Coeffect’s Data Fitness Quiz

As the leader of a nonprofit or social enterprise, you’ve probably seen how difficult it can be to collect meaningful data that proves you’re making an impact. Impact measurement can feel overwhelming - so many different kinds of evaluation, strategies to try, tools to use, and research to read. However, after helping over three dozen organizations with budgets of $500K - $5M to establish processes for managing and interpreting data, we've identified five simple practices that define data and impact measurement success:

  1. Having a clear impact strategy, including a Theory of Change

  2. Strong habits for data collection

  3. User-friendly data systems

  4. Team data fluency - skills for interpreting and communicating with data

  5. A culture of learning

To help you objectively understand your organization’s strengths in these five areas, we’ve developed a free data fitness quiz - an editable PDF you can download and share with your team. Completing this 5-minute quiz will help you learn more about these five fundamentals and understand which are stronger than others for your organization.

Why is data fitness so important?

  • Having a clear impact strategy means that you’re proactively working towards your team’s own learning and impact measurement priorities, rather than reactively collecting data when a funder, board member, or government agency asks for it.

  • Strong habits for data collection mean that you are consistently collecting meaningful data, and you’ve thought carefully about which data collection approaches are the right fit for the questions you’re asking and who is answering them.

  • Teams that have user-friendly data systems find that their systems and technology tools - while they may not be perfect - are good enough to support their mission and don’t get in the way of making an impact with the individuals or organizations they serve.

  • Team data fluency means that everybody has a common base of knowledge and language to use when talking about data. Not everybody needs to be an analyst - but everyone on your team should be competent in reviewing a data product (be it a report, chart, dashboard, or something else) and asking good questions about it.

  • Finally a culture of learning means that team members at all levels come together to review data as one part of making important decisions.

Once you’ve completed the data fitness quiz yourself, you can use the results to start a discussion with your team, by talking through questions like “where are our data fitness bright spots?” and “if we improved only one of these areas this year, which would make the greatest impact on the people we serve?”

If you’d like to discuss your responses or how to take the next step with your team, let’s jump on a call and work through some strategies that make sense for your organization.