Reimagining evaluation together with the Story+Data Map
By Elizabeth Whitcher, Kayla Benitez Alvarez, and Marcela Torres Pauletic
Join us to explore how an evidence building partnership we admire used Data+Soul’s Story+Data Map to develop an evaluation plan, and reimagine what evaluation means together. Our friends from the University of Colorado’s Center for Resilience and Well-Being share their story of using the map in partnership with the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence to develop an evidence building plan that honors the expertise of all partners.
What is the Story+Data Map?
Last year, Data+Soul shared the Story+Data Map with the broader community. The Story+Data Map is a tool for people who want to use data and stories to move towards more equitable, just futures. At its core, the map is a person-centered, assets-framed approach that unites theory of change and data all on one page, and offers a welcome shift away from the traditional logic model to re-center people over programs. In technical assistance and evidence building work with non-profit organizations, the Data+Soul team reaches for the Story+Data Map early and often to launch partnerships and develop evaluation plans. While evaluation planning can often become the siloed work of teams or individuals with research-based roles, we believe the best evaluation plans come out of the collective knowledge of people closest to the work and their evidence-building partners. We have been excited to see organizations in our networks reach for collaborative tools like the Story+Data map as a light-lift way to honor collective expertise in evaluation design processes.
How have our partners been using the Story+Data Map?
Kayla Benitez Alvarez and Elizabeth Whitcher sat down with Marcela Torres Pauletic, Director of Training at the University of Colorado’s Center for Resilience and Well-Being, to learn about how her team is using the Story+Data Map in practice. At the Center for Resilience and Well-being, Marcela works with fellow scientist practitioners to develop, inform, and evaluate interventions that
support adults to show up as their best so the children they care for can thrive. Currently, Marcela and team are partnering with the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence (SPAN) to provide evaluation support for SPAN’s work to end violence against adults, youth and children through support, advocacy, education and community organizing in Boulder, Colorado.
Why did you decide to use the Story+Data Map?
In 2024, Data+Soul shared an early iteration of the Story+Data Map tool to a cohort of 55 organizations working to end domestic violence in communities across the United States. As members of the cohort, SPAN and the Center for Resilience and Well-Being were launching a new phase of their partnership and developing an evaluation plan for their work together. Marcela saw the Story+Data Map as a strong framework to honor and learn from the expertise of the SPAN team through the evaluation design process.
Marcela: …Storytelling, the family-driven approach, a grassroots approach, …honoring people's lived experiences: that's just who they [SPAN] are. And it felt important to lead with something that was… more consistent with how they do their work… to really learn from [SPAN] about the story that they want to tell, the people that they want to support and help. The map seemed like it was a really good fit to get to a place where an evaluation plan could come out with the team… it felt like a really good fit for the way that they do their work so beautifully.
What aspirations did you have?
Through their evaluation design process, the team’s goals were to:
Re-define what evaluation means, together. From 2019 - 2024, The Center for Resilience and Well-Being worked in partnership with SPAN while implementing Let’s Connect®, a parenting intervention that teaches caregivers to respond to children’s emotional needs while building connection and emotional security. Marcela’s team led a quasi-experimental evaluation to understand and develop an evidence base around the intervention’s impact. In 2024, the partners transitioned into a new phase of collaboration where The Center would serve as the evaluation partner supporting SPAN’s on-going work to end violence in the Boulder community. Marcela and team saw this transition as an important opportunity to work alongside their partners at SPAN to define what evaluation would look like in the context of their work, together as codesigners.
Develop an evaluation plan. Through the evaluation design process, the partners aimed to develop an evaluation plan that would support and honor the holistic and culturally responsive ways that SPAN does their work within the Boulder community.
What challenges or opportunities existed?
When preparing to develop an evaluation plan, Marcela and team were mindful of opportunities for collective learning and growth that existed in their partnership.
Approaching the role of research partner with intention. In their role as scientist practitioners within a large university, Marcela and team are attuned to systems of oppression and the ways in which communities have been harmed or disserved by evaluation and research. In their partnerships with community-based organizations, they work intentionally to earn and nurture trust.
Honoring expertise. Marcela’s team stepped into the role of research partner with the goal of creating opportunities to learn from and with their collaborators at SPAN, combating narratives that view researchers as the primary holders of evaluation expertise. Marcela saw the Story+Data Map as an ideal framework to honor the expertise of SPAN as a community partner closest to the work, and facilitate the inclusion of many voices in evaluation planning.
What did your Story+Data Map process look like?
Who was in the room: To launch the evaluation planning process, members of the evaluation team from The Center gathered together with members of the SPAN team who hold diverse roles from direct service to administration and leadership.
