Pro Bono Analysis Group Team Uses Data-Driven Approach to Help West London Zone Measure Its Academic Impact
November 29, 2021
West London Zone (WLZ), a nonprofit that helps children develop social, emotional, and academic skills, partnered with a pro bono Analysis Group team to measure the academic impact of its programs. WLZ’s two-year program matches Link Workers with children to set goals, work together daily, and connect with community resources. While WLZ has always used a data-driven approach to annually streamline and modify programs, the organization’s rapid expansion revealed a need for a more efficient and robust execution.
The Analysis Group team, including Senior Analysts Hugo Cayssials, Neil Sequeira and Abby Jones and Manager Rozi Kepes, designed a new tool for WLZ using the R programming language. The tool reads in raw data from students’ grades, cleans and sorts the data into tiers based on student performance, and produces digestible summaries on which WLZ can base actions. The new tool allowed WLZ to deliver its impact data three weeks earlier in its planning cycle, while processing more than three times as much student data than in the previous year.