Leaders have limited time and their organizations have limited resources. How can they prioritize the many issues that come across their desks each day? Which initiatives will have the greatest impact?

In this series, we use examples from our clients’ experiences to illustrate how organizations can follow our 7 Steps for Data-Driven Decision Making to incorporate data analysis into their work.
We have already described how to frame the issue, develop hypotheses and collect, analyze and interpret data. In this installment, we will share Step 6: Decision Making.

Prioritize Results to Act On

After you test your hypotheses and determine which are confirmed or rejected by the data, you will find that there are many actions you could take. As always, though, time is limited and you cannot accomplish everything. Given this, it is essential to prioritize which confirmed hypotheses you will act on according to how well each one aligns with your organization’s vision and mission.

Create an Action Plan

In addition to prioritizing areas of focus based on the data, we encourage our clients to create a strategy with specific actions that they will take to improve.

An effective action plan will:

1. Set measurable goals to mark progress (Benchmarking)
   
2. Determine necessary resources (staff, budget, materials, etc.)
   
3. Lay out a timeline to ensure that the information doesn’t sit idly until it is outdated
   
4. Assign each piece of the plan to an owner who will take responsibility for managing the timeline for that component
   

Examples of the Decision Making Process

Sarah is a Program Manager for a capacity-building foundation. Her organization’s vision is to encourage service in the nonprofit sector. Providing volunteers with a positive experience and retaining them over time helps her foundation meet this objective. Her data analysis confirmed her hypothesis that grantees who invest more time and money into training and support for their volunteers have higher retention rates.

She decided to create an action plan that would use this information to achieve her organization’s goals. To begin, she worked with her leadership team to develop a strategy to inform the nonprofits who received grants about the findings of her analysis. This action would help her grantees understand how their decisions, budget and communication tactics affect volunteer retention. She would also recommend that the nonprofits spend a percentage of their grant money on volunteer training. Her organization would continue to collect data over the following grant period to examine the impact of the new recommendations.

Case study 2: Private school

John, the principle of an independent school wants to investigate the perceptions and performance of his middle school math program. The mission and vision of John’s school is to equip students intellectually and socially as they enter high school. John’s data revealed that middle school parents did not understand what their children were learning through the math curriculum, or whether their children were sufficiently prepared for high school. He also learned that his middle school’s math scores had gradually declined and were lower than those of similar schools.

While two of his hypotheses were confirmed, he decided to focus first on making improvements to his math curriculum to ensure that students were prepared for high school level math. Although John understood that managing parents’ perceptions was also important, he felt that curriculum improvement was most aligned with his vision. He knew he could return to parent perceptions once he began making improvements to the program.

John’s action plan outlined the specific tasks he and his staff would perform to improve the quality of the math program. He planned to monitor the scores of his students after implementing the improved curriculum to see if they improved. He would compare these scores relative to his school’s initial pre-intervention scores and to the scores that similar schools achieved. John also planned to formally survey his parents again in a year to see how their perceptions changed with regard to the math program.

Once you have chosen the confirmed hypotheses to focus on and developed an action plan, it is time for Step 7: Communication to Key Stakeholders.

Check out next month’s newsletter for the final installment of our 7 Steps to Data Driven Decision Making series.