How the team used the Map to develop a collective story: Gathered in a circle in a living-room style space, the team worked on large sheets of paper to explore each of the prompts in The Story. The team kept the discussion highly collaborative, conversational, and easy, rather than being facilitated by any one person. Marcela recalls how the approach of a group discussion allowed for generation of ideas in a space where participants were on equal footing, and all voices could be heard. While families themselves were not present in the space, the SPAN team holds a strong commitment to amplifying family and youth voices, and centered their understanding of community members' perspectives in the development of The Story.
The Story section of the Story+Data Map with prompting questions.
How the team moved from mapping to building an evaluation plan: Guided by The Story that the group had articulated together, Marcela and team had the insights they needed to draft an evaluation plan for the SPAN team to respond to. Through follow up conversations, the group conceived of creative ideas for evaluation approaches that were right-sized and accessible.
What did you learn and carry forward?
Build strategy alongside story. While building the story together, the team began to develop new strategic approaches grounded in the aspirations of adult and child survivors. The SPAN team lifted up parents’ desires to be seen as whole people rather than just survivors, and the need to create a space where kids are able to “just be kids”. Guided by the aspirations of the people most impacted, the group explored how to create spaces for play within the shelter environment, and offer simple skills parents can build to strengthen relationships with their children in the day-to-day moments.
Evaluation redefined. In the team’s evaluation plan, storytelling and qualitative data hold the front seat. The evaluation incorporates some pre-post survey data, with a focus on what parents got out of participating in the program: rather than the use of scores or standard measures, which didn’t feel as meaningful to the team as a way to measure their impact.
Developing evidence gathering approaches collectively. Through the process of building the evaluation plan, the team designed light-lift approaches to evidence gathering together. One example is a database where any partner can enter a de-identified impact story, describing moments of change and growth for families as well as for staff members. Creating a simple and accessible process for gathering moments of impact has allowed partners to collect data in real time, in powerful ways that paint a rich picture of the ways work is impacting both families and practitioners. From Marcela’s perspective, this approach has yielded richer and more powerful data than would be possible for the project through quantitative approaches alone.
Marcela: As much as it is incredibly important to show that [the intervention] is evidence based, that it works… and collect the data, conduct the [randomized control trials] and all the things, I think there's so much power in that qualitative piece… that combination is really powerful: you need both.
Relationships are central. When reflecting on what supported creating an evaluation plan that is responsive and effective, Marcela sees the value of guiding tools and thoughtful processes like the Story+Data Map, and emphasizes the importance of relationships.
Marcela: We've had a history with [SPAN], we know them, and how they do their work. We've learned a lot from them, in that sense of just how attuned and responsive they are to family needs and family voice. And so it felt like we wanted to align the evaluation with their overall approach: which just feels more qualitative, more storytelling, but still [with] an eye towards [how] we want to demonstrate impact.
How might you use the Story+Data Map in the future?
As a research team housed within a university, Marcela knows how important it is to intentionally build authentic partnerships with community, in which expertise is honored. In their work with community partners in the future, Marcela and the team at the Center for Resilience and Well-Being plan to reach for the Story+Data Map while forming community planning teams.
Marcela: [The Story+Data Map] is a beautiful tool that gets everybody on the same page, and it just allows for a collaborative conversation right off the bat. I think The Story allows us to learn - truly - and put our partners in the expert role: to inform the goal of what we're doing, what the needs of the community [are], and then how we work together to support… So I just think it's a fantastic tool. We'll definitely be using it as we form more community planning teams in the future.
What are we carrying forward?
By sharing our stories with each other, we learn how tools like the Story+Data Map can support teams to use data and stories to move towards more equitable, just futures. From The Center for Resilience and Well-Being and SPAN, we saw how:
The Story+Data Map can help support authentic evaluation partnerships, and redistribute power in design and decision making while we redefine what evaluation means together.
Strategic opportunities emerge when we explore and build stories together.
Using the Story+Data Map to build evaluation plans collectively supports the development of evaluation approaches that are “sticky”: the ones that feel natural and low-effort to put into practice.
Reimagining evaluation together happens through collaboration. We would like to acknowledge specific team members, Monica Fitzgerald, Kimberly Shipman and Megan Holton from the Center for Resilience and Well-Being and Damary Yanes, Tsunemi Maehara, and Heather Marcy from Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence for their contributions and partnership through the evaluation planning process.
Be a part of the Story+Data Mapping story.
Thank you to Marcela, the Center for Resilience and Well-Being team, and the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence for bringing the Story+Data Map into action in your work, and sharing your experience.
Data+Soul is always excited to learn about the different ways and contexts in which teams are using the Story+Data Map. If you have used the Map in your work, you can share your story with hello@dataplussoul.com, connect on social media, or reach out for a conversation.
Marcela Torres Pauletic is Director of Training at the Center for Resilience + Wellbeing at University of Colorado Boulder. Learn more about the Center’s work here, and learn more about the work of the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence here.
Kayla Benitez Alvarez is a research associate at Data+Soul. Learn more about her work here.
Elizabeth Whitcher is an evidence building consultant based in the Greater Boston area. Learn more about her work here.