The Link Group has had the pleasure of working with North Carolina Arts in Action (NC AIA) over the past seven years. NC AIA, a non-profit organization, empowers children in elementary schools through dance and live music, regardless of abilities and socio-economic status. The pedagogy used by NC AIA teaches students self-confidence, resiliency, critical thinking, and collaboration.

But how can you objectively measure the impact that dance and music have on a child’s ability and school performance?

In this article, we’ll dive into a case study on our NC AIA work and cover how to optimize trackers by using the Donor Impact Framework:

1. Identify donor focus
2. Align with program mission
3. Build new questions
4. Remove irrelevant questions
5. Maintain current questions
6. Reframe questions for impact

Over the past seven years, we’ve partnered with NC AIA to gather more comprehensive data and insights to ensure that the program can continue to deliver meaningful experiences. Each year, students complete a pre-and-post program survey, where we measure significant improvements in self-confidence, attitudes about school, and attention paid in class. We track that data over time to show both the organization and its donors the continued and sustained impact of the program. But after seven years, we wanted to take a fresh look at this tracker. To do this, we created the Donor Impact Framework,which measures the donor attractiveness of key metrics against the focus areas of the program. Aligning these axes allowed us to optimize and refresh the tracker. Let’s take a look at how this framework plays out in action.

Identify donor focus

We knew from qualitative research and anecdotes from the organization’s leaders that donor priorities and needs may have changed over time. So we checked in with key donors to understand what was most important to them and what most impacted their desire to give. We also understood what key parts of NC AIA’s mission were most meaningful to them. This gave us a yardstick against which to measure success of metrics.

Align with program mission

The NC AIA pedagogy had evolved since the tracker’s inception, and they had redefined their mission. We talked with the organization’s leaders and teachers to understand what they most cared about when it came to serving children and what impact they were most interested in measuring that are core to its cause. Armed with this framework, we were able to refresh and reimagine the tracker by identifying which new questions to build into the survey, which to remove, which to continue measuring, and which to reframe.

Build new questions

What key questions are missing from the survey which speak to either donor or program priorities? We found that coming out of the pandemic, donors were focused on wanting to see impact on social-emotional behavior, especially among students in elementary school. While this is not a core tenant of NC AIA, it is tangential to its teaching pedagogy. Therefore, we built a new battery of questions to address this outage.

Remove irrelevant questions

What existing survey questions are no longer relevant to neither donors nor the program? When we first created the survey seven years ago, donors were interested in physical health and so we included a question that showed how the program impacts children’s mindset about exercise. But today, physical health was less of a focus for donors and not a core tenant of the program, so we removed that question.

Maintain current questions

What current questions are getting the job done? As we looked over the survey, most of the questions were addressing metrics which were both important to donors and spoke to the program’s mission. These were questions we wanted to keep in the survey to continue to measure impact.

Reframe questions for impact

What questions need to be asked differently to better measure impact? There may be questions that are important to the program’s focus and mission but aren’t – as written – addressing donor focuses. In our case, we had a question about how the program motivated students to do their best, but the bigger impact for both donors and NC AIA is how the teachers motivated students. This spoke to the relationships built by the teachers and how well they were teaching pedagogy. Therefore, we reframed the question to better capture the impact of the teachers.

When was the last time you looked at your trackers? Taking a fresh look – and using a framework like the Donor Impact Framework – can help make them more streamlined and more impactful for your organization. Determine how current questions align with your organization’s focus, as well as the focus of your audience. Then identify those questions to build, to remove, to maintain, and to reframe.

If you’re ready for a tracker refresh, contact The Link Group today to receive a custom plan tailored to your organization’s needs.