Innovation through Community Partnership Mapping and Analytics

Higher education institutions increasingly are required to provide a measured response to perceptions that challenge institutions’ value proposition as assets to their communities. This article will focus on best practices in the campus’ efforts to create a pathway to demonstrate community impact. Foundational is the ability of systematic tracking of partnerships and projects data. This article will discuss how institutions’ research agenda can expand from basic metrics to analyzing leading indicators of partnership success – and how a sophisticated dataset can be ultimately leveraged to measure impact. The article will conclude with a reflection of the challenges faced by other higher education institutions and the commonality in institutions’ desire to systematically track and visualize community engagement efforts.