Measure What You Treasure
The Hope Community team’s journey to evaluating impact and telling their stories
At Hope Community, program design has always been rooted in something real: reflection, dialogue, lived experience, and community. For years, that intuitive grassroots approach has helped drive powerful outcomes.
But as the organization grew and funding became more challenging, Hope wanted to communicate its impact and outcomes more strongly and clearly. To get there, the team saw the need to “speak evaluation” to help push themselves toward greater impact and better cross-team collaboration.
Here's how we know it's working
The turning point? Recognizing that the team didn’t just need tools—they needed shared language. “We wanted to strengthen Hope's capacity to speak a language that communicates to the people who need to understand our work,” shares Director of Development and Impact Betsy Sohn, who has been at Hope since 2002. “And we wanted to offer staff a different way to think about their work and be able to say, ‘Here’s how we know it’s working.’”
That chance came when Betsy and Amplify’s Allan Martinez Venegas got to talking in mid-2023. “When Allan said, ‘You know I do a workshop on this’—which is now the famous line from Allan that none of us are surprised by—we were delighted to have a framework we could learn and then adopt,” says Betsy. “One of our founders says, ‘The right people come along at just the right time.’ And that happened for us. It made me tear up because we SO needed something like this, and until Allan suggested his workshop and coaching, I didn’t how to make it happen.”
“Hope was the perfect partner,” reflects Allan. “The staff at all levels just want to learn.”
Human-Centered, Hope-Aligned
Together, we designed a workshop series that fit Hope’s learning culture: collaborative, relational, and immediately practical. “One thing I notice often is a disconnect between nonprofit program staff and the fundraising and communications staff who have to write about the program work,” says Allan. “Bridging that gap is important because it makes the work between the two parts of the organization a collaboration.”
To build those relationships, Amplify and Hope hosted six workshops across multiple program areas focused on:
Human-Centered Logic Models
Logic models are often the starting point of effective evaluation, but at the same time a non-starter, because they can seem overly complex and impersonal. To avoid that pitfall, we started with personas—real stories of program participants—and built logic models around their experiences, needs, and dreams. This flipped the script from “how do we report on this?” to “how do we center people in our planning?”
“The workshops were helpful in taking the logic model content off the columnar page and into real life,” Betsy tells Allan. “The way you start the workshops with ‘think about the people you work with, what’s going on in their lives, what are they wrestling with? And how does Hope’s work address that?’ That is at the heart of what every program staff person cares about.”
From Output to Outcome
Staff explored how to move beyond counting activities, like number of people served by a program, to capturing transformative outcomes: how the program changes lives.
Telling the Story, for Impact
Logic models became narrative tools to create storytelling for impact, with each program team translating their work into 60–90 second “impact stories.”
Connecting it all to community
As they do, the Hope team took the work to the people, incorporating the impact stories into a Community Open House. “People had examples of their work and they talked with folks in the community who were curious about what they do and why it matters,” says Betsy. “There wasn’t a logic model in sight, but all of that [workshopping] helped people talk about their work in different and powerful ways, in a short period of time.” It was articulating impact, Hope-style: heartfelt, accessible, and grounded in pride.
The results have been powerful:
Cultural shift: Staff now speak “logic model” fluently—and even enthusiastically.
Cross-team collaboration: Program and development staff are more aligned than ever.
Stronger tools: Each program has a logic model and narrative to support grants, strategy, and onboarding new staff.
Staff empowerment: People feel equipped to advocate for their work with clarity and pride.
Hope Community proves that evaluation doesn’t have to feel foreign or forced. With the right tools and a whole lot of collaboration, it can become a source of clarity, confidence, and connection.