The Mississippi Center for Education Innovation (CEI) was founded in 2008 to improve education in Mississippi by promoting public education, establishing early childhood education as a statewide priority, and recruiting and retaining quality teachers and administrators in public schools across the state. CEI is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation whose Educated Kids program focuses on partnering with organizations dedicated to promoting quality early childhood education in communities where children and families are most in need of high quality early intervention to achieve success by third grade and maintain it beyond.

In 2008, Kellogg awarded CEI a $16 million grant over four years to provide the capital needed to launch and develop the organization and followed its seed funding with a $2 million grant to assist in CEI in building its capacity to measure, deepen and sustain its impact. The new grant, covering 2013-14, allowed CEI to demonstrate that it has successfully increased its capacity, acquired new funding sources, and has expanded the reach and impact of programming through its systems and policy work.

Rather than conducting an evaluation of its programs at a single point in time, CEI used part of the  Kellogg grant to develop its capacity to assess its performance on an ongoing basis and apply lessons learned to its efforts to refine its program model and deepen its impact. As part of that effort, CEI engaged Impact Catalysts (as its predecessor firm, Root Cause) to support the organization in its review of its performance measurement practices and its strategy for using data to improve service delivery and deepen impact. We supported CEI in creating a comprehensive performance measurement system that will collect and evaluate data consistently across its initiatives and developing a strategy to present its plan and resulting data to funder to capitalize on the organization’s accomplishments and attract new funding.