MDRC’s fourth brief, Beyond Reporting: Using Data as a Performance Management Tool, continues to chronicle the progress of the Change Capital Fund (CCF) grantees to help move individuals and communities up the economic ladder.  This brief focuses on how the CCF initiative has altered staff perceptions and uses of data, moving from data collection to using data to improve programs and outcomes for participants.

Over the past three years, CCF has provided technical assistance to support grantees in their efforts to build their capacity to track and use data for performance management.  To date, grantees have implemented and customized data systems and made program improvements based on data analysis.

The MDRC brief identifies the cultural shift that must take place within an organization attempting to build their data capacity — a culture often shaped by funder requirements — in order to shift away from using data to report outcomes (or often, interim steps that may or may not lead to outcomes) to using data for performance management. Related, the brief also addresses the challenges of creating a centralized database infrastructure. Finally, the brief lays out how grantees have used data for program improvement purposes.

Read the brief here.