network. The outcomes included grantees co-designing a new governing and participation structure for the network, co-creating a new purpose for their work together, and sharing a newfound excitement and engagement level with the foundation as a partner. In May 2024, we completed a second, large-scale impact and strategic learning evaluation project with College Futures Foundation to assess the impact of their grantmaking strategy on their policy and advocacy grantees, offering them feedback throughout the project timeline. This project culminated in a published article on their grantmaking strategy, a compendium of bright spots of collaboration among their grantees, and an internal impact evaluation and recommendations report for the foundation.
