New Growth Innovation Network (NGIN)

Coalition Impact Calculator: Economic Impact Web Tool

Non-Profits data-visualization UX Design accessibility Information Architecture

Overview

A national, federally funded nonprofit runs an alliance of two dozen local economic-development coalitions. Each coalition is staffed by community practitioners, not economists, yet each is expected to put a credible economic-impact number in front of funders and boards. The result is predictable: a confident but indefensible figure that collapses under a reviewer’s first question, and two dozen incompatible numbers that cannot be added into one program-level total.

We built a working, brand-styled, single-file calculator and dashboard that demonstrates the full experience end to end. A guided flow walks a non-specialist from the numbers they actually hold toward the correct net-new inputs, with inline guardrails that flag a wrong dollar base at entry. A gross-to-net waterfall shows the headline number going down (minus deadweight, minus displacement, equals net), pre-answering the first funder challenge. Every figure carries a reliability tier and a clickable drawer tracing it to a named public source and the operative multiplier.

A one-click, print-ready Impact Brief pairs the case for investment with honest caveats and an auto-generated source appendix, generated client-side with no server. The prototype shows how a documented quantitative method becomes a rigorous, accessible, funder-ready product.

[01] The Challenge

The brief we set for the prototype: make a funder-defensible impact estimate producible by a non-economist, and make it look and feel like a finished product rather than a spreadsheet.

Non-specialists entering the wrong dollar base and publishing a confident, indefensible number
Two dozen coalitions computing with their own assumptions, producing numbers that cannot be compared or summed
A skeptical funder audience that asks, on sight, gross or net, what displacement, and where is that multiplier
A need for the tool to be accessible, embeddable, and free of hosting overhead

[02] The Solution

We delivered a single, dependency-free interactive tool built as one shared data model with many views.

A guided estimate flow that moves a non-specialist toward correct net-new inputs, with guardrails at entry
A gross-to-net counterfactual waterfall that shows the number come down, with a one-line reason at each step
Reliability-tier provenance that traces every figure to a named public source (BEA RIMS II, BLS, Census, and more)
A one-click, print-ready funder brief with honest caveats and an auto-generated source appendix, generated client-side
A portfolio rollup that standardizes site numbers into one comparable, double-count-protected program total
Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA: keyboard operable, screen-reader labeled, with a data-table fallback behind every chart
A portable, CMS-embeddable build with shareable, URL-encoded state and no backend

Target Outcomes

WCAG 2.2 AA

Accessibility Target

Cited Tiers

Figure Provenance

No Backend

Architecture

1-Click

Funder Brief