The English Tutoring Project (ETP) is a small but mighty program that provides English language tutoring to non-native speakers in St. Louis’s Catholic elementary and middle schools. The program has great success increasing the language proficiency of its students and believed that this success was impacting the students in other ways that were not yet captured in their data but that institutional funders were starting to require.
Working collaboratively with the program’s leader and volunteer tutors, we identified the ways improved language proficiency changes the lives of students including increasing their confidence in the classroom, increasing their participation in school and social activities, and improving academic performance. From there, we crafted meaningful and measurable outcome statements to capture the changes they saw in students and to make their case to funders.
We designed parent, teacher, and principal surveys to assess the new outcomes in simple ways. Lastly, The IllumiLab designed a data management tool that was manageable for this small organization yet robust enough to meet funders’ increasing demands for outcome reporting. Today, ETP can easily capture and describe its impact and use its data for learning, improvement, and storytelling.
Here’s what the Program Administrator, Kathleen Koenen says about their experience:
“As the leader of a small nonprofit, logic models, impact, outcomes and outputs were not in my normal vocabulary and seemed too big a task, but we were at a point where we needed to develop our strategies. In came Sarah who organized a plan and worked with our entire staff to define success and set our goals. She had an approach that made it fun and her style was affirming and clear. We now have clear tools for measurement, a plan for sharing, and a tool for compiling data that I can use with ease. The package was just what we needed. I learned a new way of telling our story of success.”