Social Impact Assessment Initiative

The New American University represents excellence, access and impact. But once the goals are articulated and the programs are functioning, how do you measure impact? How do you know when you are meeting your goals?

This question was coming up as UI started to become more and more involved in community outreach programs. Both on an individual program level and on a university-wide level, ASU needed a way to assess what social impact its programs have had.

There is no one elegant way to measure social impact on a university-wide level. (Got any ideas? Email us!) We looked around at what other universities have done, and none of them seemed to have come up with a good way to do this either. So we started by thinking about how to measure social impact one program at a time. We put out a call for collaborators on the ASU in the Community web site through its newsletter, the Community Camera.

The Escalante Community Center approached us to participate. Escalante is partially run by ASU nursing professors and student interns, and partially by non-ASU-affiliated community members, to serve kids and the elderly. They do amazing work on a variety of fronts, helping students to gain practical nursing experience and engage with the community, while also providing a health and wellness program to seniors, and running a voluntary-contribution-based health clinic for people of all ages.

Through research that UI students Chris Olsen and Tad Davis did about these kinds of assessments, UI decided to base our pilot project on the “logic model” developed by the United Way. We then had to determine what Escalante’s needs were; what kind of data they were already gathering; and figure out ways to determine what the impact of their programs is on the community they serve and on the ASU students who take part in the work.

A lot of conversations took place; a lot of brainstorming; a lot of meetings. After more than a year, we developed a system of self-assessment that was useful for Escalante in measuring their work. Success! But…it was too specific. The model assessment could not be easily translated to another situation or program. We learned a lot, and the focal point of that learning was that each program is different, and assessments have to be tailored to a specific program in order to work. Now we are sharing what we’ve learned by telling this story and via documents that were generated along the way. We’re still hunting for good ways to measure an intangible thing like social impact, and we’re watching for the next opportunity to do a project like this one.