Impact Tracker

Media organizations are always looking to measure and analyze the impact of their work, so they can communicate their value to stakeholders. The Impact Tracker is an analytics dashboard for events in the real world. The framework records impacts at the level of the individual, community, and institution. For example when an individual takes action, public officials refer to a story, or a government hearing is held in response to a report, those changes are logged in the system as discrete outcomes.

Those outcomes can then be tracked over time by topic, by type of outcome, or other metrics. I collaborated with our Director of Strategic Research to develop the dashboard based on her research. We built a rough prototype in Podio, an online database tool.

We worked with visualization studio, Stamen, to develop a Visualizer mode that plots logged outcomes against web traffic, pulled from Google Analytics. This integration lets user correlate web traffic against project outcomes.