Taking Measure: What Happens When Organizations Assess Their Data Journey

The Challenge

When we talk to community partners, backbones, and organizations about data, we hear a familiar story:

Everyone at your organization agrees data should drive decisions, and data does get collected: attendance records here, enrollment numbers there, a shared spreadsheet someone updates before board meetings. You are experts in your fields and your communities, and you’re pulling off a lot of one-off heroics with the time and resources you have.

Partnerships collect plenty of data but struggle to reliably access or use it to change outcomes, or to tell that story to the funders and partners who need to hear it.

What's missing isn't the will to use data well. It's a clear, shared picture of where the organization actually stands today, and what to fix first. That’s not an individual challenge: it’s systemic. There’s not yet an ecosystem culture of data-driven decision making or exploration for place-based leaders, and technology is shifting under our feet as we speak.

The gap shows up in familiar ways: a lone data lead holding knowledge that lives across three different systems, partners sending information in whatever format is easiest for them, dashboards built for one grant report and never touched again.

Most leaders know data matters. Many organizations collect data in some form or another. Fewer have a clear picture of where they stand today or what to prioritize next. And even fewer are able to reliably access and use the data they need to change outcomes in their communities and champion their impact.

Almost every community organization wants to improve how they use data and technology to drive their work. But we know they often face competing demands, limited staff capacity, and disconnected systems, making it hard to get started on this work.

At Measure Well, we are on a mission to change that. We’re working to help place-based partners and leaders use exemplary data practices and cutting-edge technology, by building repeatable tools, launching learning opportunities, and working with groups to solve some of their biggest challenges.

But in order to get started, you first need to know where you’re starting from. That’s why we designed the Data & Tech Journey Self-Assessment: to help leaders understand where they are on the data and technology spectrum and take the first step to build a shared understanding of their current strengths, gaps, and opportunities.

The Approach

The Data & Tech Journey Self-Assessment is designed as an approachable planning tool to help teams go deep on their data and technology practices to evaluate how they collect, store, govern, analyze, and communicate data.

Organizations complete a structured reflection exercise that includes:

• A technology and tool inventory

• A data inventory

• A maturity self-assessment

• Guided discussion prompts

The goal is never to score organizations against one another. Instead, the self-assessment helps teams understand their own current reality, establish a benchmark for themselves, and identify practical next steps for improvement that are aligned with their organization’s goals.

What We Learned

We’ve been piloting the Data & Tech Journey Self-Assessment this year, and across workshops and assessment participants, several themes emerged.

1. Simply Getting Things on Paper Is Revealing

There are some easy wins that the Self-Assessment can help teams uncover, no matter their skill level. One of the biggest insights was that the technology and tool inventory exercise helped participants recognize just how many tools and platforms they are using.

In several cases, responses revealed information that surprised both participating organizations and the national networks supporting them. For example, one advanced organization acknowledged that they have several programs with very mature data collection practices and newer programs where they are not leveraging best practices. As a result of that insight, they’ve put more emphasis on data collection techniques as they design new programs. Simply documenting existing systems created new visibility into how work was being done.

2. The Self-Assessment Gets Teams Talking

Taking the Self-Assessment with team members is the most valuable way to engage with it because it sparks important conversations that you may not be having on a day-to-day basis.  Sometimes organizational leaders and doers have different perspectives about what stage the organization or partnership is in.

One participant organization, United Way of the Coastal Empire, attended a workshop featuring the Data & Tech Journey Self-Assessment and told us: "Your presentation sparked quite a bit of conversation among our team."

The team immediately saw opportunities to use the approach in their organization’s own work. They had recently redesigned their grantmaking process and were thinking deeply about data collection, systems, and organizational capacity.

The exercise provided a framework for continuing those conversations, and they’re now exploring how to integrate the self-assessment into future capacity-building efforts with local partners.

3. It’s All in the Follow Up

Teams loved surfacing shared insights and starting conversations, but it’s important for the exercise to lead to action. We heard from several participants who are looking for practical guidance for progressing through the maturity stages, shared definitions and descriptions for those just starting out on their journey, and recommendations on which areas to focus on first if you have limited time and resources. We’re actively working with our community to develop more of these repeatable resources, so cradle-to-career organizations and place-based partnerships can continue to learn and grow together.

Why It Matters

There are a million competing priorities for most cradle-to-career organizations and place-based partnerships. The Data & Tech Journey Self-Assessment creates a structured opportunity for organizations to reflect, align as a team, and identify priorities for growth.

Of course, the biggest changes come when organizations start to change and improve their practices, and the team at Measure Well is excited to be your partner in that journey. But even before organizations make changes to their systems or processes, the self-assessment can bring value to your organization and help your teams:

• Establish a baseline

• Build a shared understanding of current practices

• Identify opportunities for improvement

• Start data-informed planning conversations

As more organizations complete the self-assessment, these individual reflections will contribute to a broader benchmark for understanding how place-based partnerships and community organizations use data and technology to drive impact. Those insights will also help us design tools and resources that address and solve shared problems.

You can download the Data & Tech Journey Self-Assessment here and get started with your own team. Or reach out if you’re interested in joining an in-person workshop or having a session facilitated by our team.