Measuring our Impact
It is critically important that we work together on data collection to gather defensible estimates and accounts of our outputs, impacts, processes and patterns. This will help us to better understand where our work is most effective and where we can improve. It will also help us to attract new donors and strategic partners, as they will be able to better understand the impact we're having and why they should contribute.
Some notes from Jon Schull:
Most of e-NABLE is "dark matter". When people (or funders) ask how many devices we've made or people we have helped, we can only say "thousands".
Saiph Savage's "Occupational Therapy Practices Workgroup", and some of her graduate students are currently [harvesting lots of great information](https://community.e-nable.org/content/perma?id=184) through conversation and case-sharing among committed volunteers with vast amounts of qualitative and quantitative information. Perhaps this is a pattern we can build on.
While our recipients have not been responsive to surveys, we have chapter leaders, makers, and infrastructure volunteers who know a lot about a lot. We need some detail-oriented collaborators who are willing to help with the interviews, and to take responsibility for collating, organizing and analyzing the data.
One of the possible approaches we've been discussing is to have our volunteers conduct interviews with device recipients instead of just asking them to fill out a survey. These interviews would be conducted in person or via online video meetings. The volunteer would ask the questions and record the answers. The reason we feel this approach may work better is that, when asked to fill out a survey, a recipient may feel obliged to give positive feedback, since they received the device for free. With a volunteer conducting the interview, we can explain to them the importance of having honest feedback, positive or negative, so we can continue to improve our capabilities and help more people.
Join the discussion and share your ideas in the Stream section!
![](https://wikifactory.com/files/RmlsZToyMTA3NzQ%3D)