How We Measure What Matters: Team Up’s Journey to Meaningful Evaluation

As an Executive Director, these questions used to make me want to find the nearest exit. Why? Because nonprofit evaluation can feel overwhelming—especially for holistic, long-term organizations like Team Up Mentoring.

Let me be clear:

I come from an education background. Evaluating student mastery against a set of learning objectives? No problem. Give me five standards and a timeline, and I’ll give you clear ways to measure success. But the waters get murkier in nonprofits—especially one like ours that walks alongside families for 10 to 12 years, often spanning the entire developmental journey of a child.

What should we measure? We’re not focused solely on boosting academic achievement (though we care about that). We’re not just trying to increase self-confidence (though that matters too). Our mission is broader: we want kids to grow up well, in every sense of the word—whatever that looks like for them.

If you're in a similar space—supporting real people with complex, individualized needs—you know that no single measure of success captures the whole story. But here’s how we moved from confusion to clarity. (Spoiler: most of this didn’t cost money—but it did take time, commitment, and a lot of recalibrating.)

Step 1: Start with Outputs

This was the easy part. We tracked program attendance, workshops offered, transportation mileage, volunteer hours—you name it. It wasn’t transformational, but it was a start. We created spreadsheets and dashboards to reflect the core activities that kept our programs running.

Step 2: Create a Logic Model (Yes, We Shuddered Too)

Logic models are notoriously tricky, especially for long-term, relationship-driven work. But thanks to a pro bono capacity-building initiative, two of our staff members worked with experts over several months to build one that made sense for us. It gave us shared language and clarity around our short-term, mid-range, and long-term goals.

Step 3: Struggle Through the Murky Middle

Short-term KPIs? No problem. But mid- and long-term goals like “graduates create a ripple effect in their community”? That’s harder to quantify. We had the logic, but we needed better tools to tell the story.

Step 4: Adopt A Management System and Streamline

For us, that system was the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). Our leadership team used it to revisit our logic model and streamline what we tracked. We trimmed our KPI list to focus on what really mattered. We also made sure our data collection with clients was purposeful—not just surveys for the sake of checking boxes.

Step 5: Level Up with AaEA

Our breakthrough came with the Atlanta-area Evaluation Association (AaEA). Their pro bono team worked with us for eight months to refine our framework. We focused on our Student Life Program and developed evaluation tools that could track progress over time—from program intake to graduation. Thanks to AaEA, we’re now equipped to measure things like self-confidence, decision-making, and resilience over the long haul.

Today, we’re still learning—but we’re not lost. Our team has a framework, a shared language, and a focus that lets us track impact in ways that matter to us and to the youth and families we serve.

If you’re walking this same road—know that you don’t have to have it all figured out. But you do have to keep going, ask good questions, and stay committed to learning what really moves the needle for the people you serve.