Video: Hear from ImpactED staff and clients about how data can be used to inform learning and make more impactful change in the community.
ImpactED is a center for social impact based in the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies. We equip mission-driven organizations with critical skills and data to accelerate social change.
Recognizing that mission-driven organizations rarely have access to meaningful and actionable data to expand their impact, our original focus was providing high-quality evaluation support. While we have continued to equip our partners with data, we’ve realized that our work is about much more than facts and figures — it’s about learning.
We support our partners to build impactful learning organizations that respond to the needs and goals of the communities they serve.
Our values
ImpactED approaches all of our work with a commitment to our core values of empathy, collaboration excellence, and continuous improvement.
- Empathy: We engage in constant inquiry to help us better understand the needs and goals of our partners and the communities they serve. This understanding helps us center their humanity and tailor our approach accordingly. We prioritize building strong relationships with our partners and empowering them as agents of change, rather than subjects receiving services.
- Collaboration: We value different forms of expertise and are committed to explicitly and intentionally learning from multiple sources of knowledge. Our approach involves co-generating ideas and incorporating the voices of multiple stakeholders into decisions, including the voices of those most affected by those decisions.
- Excellence: To support our partners in realizing their goals, we ensure that our products and trainings meet high standards and generate meaningful - and actionable insights. Unlike more traditional research organizations, our approach is focused on achieving catalytic validity — i.e., the degree to which the process reorients, focuses, and energizes participants towards knowing reality in order to transform it.
- Continuous improvement: Above all else, we strive to be a learning organization ourselves. We seek to learn from our collaborators, partners and the communities they serve, and value unfiltered feedback that helps us grow and improve our practice. We use this feedback from our partners to inform our approach and engage in reflection and learning on a regular basis.
Our services
We offer a range of capacity building supports and consulting services to help organizations develop critical components of a learning organization. When put into action, these components create the conditions necessary for organizational growth and impact.
- Strategy services help organizations clarify their vision and strategy to better understand how their work responds to community needs and goals and how they can externally communicate their impact
- Evaluation services focus on data collection and analysis and the development of customized evaluation strategies and action plans to help our partners assess and strengthen their impact
- Leadership services equip leaders at all levels with the skills and mindsets needed to build inclusive cultures and networks
