By its very nature, place-based work is bespoke to the specific community it is focused on, with their specific history, environment, cultural identity, industries and skills, opportunities and challenges, and leaders driving the work. With that level of customization, are there standards and best practices we can adhere to in how funders and partners measure the impact of this work? Or are place-based initiatives fundamentally at odds with a consistent measurement approach?

During this NationSwell leader roundtable, a group of place-based funders and practitioners explored the topic of what it takes to successfully measure place-based work, and whether there are universal principles worth adapting to each unique context.

Some of the most salient takeaways shared during the discussion appear below:

Key takeaways

Pair a shared North Star with locally chosen indicators. A small set of consistent, long-term outcomes can give partners a common, motivating destination, while contributing indicators can reflect the conditions and strategies that matter most in each community. Layering those measures with rapid-cycle input and output data allows organizations to pursue population-level change while learning and adapting in real time.

Measure whether people and communities are ultimately better off, not simply whether a program produced its intended output. Jobs created, people trained, businesses supported, and properties revitalized matter, but they do not capture the full value (or potential unintended consequences) of place-based work. A higher-paying job can still leave a worker worse off if it triggers the loss of healthcare, housing, childcare, or other benefits. Measures like social return on investment, civic participation, community identity, and residents’ sense of agency can provide a fuller picture of whether an initiative is strengthening both individual well-being and a community’s capacity to sustain its own renewal.

Treat community engagement as an essential source of measurement and strategy. Residents should be active participants in helping to determine what success looks like and which conditions require intervention. Compensating them for their time, providing childcare support, creating recurring opportunities for input, and reporting back on what changed can turn local knowledge into indicators, investments, and program decisions. The test of authentic engagement is not whether residents were consulted, but whether institutions used their authority and resources to act on what they heard.

Use data to uncover the systems beneath an outcome. The presenting problem may not sit within the system responsible for addressing it: chronic absenteeism can be driven by eviction and housing instability, while workforce retention can depend on childcare, transportation, or the abrupt loss of public benefits. Data should function as a learning tool, not simply as evidence that an existing strategy is working.

Build one coherent theory of change before translating the work for funders. Place-based organizations often face overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, reporting requirements from public, philanthropic, and corporate partners. A clear, sequential model can demonstrate how workforce development, business creation, physical revitalization, and other interventions reinforce one another, allowing organizations to map funder-specific metrics onto a consistent framework rather than maintaining a new measurement system for every grant. When the relationships among interventions are made legible, a theory of change can do more than satisfy funders: it can build the case for changing what they are willing to support.

Scale place-based work by transferring capacity without reproducing control. Leaders can distinguish among places where they possess the relationships and expertise to work directly, places where local partners can adapt the model with funding and technical assistance, and places where broader dissemination is most appropriate. The local owner may be a municipality, cooperative, tribal government, public authority, business, or nonprofit. Scale succeeds when the model can travel while strategy, authority, and ownership remain rooted in place.