Using common indicators: A tool-building approach Becca Blakewood, US Impact Study

Why use common indicators?  Using shared resources means time, staff, and funding costs for measurement are minimized  Common indicators allow you to aggregate and compare results across multiple organizations

…and why not?  Lack of knowledge or skills (survey design, validation, etc.)  Lack of awareness of common indicators  Limited time, staff, or funding  Lack of leadership support

Tool-building removes some of these obstacles by providing methods, shared among many similar organizations, for quickly and easily gathering and using data.

Impact Survey tools  Launched in October 2013 for all US public libraries  More than 450 libraries have surveyed their patrons and received customized reports of their survey responses.  An active user base means we’re getting frequent requests for new features and ways to improve our tools.

What we provide  A validated survey  A programmed web survey interface that allows survey responses to be collected from any computer or mobile device  A paper survey  An online account that allows you to schedule a survey, get custom links to your web survey, and complete data entry for paper surveys  Automated reports that summarize and analyze your survey results and are available to download from your account  A dataset of your survey responses for further analysis  Group accounts that allow monitoring of many surveys

Build tools that make indicators easy to adopt  Develop and validate indicators  Create a survey  Collect pilot data  Use exploratory data analysis to find interesting patterns in the data  Design one or more reports to communicate about the analysis  Share the survey and reports with similar organizations  Ideally, automate:  Program the reports for automation (we have used Excel/Word, PHP/html, and R/html)  Create account management for partner organizations

Build tools that serve multiple audiences  Using the results:  The summary reports we provide have sometimes challenged the assumptions and observations of library staff about how patrons use public computers and Internet.  Libraries use this information to adjust service levels and programs to better meet their community’s needs.  Library leaders have used their reports to fight budget cuts and inform community decision-makers about specific positive outcomes of library services.

Not just for libraries  We’re extending impactsurvey.org to serve other organizations  Choose which survey to run  Track organizational data that’s important to you: budget, equipment, service levels  Custom reports  We’d like to hear about your projects  Questions? Or to get involved: ImpactSurvey impactsurvey