Impact Assessment
Demonstrate your company alignment with public sector's educational goals by providing transparency and reporting in how you translate your vision of positive social impact into measurable results.
Why: The procurement of edtech necessitates robust justification for the cost. As the edtech market matures, commonly used low-level proxy indicators such as retention and engagement will become standard expectations. But there’s also a big opportunity for thought leadership, given the lack of consensus on the metrics that truly mirror our values in education. Maximization of misaligned metrics cause distrust, while thought leadership on novel metrics that successfully measure much desired educational outcomes can generate trust by demonstrating value alignment. Setting a new standard, and helping shape the industry’s trajectory, earns the trust of public sector buyers.
Maturity levels
Level zero: Product reports are internal only. Reports are basic single-time usage statistics that provide only surface-level understanding of the product's impact. There is no aggregation of data in a way that allows later reflection and reporting of long term impact. There is no publication of findings, or sharing of insights at knowledge-sharing hubs like conferences.
Junior level: Set up your product and database so that basic impact data such as adoption, engagement, retention is tracked and being collected for later analysis and reporting.
Medior: Internal reporting to customers and partners of industry-standard metrics like retention rates, engagement levels, and grades or other academic performance indicators. Adopting industry-standard metrics like NPS and CSAT to quantify impact in methods that can be benchmarked to peers in the industry.
Senior: Annual public reporting on company impact. Additionally, working on modelling long-term impact on student learning. Moving beyond single-time usage statistics on learning activities, towards holistic reporting on user impact (for example, moving from reporting of performance on single exams or tests, towards insights of skills development over time using programmatic assessment). Working with customers/partners to set up impact validation research (studies, experiments), pioneering metrics, correcting metrics and publicly reporting on this process as insight progresses. Coordinating with public organization in the field on the adoption and standardization of new methods and metrics for quantifying impact.
Good examples
Practical counter-examples to help build understanding
Tesla Impact report: Relevant metrics that report on progress on mission. User-friendly design. A report that is also accessible also to the public, not just internally / to shareholders.