How a long-term partnership helped The Chicago Community Trust harness the power of analytics.

Organisations across the globe are working to address inequity in their communities. However, making meaningful change doesn’t happen overnight. Many spend considerable time and effort seeking to understand their impact to ensure that they are making the right decisions and investments in their communities.

Tapping into the power of real-time economic analytics can be game-changing for organisations in the public and non-profit sectors, helping them better measure new programmes and their outcomes.

So, what does this look like in practice? Hear how The Chicago Community Trust used data and analytics to maximise the impact of their initiatives and better support their goals.

As the Chicago region’s leading community foundation, The Chicago Community Trust is focused on building wealth in underinvested communities. In 2020, the Trust led the creation of a pooled fund, We Rise Together.

The We Rise Together fund aims to address the racial and ethnic wealth gap in Chicago, which had been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The fund makes place-based grants to support real estate, workforce and small business development in historically disinvested communities, which are predominantly Black and Latine.

The Chicago Community Trust partnered with Mastercard to evaluate the economic impact of We Rise Together investments, with the goal of empowering:

• Organisations, to understand and communicate their impact on the community
• Donors, to visualise the tangible outcomes of their contributions
• Community developers, to understand the drivers of effective investments

By working with Mastercard, The Chicago Community Trust was able to improve their analytics capabilities and their overall approach to measuring social impact.

Timely measurement 

Using Mastercard’s aggregated and anonymised spend data and analytics tools, The Chicago Community Trust can now measure an investment’s impact in a matter of months, rather than waiting years for secondary data to become available. This empowers the Trust to more quickly gather learnings and adapt their evaluation and investment strategy. Programme managers can also use these insights to improve community initiatives in real-time.

Understanding the impact on local businesses

The Chicago Community Trust can now measure how both visitors and local residents changed their spending activity in response to We Rise Together initiatives and the consequent impact on local businesses.

Focus on incrementality

Broader environmental factors and variables can make it challenging for organisations to measure initiatives through traditional methods, which often use lagging indicators.

With more cutting-edge measurement tools, the Trust can isolate the incremental impact of each initiative by comparing the neighbourhood of-interest to a set of carefully chosen control neighbourhoods based on historical economic patterns, business makeup, community income and other factors.

The Chicago Community Trust worked with Mastercard to implement a robust methodology to measure the impact of the We Rise Together fund.

The analyses looked at economic activity in block groups (Census-defined neighbourhood units) in close proximity to the fund’s investments. Mastercard helped The Chicago Community Trust measure activity based on half-mile rings — close enough to attribute economic impact to specific investment sites, while broad enough to observe changes across neighbourhoods with different economic dynamics.

Early analyses proved how crucial it is to grasp the unique economic composition of each neighbourhood. For example, an industry in one neighbourhood saw a huge spike in sales, which skewed the data analysis. So, Mastercard advised The Chicago Community Trust team to run additional analysis without including the sales data of the outlier industry in that neighbourhood to get a more accurate read of the impact. Similarly, Mastercard’s proprietary analytics methodologies were able to pinpoint when certain categories of sales activity, such as fuel spend in neighbourhoods near highways, played an outsized role in overall trends, enabling a more targeted assessment moving forward.

Over time, The Chicago Community Trust gained a better understanding of what questions to ask when measuring each individual investment:

• How does an organisation rolling out programming in phases affect a neighbourhood’s economy over time?
• How does proximity to a commercial corridor affect the scale of economic impact?
• How do an organisation’s goals influence spending patterns? For instance, a community partner aiming to draw new visitors to the neighbourhood, versus primarily serving local residents?

Analysing individual investment sites empowered those community partners to understand how their neighbourhood’s economy had changed and quantify the economic value of their efforts.

With these best practices established, The Chicago Community Trust looked to better understand broader impact trends. To facilitate that, Mastercard compared results of seven individual investment sites to identify actionable insights. For instance:

• Consider proximity to commercial corridors if an investment’s goal is to increase incremental spend in the neighbourhood.
• Explore additional investments in local supermarkets, which have a radiating economic impact, particularly in underserved neighbourhoods.

The Chicago Community Trust also shifted how they think about evaluating investments. Rather than look at individual investments in isolation, they consider the impact different investments can have on one another as part of the broader ecosystem.

Communicating results to stakeholders is the critical final step in any analysis. The Chicago Community Trust developed strategies for presenting results to different sets of stakeholders with different priorities, for instance:

• Community partners focus on the impact of their initiatives and how the landscape of their neighbourhoods changed over time.
• The steering committee of the We Rise Together fund wants to understand the collective impact of these initiatives.
• Funders prioritise how insights can inform future investment strategies.

Through partnership with Mastercard, The Chicago Community Trust has unlocked the power of data and analytics for social good.

Mastercard’s combined spend insights and analytics capabilities have enabled the Trust to better understand the economic impact of their investments, all within the context of broader spend trends. In turn, these insights support The Chicago Community Trust in refining their investment strategy and charting a course for the future.

To complement Mastercard’s insights, The Chicago Community Trust will continue working hand in hand with community residents to hear their perspectives and priorities — helping advance equity for all.