Measurement and Continuous Improvement

Our Work

Data is the key to understanding whether an organization is on the path to success, and what it could improve to get there faster. We partner with organizations — including districts, state agencies, nonprofits, and funders — to integrate evaluation into their existing planning and implementation efforts, delivering data-based insights that drive their efforts to support students.

Our focus areas include:

Program Evaluation: We offer both short- and long-term program evaluations, including experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, and descriptive research in addition to developmental evaluations that can help organizations define, gather feedback on, and refine initiatives during the early stages of design.

Capacity-Building: We build and strengthen organizations’ internal capacity to capture and use data for management, to drive decision-making across the organization and maximize performance, and to evaluate what is working and provide evidence of efficacy. Our capacity-building support includes refining logic models, developing and supporting implementation of measurement and evaluation plans, and creating dashboards and reports to enable insight and facilitate decision-making for stakeholders, including funders. This work also enables organizations to embed these capacity-building practices into their own operations over time.

Tailored Research: We offer rigorous and tailored research services to inform planning, implementation, and communications. Services include survey research, quantitative data analysis, focus groups, literature reviews, and social network analysis.

Our Impact

Bellwether partners with clients to integrate evaluation into their existing planning and implementation efforts. Some of our past partners and clients include:

InsideTrack: Bellwether worked with InsideTrack, an organization that provides coaching to support college students to reach their educational and career goals, on two projects to improve their measurement and evaluation capabilities. Bellwether helped InsideTrack develop a coaching program evaluation plan to measure student outcomes, including crafting survey tools and an implementation roadmap. We also facilitated a process to develop a set of management dashboards to help organization leaders monitor organizational health and impact.

Collegiate Academies: Bellwether partnered with Collegiate Academies, a charter management organization based in New Orleans, for more than seven years to conduct a mixed-methods implementation and impact study of their two federal Charter Schools Program grants. This long-running evaluation included a quasi-experimental study of the impacts of enrollment on student outcomes, as well as site visits to observe programming; interviews with Collegiate staff, families, and students; and surveys of Collegiate students and alumni.

Education Forward DC and Youth Invest Partners: Bellwether partnered with Education Forward DC and Youth Invest Partners to analyze data from the Panorama social emotional learning survey administered to students in a cohort of schools in the District of Columbia. We synthesized the data into a series of multiyear public reports designed to provide insights on student well-being across the city, with lessons for leaders in D.C. and beyond.

The Broad Center Social Network Analysis: Bellwether conducted a social network analysis to help the Broad Center understand the current state of alumni relationships within its network. Findings from Bellwether’s social network analysis showed that their alumni were successfully maintaining the networks they developed through the Broad Center’s programs and have leveraged them to advance their career. 

Utah State Board of Education (USBE): Bellwether is conducting a three-year study of the Check & Connect Mentoring program offered by USBE to students receiving Youth-in-Care and Prevention services provided to all students in state custody (juvenile justice and child welfare). Bellwether began by helping USBE build a logic model and implementation fidelity framework to describe the program and is now collecting annual implementation data to assess progress towards program goals. This study will result in an interactive data dashboard grounded in the logic model and implementation fidelity framework allowing state agency staff to track program implementation and understand the impact that high-quality services have on the youth receiving mentoring.

Our Team

Melissa Steel King
Senior Partner

Paul Beach
Associate Partner

Katrina Boone
Senior Associate Partner

Alex Cortez
Partner

Kelly Robson Foster
Senior Associate Partner

Molly Jamieson
Senior Associate Partner

Liz Russel McNamee
Senior Associate Partner

Daniela Torre Gibney
Senior Associate Partner

Christine Wade
Senior Associate Partner