Know What's Working, Prove Your Impact, Grow Your Organization
We partner with education and youth development leaders to build your learning practice so you can learn with data, tell your story with evidence, and grow your impact.
You're Doing Incredible Work. But Proving It Feels Hard.
You see the difference your programs make with young people and educators every day. But when it's time to demonstrate that impact to funders, your board, or partners, you get stuck.
You're Not sure if you're measuring what actually matters
Data collection happens because grants require it, not because it helps you understand if programs are working.
Your team doesn't feel confident interpreting what the numbers mean
Staff collect data but don't know how to read it, spot patterns, or use findings to improve programs.
Creating reports feels like starting from zero every time
Every funder asks different questions. You spend hours reformatting information instead of analyzing whether you're making progress.
Your information lives in multiple places with no unified system
Program data is scattered across spreadsheets, surveys, databases, and staff notebooks. Nobody knows which version is current.
You Can Become a Learning Organization That Runs on Evidence
When you build a learning practice, everything changes:
✓ You know exactly what outcomes matter and have clear ways to track them
✓ You have systems that make data collection efficient and woven into daily work
✓ Your team can confidently interpret information and use it for reflection and improvement
✓ You share compelling evidence stories that convince funders to invest
This is what we build together: Your learning practice.
Our Four-Phase Evidence Framework
We guide you through a proven process that blends rigor and heart to help you learn with data, tell your story with evidence, and grow your impact.
Discover
Know What Matters
Clarify the outcomes that matter most through your community's perspective and co-create measurement frameworks.
Build
Make It Efficient
Create unified data systems and tools that make data collection seamless and integrated into your workflows.
Learn
Strengthen Your Team
Facilitate learning cycles and coach your team to interpret data and use it for reflection and continuous improvement.
Share
Tell Your Story
Conduct rigorous evaluations and craft evidence narratives that combine data with the human experiences behind the numbers.
We Work With Two Types of Organizations
Education & Youth Development Nonprofits
If you run education and youth programs and need to build a sustainable learning practice to track outcomes, reflect on findings, and demonstrate impact, we can help.
Philanthropic Foundations
If you fund education or youth programs and need clear, comparable data across your grantees while building their capacity for learning and evaluation, we build your TRAIL Outcome Compass system.
What Organizations Say About Working With TRAIL
We Aren't Your Typical Evaluation Firm
Most evaluation firms conduct a study, hand you a report, and leave. Six months later, you're back where you started—no systems, no capacity, no sustainable way to prove impact.
We work differently.
We're your strategic learning partner. We build your learning practice—the infrastructure that makes generating evidence automatic, the capacity for your team to use data confidently, and the storytelling skills to communicate your impact in ways that resonate.
Our approach blends rigor and heart, helping you uncover what's working, understand why it works, and share your story with confidence.
Ready to Build Your Learning Practice?
We work with a limited number of organizations each year so we can provide deep, personalized support.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call to explore whether TRAIL is right for your organization.
During our call, we'll:
✓ Learn about your current data and evaluation challenges
✓ Discuss what a learning practice could look like for you
✓ Determine if we're a good fit to work together
