EarlystART

Honing Priority Performance Measures to Support Operations and Strategy

EarlystART, a Kansas City-based nonprofit childcare provider, had developed a list of hundreds of performance measures of various relevance and importance. EarlystART asked PorchLight Insights to assess the possibility of a data dashboard to report on measures.

This project demonstrates PorchLight Insights’ iterative and agile approach to client projects.  While our initial project was focused on building a data dashboard, it became clear that the client sought to refocus on key measures to support operations. Our scan of EarlystART’s performance measures revealed opportunities to improve coordination and definition of measures collected across different operating units. Like many nonprofits, measures were collected typically for the purpose of annual grant or compliance reporting, which created a scramble of activity to collect data instead of maintaining a consistent measurement routine.  PorchLight Insights helped EarlystART identify a small list of high priority measures to be collected and reviewed on a regular basis by management staff with the goal of using this condensed list of measures for better data-informed operational decisions.