For years, J+D Lab has been supporting free journalism programs with civic organizations, training community members to report on their own neighborhoods, building local networks of partners who take seriously the idea that everyone plays a role in keeping their community informed. The work was growing. But the team couldn't precisely measure it. Impact data was scattered across old surveys and reports, and there was no single place to look when we wanted a real-time snapshot of impact. Before we could build anything, we needed to get clear on something harder first: what were J+D Lab's key strategy goals and questions? Without that, any tracker we built would just be counting things, not situating them in our theory of change.
This was a team effort from the start. I served as product designer and tech lead, working with the Managing Director, the Program & Sustainability Lead, and the Network Lead through a series of design loops that were really two conversations at once: strategic and practical. What is J+D Lab trying to accomplish, and how do we know if it's working? What does that mean to actually track? We landed on the things that mattered: programs supported, participants reached, local stories and content produced, local partnerships fostered.
We needed a low-tech solution that anyone on the team could maintain, and our strategic conversations gave us enough clarity to build it simply:
Strategy before product was non-negotiable. We couldn't define the schema until we defined what we were trying to measure, and we couldn't do that until the organization had its own language for what success looked like.
On the technical side, that meant Airtable's data, Interface, and Forms capabilities, configured for two distinct users: participants completing surveys and program leads filing post-cycle reports. And a sustainability-first mindset throughout. The goal was a system anyone on the team could modify and maintain, not one that walked out the door with the developer.
The tracker is in active use. The J+D team plans to use it to write grant and funding reports, share impact publicly, and inform how they design programs going forward. It's given the organization one place to see and tell the story of the work and what it means to people in the communities we serve.