To answer your strategic guiding questions and gain a deeper understanding of your program’s impact, you will need to take your raw data and transform it using a combination of basic arithmetic and descriptive statistics to reveal patterns—both those that you expect to see and those that may be surprising.

A helpful tool in statistical analysis is the “facts-stats-trends” framework:

• Facts: Counts, or sums, of numbers
• Stats: Basic descriptive statistics (mean, median, mode, distribution)
• Trends: Looking at data over time (e.g., percent change, percent difference)
  • Within the same group at different points in time
  • Between groups at the same time or at different points in time

Facts provide a high level summary of your raw data. Results provide “nice to know” information and help you familiarize yourself with your data set.

• 50 participants
• $10,000 raised
• 100 email clicks

You can also express your raw data in ratios (usually a percentage or fraction) to provide more context. This may require some division:

• 50 participants out of 100 registered = 50% participation rate
• $10,000 raised compared to $5,000 last year = double the money raised
• 100 clicks out of 1,000 email recipients = 10% click-through rate

If you previously set goals or benchmarks for the data you collected, compare them to your results:

• 50 participants, 50% of goal (100 participants)
• $10,000 dollars raised, 100% of goal ($10,000)
• 100 email clicks, 25% of goal (400 clicks)