Client Spotlight: Partners for Rural Impact

By: Christian Ragland

August 28th, 2025

Introduction

On June 10th, Clear Impact hosted the webinar, Education In Action: Leveraging Data + Technology To Improve Student Outcomes. The event focused on how organizations are using data and technology to improve student outcomes.

Speakers represented diverse perspectives—from healthcare and education services in the Mississippi Delta, to community school strategies in New York, to rural youth empowerment in Kentucky. Results-Based Accountability (RBA) and Scorecard software featured prominently as tools that help organizations track, share, and act on data in meaningful ways.

Presenters included:

• Dan Duncan, Senior Consultant and Education Lead, Clear Impact
• Aparna Nandula, Chief Information Officer, Delta Health Alliance
• Dr. Rebecca Tucker, Director of Data and Evaluation, Partners for Rural Impact
• Ripley Hoffman, Community Schools Project Manager, Syracuse University / Wayne County Community Schools Evaluation Team
• Ryan Heath, PhD, LCSW, Associate Professor, Syracuse University
  

Spotlight: Partners for Rural Impact (PRI)

Dr. Rebecca Tucker shared how Results-Based Accountability (RBA) and the Clear Impact Scorecard have transformed the way Partners for Rural Impact supports rural youth and families. PRI works across 46 school districts and serves over 65,000 students, primarily through Promise Neighborhood and Full-Service Community School initiatives.

Moving from Programs to Outcomes

In the early days, PRI viewed RBA primarily as a compliance exercise. Over time, however, RBA helped the organization move beyond simply counting participants to measuring true community-level impact.

“We realized that program success doesn’t automatically lead to population-level change.” 

By adopting shared, measurable outcomes, PRI catalyzed collaboration across educators, nonprofits, and community partners.

Making Data Visible and Actionable

Clear Impact Scorecard provided a framework for PRI to connect performance measures with broader outcomes. This visibility helped identify contributing factors, restricting barriers, and opportunities for improvement.

“The Scorecard software makes this work visible, and it makes it actionable. It allows us to put all of those RBA results and program performance in one spot.” 

For Tucker and her team, Scorecard was also a spark:

“For me, more than that, Scorecard made me curious. It ignited my curiosity about making data visual and shareable… it sparked new questions for us, and it pushed my team to improve.” 

This curiosity led PRI to expand its data visualization capacity—experimenting with Tableau, transitioning to Power BI, and building both internal and public dashboards.

Building a Culture of Curiosity and Capacity

RBA’s Turn the Curve framework has become one of PRI’s most valuable tools, both for external collaborations and internal growth.

“One of the RBA tools we use the most often is Turn the Curve thinking… it’s a simple process for helping us understand what’s the story behind the data, who are the partners, what works, and what will we do?” 

Internally, PRI invested in staff training on data literacy and compliance, created a data style guide, and developed pipelines to connect program and population-level data. This intentional capacity-building has deepened the organization’s ability to analyze and communicate progress.

From Reactive to Proactive

Dr. Tucker closed her remarks with a reflection on how far PRI has come—and where it is headed.

“I believe that Clear Impact Scorecard and the RBA framework has helped us move from a reactive data use mindset to a proactive strategy and cross-sector accountability mindset.”

PRI’s next steps include expanding stakeholder access to dashboards, strengthening data pipelines, and continuing to share learnings across the communities it serves.

Key Takeaways:

• Technology enables collaboration. From rural Kentucky to the Mississippi Delta, data tools allow organizations to align partners and track outcomes in real time.
• RBA drives focus. The framework keeps organizations centered on population-level change, not just program outputs.
• Clear Impact Scorecard brings accountability to life. Scorecard transforms data into actionable insights, supporting both internal improvement and community-level advocacy.

Data capacity is cultural. Beyond dashboards, success requires cultivating curiosity, training staff, and building systems that sustain continuous improvement.