By: Adam Luecking
January 13th, 2023
Social Sector Hero Spotlights tell stories of exemplary social and public sector organizations that are making measurable differences in their communities. The following Berkshire United Way spotlight is an excerpt from “Social Sector Hero – How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact” by Adam Luecking. You can download the book for free here and read all 16 Social Sector Hero Spotlights.
In this Social Sector Hero Spotlight, learn more about the tools and tactics that help Berkshire United Way engage in more effective data-based decision-making, funding, and communication.
Table of Contents
1. Introducing Pittsfield, Massachusetts
2. The Challenge: Education, Graduation, and Income
3. The Power of a Good Story Behind the Curve
4. Empowering Partners to Create a Community of Impact
5. Seeing Community Impact as the Endgame
1. Introducing Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Pittsfield is the largest city and seat of Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Like many New England manufacturing centers, it experienced a significant economic decline in the latter part of the twentieth century. However, with environmental initiatives, industrial property reconstruction, and growth in arts and entertainment, the city has redefined itself as a cultural and economic powerhouse. Forbes ranked Pittsfield as number 61 in its 2006 Best Small Places for Business list. In 2009, Massachusetts chose the city to receive a 2009 Commonwealth Award, the state’s highest award in the arts, humanities, and sciences.
Pittsfield is also home to Berkshire United Way (BUW). Berkshire United Way is helping children, families, and individuals learn and grow, make smart decisions, and find stability in life by supporting programs that focus on early childhood development, positive youth development, and economic prosperity. Through Community Impact work in Fiscal Year 2021, BUW was able to help 13,443 individuals in 38 programs across 25 agencies.
2. The Challenge: Education, Graduation, and Income
Despite the city’s accolades, there’s a different side of the city and county. As of 2020, the percentage of Berkshire children who score at or above proficient on Grade 3 MCAS English tests is down from the last ten years and is lower than the state average. High school graduates planning for college have also seen a decline, likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Median household income increased but was still significantly lower than the state average in 2020, and the gap continued to grow. Due to this troubling data, BUW focuses on improving third-grade literacy, high-schoolers planning for post-secondary education, and median household income.
BUW was already concerned about these issues nearly a decade before they came to light. To make a serious impact on their focus areas, Social Sector Heroes at BUW realized in 2013 they needed a way to track their community partners’ outcomes. This realization prompted them to seek training in several social impact frameworks. Before 2013, BUW had already adopted Collective Impact, Results-Based Accountability, and Asset Based Community Development and integrated them into its internal strategic plan. Colleagues from one of BUW’s sister organizations, United Way of Central Iowa, had recently visited and shared their experience using Clear Impact consultants and software to build their outcomes tracking systems. Julie Singley, BUW’s Coordinator of Research and Evaluation at the time, was all in. She looped in Dan Duncan, one of Clear Impact’s Senior Consultants, to facilitate community training and work with them to develop their strategic planning process.
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3. The Power of a Good Story Behind the Curve
During the design phase of their new outcomes measurement initiative, a BUW implementation team worked closely with Clear Impact staff. The team utilized the Clear Impact Scorecard to set up data dashboards to monitor and improve progress across their entire fellowship. On the Population Accountability front, they set up dashboards for each of their three focus areas and each corresponding Strategy for each partner agency to report programmatic outcomes (home visiting, quality early education and care, mentoring, career readiness, etc.).
Understanding the importance of journaling their impact story, BUW also ensured partners provided a Turn the Curve plan, consisting of a Story Behind the Curve, Partners, What Works, and an Action Plan for each target performance measure. To get the most out of the software, the implementation team attended Scorecard University and worked closely with several team members at Clear Impact to learn more about implementing Scorecard effectively. By July 2017, all community partners were using Scorecard to measure performance.
4. Empowering Partners to Create a Community of Impact
Why did BUW find Clear Impact Scorecard so valuable? Notably, it helps their partners to journal their impact journey and document answers to essential RBA questions. While she was still with the organization in 2019, Singley shared, “We highly value the Clear Impact Scorecard system that helps us aggregate all of our community partner work as well as it’s able to capture both quantitative as well as qualitative data. So, our partners can share the Story Behind the Curve and explain why the data is looking the way it does.”
Some of the benefits BUW experienced as a result of their new initiatives included:
- Funded partners were easily able to share their success with other funders
- BUW could more easily see trends and aggregate/disaggregate data by focus area/strategy
- Early childhood partners began consistently performing well
- BUW engages in more effective data-based decision-making, funding, and communication.
You can read the full list of benefits in Clear Impact’s official BUW Scorecard Case Study.
5. Seeing Community Impact as the Endgame
To BUW, community impact isn’t just a process for making investment decisions. It’s the endgame. That endgame includes literate children that grow up into happy, healthy, educated youth, literate adults, and financially stable people — the keys to a good life. BUW creates sustainable change by directing resources to programs and initiatives that meet the broad range of needs in these areas. Ultimately, RBA and Scorecard are helping BUW to see whether they are making measurable progress toward these end goals.
Having already established accountability and impact measurement systems, BUW would’ve undoubtedly made progress on its focus areas. However, three critical tools mentioned in this chapter accelerated the entire effort: RBA’s Turn the Curve Process (particularly the Story Behind the Curve), the Clear Impact Scorecard’s qualitative data analysis functionality (Story Behind the Curve reporting), and the help of expert facilitation from champions for change like Dan Duncan.
6. Helpful Links
- Learn more about “journaling your journey” and creating effective Stories Behind the Curve.
- Learn more about the Turn the Curve Thinking Process.
- Read all 16 Social Sector Hero Spotlights in a free download of Social Sector Hero
- Read BUW’s official Clear Impact Scorecard case study
- Read another Social Sector Hero Spotlight that explores the importance of “journaling your journey.”
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