Impact@RAP
Measuring social impact
How might we define, measure, and communicate the social impact of a small non-profit organization to ensure sustainable growth?
#Strategy #DesignResearch
Org: Resilience Advocacy Project & The New School || Location: NYC || Date: Aug - Dec 2018 || Role: Researcher & Client relations
Brief
Resilience Advocacy Project (RAP) is a New York City nonprofit organization that focuses on youth-led programs in order to build leaders in the fight against social injustices. Founded in 2008, the mission of the organization is to empower youth to obtain a deep knowledge of various social justice issues and leverage the tools and resources to create change in their communities.
The New School’s Parsons School of Design partnered with RAP to learn and work on their organization’s challenges and craft solutions utilizing the frameworks of design thinking and service design.
This project centers around the challenge of creating an effective system to effectively measure RAP’s social impact and increase engagement of all internal and external stakeholders.
My role
As part of a team composed of thirteen colleagues, I was in-charged of managing the client relations and communications. I also lead the prototype creation using google sheets, the storytelling process during our pitch nights, and the Organizational Culture Kit’s content design.
Process
Throughout the thirteen weeks, we followed the strategic / design thinking process of diverging and converging. We worked on smaller teams of three during the diverging stages and as a large team when converging.
Stakeholder mapping
The process starting with an understanding of the current state of the organization, its stakeholders, and unique challenges (as defined by our client).
Secondary & Primary Research
As part of the diverging stage the team identified and interviewed different stakeholders, facilitated workshops, and executed guided observations.
Sense-making & Insights
We developed a metaphor inspired on RAP’s own activities to introduce the insights and priorities to our client, allow us to communicate and prioritize the areas of focus for the next stages.
Ideation
We used How Might We’s statements to create many ideas and then prioritized them according to the constraints of the organization, centering around those low cost - high impact.
Prototyping and testing
We divided the team and created a series of prototypes and tests to develop and iterate the ones that would be more feasible to implement for the organization.
Results
We developed two final solutions that focus on utilizing data more effectively and clearly communicating one story-based. The two solutions were the Engagement Suite (containing a story base, an organization culture framework, and data collection toolkits) and the Impact Model (KPIs and guidelines on how to use the engagement suit to communicate impact and generate long term engagement). Follow these links to see the Full Report & the Org Culture Framework
