Assuring Better Child Health & Development (ABCD) is a statewide nonprofit leading the way in co-designing, actively shaping, and championing progressive early childhood policies, early childhood developmental services for young children and their families.

Throughout all of ABCD’s work, co-design is at the center of developing policies and services that promote healthy development. Co-design, as defined by K.A. McKercher in Beyond Sticky Notes (2020), brings together lived experience, lived expertise, and professional experience to learn and make things better – by design. Using inclusive facilitation that embraces many ways of knowing, being and doing, co-design helps organizations work with people closest to the solutions and share power.

For ABCD, co-design is important because it embodies the concept, “Nothing about us without us.” The organization views co-design as a collaborative process that builds relationships, explores key issues from multiple perspectives, nurtures curiosity, and ensures services are designed, developed, and implemented with people and within communities, not for them.

As a small team, ABCD partnered with a ResultsLab Impact Manager, a consultant supporting nonprofit data projects on a fractional basis. This allowed ABCD to access a specialist’s expertise, with more flexibility, while advancing their data strategy, data collection tools, and individual project evaluation plans to support the organization’s commitment to co-design.

Together, ABCD and ResultsLab worked to center co-design in ABCD’s data practice by:

1. Embedding co-design metrics in the organization’s core measurement plan
2. Developing data collection tools to help ABCD measure the impact of its co-design initiatives
3. Customizing individual project evaluation plans to support ABCD’s commitment to co-design

Embedding Co-Design Metrics in ABCD’s Measurement Plan

Before creating any data tools or systems, ABCD articulated the “why” and “how” of the organization’s data practice. ResultsLab facilitated an ACT™ Series Workshop with ABCD to develop a customized Impact Strategy as well as a Measurement Plan.

The Measurement Plan laid out a road map for how ABCD would like to tell its impact story through data. ResultsLab worked with the ABCD team to develop four co-design metrics measuring how the organization shares power, prioritizes relationships, uses participatory means, and builds capabilities within its co-design teams. These metrics help ABCD to center co-design in data collection across its programs and grant-funded projects.

Developing Data Collection Tools to Measure the Impact of Co-Design

After developing a Measurement Plan, ABCD worked with ResultsLab to create data collection tools that could measure the impact of the organization’s co-design initiatives. ResultsLab helped ABCD strengthen an existing tool, ABCD’s Working Together Survey, by aligning it with the organization’s new Measurement Plan as well as K.A. McKercher’s four key principles of co-design.

In addition to strengthening the Working Together Survey, ResultsLab also embedded co-design survey questions into a custom post-event evaluation template. This allows the ABCD team to easily access measures of co-design satisfaction when designing surveys for event participants.

Customizing Project Evaluation Plans to Support ABCD’s Commitment to Co-Design

Finally, ABCD and ResultsLab worked together to ensure that co-design metrics were integrated into project-specific evaluation plans for projects funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, and the Delta Dental Foundation. Using ABCD’s Measurement Plan and co-design data collection tools as a base, embedding co-design into evaluation and data collection helps ensure that ABCD’s commitment to co-design is central to project implementation.

In addition, ResultsLab has helped ABCD carry out data collection efforts for these projects, developing custom tools and resources and providing qualitative and quantitative data analysis. In one project, ResultsLab and ABCD integrated co-design principles into the development of progress tracking tools to better meet the needs of the communities ABCD is working with.

During the project, ResultsLab and ABCD convened a small group of stakeholders to support the redesign of the progress tracking tools. After the convening, ResultsLab made needed quality of life improvements to the tools, sharing them back with the group for additional refinement. Reflecting ABCD’s commitment to co-design, these progress tracking tools will continue to be tested and improved throughout the duration of the project, and ResultsLab and ABCD will continue to incorporate stakeholder experiences into future iterations of the tools.

Results

Through this process, ABCD was able to develop a data strategy, data collection tools, and custom project evaluation plans that illustrate the impact of co-design. This approach also laid the foundation for making more data-informed decisions that can help strengthen ABCD’s co-design initiatives. Overall, these efforts support ABCD as a leader in the co-design space as the organization continues to implement participatory approaches to designing solutions.