Using the Story+Data Map to create an Evaluation Plan
Suggested Citation:
Data+Soul. (2025). Using the Story+Data Map to create an evaluation plan that gathers data and evidence with intention and care.
Background
Many of the public and private funders we work with in the community health and social service ecosystem require that grantees develop a logic model and evaluation plan as a part of their grant application or planning phase. When done well, this requirement helps align expectations about how organizations’ activities contribute to desired outcomes and ensure clarity around how grantees will gather and use evidence and feedback to learn about and improve upon their work. These funders partner with Data+Soul’s technical assistance team over multiple years to help grantees a) build or strengthen their capacity to answer their own learning questions, b) complete evaluation deliverables, and c) sustain evaluation activities after their grant ends.
The grantees we work with are typically non-profit agencies, community-based organizations, and community collectives.
The Challenges:
We’ve encountered the following challenges when it comes to existing tools and mindsets around evaluation planning, especially among program staff:
Many evaluation planning tools tend to center the program rather than the people that the program is aiming to serve. Centering the program in our planning tools can overestimate a program’s contributions to outcomes while underestimating the strengths and resources within individuals and communities that contribute to those outcomes.
Organizations are conditioned to think of evaluation as a separate activity. Meanwhile, they have different capacity, resources, and appetite for evaluation – one size does not fit all. Separating the theory of change from the data collection planning can make these efforts feel misaligned or position evaluation as an additional “ask” that appears to draw resources or attention away from the program and/or the community. In reality, a closer integration of evaluation and program design is often an impactful way to bring in real-time learnings and allow adjustments, especially when capacity is limited.
Data+Soul Approach:
We developed the Story+Data Map as a tool for helping program teams conduct their own evaluations in ways that are right-sized for their existing evaluation capacity and need. The tool is embedded in our approach to provide evaluation technical assistance that supports teams to create a theory of change, logic model, and other elements of an evidence gathering plan. Story+Data mapping can help us to prioritize what matters most (people and their aspirations), make sure we are using knowledge and data where it exists, and create evaluation and evidence gathering plans that are realistic, actionable, and respectful of everyone’s time and energy.
In our 2024-25 technical assistance engagements, we used the Story+Data Map over the course of 3 sessions with grantees (typically, 1 for the Story, 1 for the Data, and 1 for Evidence Gathering + Action Planning). Grantees continued to work on the Map and built upon the ideas discussed in between sessions.
Results
Our grantees are passionate, busy non-profit staff, often focused on implementation and action. The Story has helped grantees pause to de-center themselves (the programs) and re-center the people they’re here to serve, while encouraging them to think creatively about addressing systems challenges.
The Story maps well onto a traditional logic model!
The Data and Evidence Planning sections ground the Story in actionable next steps, ensuring that grantees have a plan to collect data and share it back with the funder in ways that match their current resources and capacity.
Learn More
The Story+Data Map: Development and Inspirations (Forthcoming)
Workbook (Forthcoming)